The Ethiopian Church Journal Blog

    Summing It All Up By Mitiku Adisu If you were to sum up in a few words the trajectory of your life, what would those words be? "Can’t drink coffee on a running horse?" "The best is yet to come?" "Life goes on" was how the octogenarian Robert Frost (d. 1963) responded to a journalist’s query. Frost is gone, but his memory lives on. What about Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin (1936-2006), Ethiopia's preeminent communitarian poet-playwright? We'll look at the quintet briefly below, even as we recall the glory days of Ethiopian theater ( እናት ዓለም ጠኑ Enat Alam Tannu, an adaptation of Brecht's Mother Courage; ሀ ሁ በስድስት ወር Ha Hu Basidst Wer, The Alphabet in Six Months), each of which was packed for months on end, with audiences poring over the playwright's perky prose like possessed monastic holy men. Not unlike the prophets of old, Tsegaye had a disposition to carry in his person the tragedies, beauty, and hopes of the Motherland. The verse was likel...

Michelle with her mother and four of her five children in Sydney How Michelle discovered beauty from ashes Anne Lim | December 14th, 2021 10:58 AM | Michelle Zombos was on the mission field in Ethiopia, helping to restore hope and dignity to women who had turned to prostitution, when she realised that she was the one who was starved of hope that anything would ever get better. The realisation came five years after Michelle and her husband took their five children to Ethiopia to work in an organisation that worked with orphaned children. They’d seen it as an opportunity to help those who were broken. Now, though, bruised and battered by her husband’s alcoholism and abusive behaviour overlaid on her own insecurities from an abusive, mentally ill father, Michelle realised that she was the one who was broken and whose world needed to change. “What I didn’t know was that I was the one who was about to be restored,” she writes in her book, Into the Garden . “It was there, in Ethiopia, that ...