It all started last December. I was
in Pennsylvania, having breakfast with my fabulous friend Megan, and she told
me about one of her friends who was moving to Addis Ababa to work at the CURE
Hospital there. I vaguely remembered her mentioning this particular friend when
Megan and I were in college together, but she was fairly annoyed with him at
that point, so the comments were not all positive. Needless to say, I was a bit
more excited about him this time, since it would be another guy to hang out
with in our group of mostly single women here at Bingham. I gave Megan my
Ethiopian number and told her to have him call me when he got to Addis- he
would be more than welcome to come hang out with the group, play soccer on
Thursday nights, etc.
Fast forward six weeks, to February
15 (strategically, the day after Valentine’s Day), and as I was sitting on my
couch, procrastinating on doing school work, I heard my phone ring. In
Ethiopia, we tend to get a lot of wrong numbers, so I generally don’t pick up
numbers that I don’t know. But I was very grateful I picked up this one; turns
out it was Andrew on the other end of the line, calling like he told Megan he
would.
We chatted for about 20 minutes and
the number of connections that we made in the initial conversation was pretty
impressive. We both went to Messiah and had a number of mutual friends there,
we had both worked in SIM, he in Burkina Faso and I in Ethiopia, and we had
both lived in Pennsylvania for a number of years. I remember hanging up the
phone and thinking “how in the world can I have so many things in common with
someone I just met in Ethiopia?!”
Over the next few weeks, I invited
him to a number of social events that we were having- maybe even planned one or
two, so that he would specifically come. About a month and a half later, we
started dating, and now ten and a half months after that, we’re engaged!
It’s been an exciting ride so far-
we have visited four countries together, gone on a number of trips within
Ethiopia, ridden a motorcycle all over Addis, been to a lot of different restaurants (eating out is really cheap here),
met each other’s families with love all around, challenged each other in our
walk with the Lord, shared lots of joy and some tears, and fallen in love. I am
so blessed and excited to spend the rest of my life with this man and discover
many new adventures together.
