Archived Blog
First ICSA Basketball tournament
It has been a fairly busy month here at Bingham, will try and summarise the important things that have been going on here!!
One of the biggest things that happened this month was a basketball tournament. Bingham got in touch with a number of other Christian international schools over Africa, the "Binghams" in other parts of Africa, and invited them all to the school here in Ethiopia for a basketball tournament. 5 schools came, from 5 countries over Africa.
Bingham staff and students volunteered to host the coaches and players of the visiting teams. Each school entered a boys and a girls team, who competed on Bingham's basketball courts. It was a really good tournament to watch, very sporting and exciting competition! Bingham's girls team came second overall, but the boys team won quite convincingly.
As well as just the basketball, Bingham had organised a guest speaker to come and speak to the students during the mornings and evenings. A number of the teachers here organised a worship band too and led the worship sets. It was really great to see the kids listening and being challenged by the speaker, Ernie Frey. He encouraged them to think seriously about committing their lives to God, and what that meant to them as missionary kids, perhaps thinking about committing to becoming missionaries themselves. We were very encouraged and blessed watching the students' responses to this challenge. Please pray for the students and the challenging things that they heard during the talks, that they would resonate throughout their lives and futures.
Home team advantage might have played a part...
Chapel talks
Whole tournament participants!
One of the new things that I've really got into here in Addis is rock climbing. I enjoyed this back home when I was in University, but hadn't done it much recently. I brought out some of my equipment, harness and shoes etc, because Bingham has an indoor rock climbing wall which I am in charge of, and I thought they might be useful. However, one of my friends here in Addis has started going to a nearby cliff just north of the city to climb there and I've been joining him recently. It is a 50-60m basalt cliff, which some ex-pat climbing addicts have made routes up, and bolted a lot of bolts for climbing. We've become quite addicted to it, and have gone almost every saturday for the past few weeks! One of our other friends, Andrew, who we took there recently took some photos:
It involves a lot of looking up...
Anyway, we have taken this inspiration, and started a climbing club for students at Bingham. We hope to be able to take them to this wall in the not too distant future. I am excited about another way to develop relationships with some of our high school students. Football season has also started up. I'm involved again in coaching some of the Bingham teams, though mostly with goalkeeper training. Please pray that God will give opportunities for mentoring relationships through these further informal contact with the students.
I am also continuing to work hard with practicing my Amharic. At times it seems slow going, and quite discouraging, other times I feel like I'm getting places! It all depends on the speaker, and the context! Anyway, in an effort to further practice, as well as develop relationships with the Ethiopian Bingham staff, I have been joining 4 guys from the Bingham staff in a sort of monthly lunch event. We each take it in turns to host the other 4 for Sunday lunch, and some chat. It can be quite exhausting, as the entire afternoon is in Amharic, so my brain has to work hard all afternoon. Anwyay, this past Sunday was my turn to host, so I had our house worker make some injera, and I crafted a sort of "Irish Stew" in the slow cooker. I wasn't sure what they would think of it, but they seemed to really enjoy it, there was very little left in the pot afterwards. They were all asking what was in the stew, and how I made it. I told them it was a special type of pot which cooks things very slowly, which helps to make it taste nice. I found out this morning that one of the guys took a picture of the stew, showed to his wife, and asked her to try making it! Obviously was quite a hit :-) Regardless, I hope that this regular contact with these guys will lead to further ministry opportunities. Please pray for me as I develop relationships with these and other local people in this country.
More picture as usual here
Niall
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