Where our little girl is coming from...

One of our desires in our adoption of Hanna is that we can learn as much about her culture as possible in order to raise her with a connection to that culture. She is Ethiopian by birth and she will always be Ethiopian by birth. So, I have been setting off to try to find out as much about the village she was born in as possible. I figured I'd start by Googling it - after all isn't that what we do anytime we want to know anything about anywhere? Very little information. So, I thought I'd go to wikipedia. Once again, very little to glean from there. I even went to Google maps - no luck there either. Finally, I was able to find the coordinates and type them into Google Maps. Here is the result of that search...

click here for map

The town where Hanna (pronounced Hah-nah) is from is named Mudula and is approximately 200 miles South of the captial city of Addis Ababa. If you look close, you'll notice that the closest road to Mudulla appears to be about 20 miles away. What we have heard is that while there are roads that go to towns, they are not roads like you and I think of them - or even what we would call a "cow path," rather they are fitting challenges for Land Rovers to navigate.

From what I can learn so far, Mudulla is a town within the Southern Region (called the SNNPR- Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples Region). Ethiopia is divided into 9 ethnic divisions (or regions) of which SNNPR is one ethnic division. SNNPR is bordered on the south by Kenya. This region is Ethiopia's most rural region with over 90% of the population living in rural settings. There appear to have been some major strides within the past 15 years in the area, in that the % of the population that has drinkable water has increased from 15% to 50% within that time. Much of the region is engaged in agriculture, especially subsistence farming, and this region is well known for its coffee (growing almost 50% of all of Ethiopia's coffee exports). Within the SNNPR, there are over 45 indigenous ethnic groups, many of which have their own spoken language - while Amahric remains the state language. I'll blog more about language in the future...

The red is SNNPR, the pink is all of Ethiopia.

Refining the search a bit further, Mudulla is located in the Kembata Tembaro Zone - otherwise known as KAT. KAT is one of 14 Zones within SNNPR. This zone appears to be mixed topography - flat to hilly to mountainous and has 3 famous mountains within it - considered to be holy mountains. As a reality check...74% of this zone is exposed to malaria and as of 2004 only 2% of the population has electricity. Check out this satellite map of this zone (and some surrounding area)... Mudula is the blue pin.

Hopefully I'll soon be able to find more info on Mudula itself...

By the way...we know that when we travel we will get to go to at least Hosanna, which you probably can see on the towards the top of the above map...a dream would be that we would actually get to visit Mudula, too!

This feels a bit like a treasure hunt...bit by bit of info along the way.