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From pat-a-cake under a beautiful mango tree to a rousing game of volleyball, the way kids in Ethiopia play is not all that different from what you might expect on a Canadian playground.

Sometimes you need just the right expression to ‘hit the nail on the head’. Check out these local idioms from FH-partnered communities — ‘straight from the horse’s mouth’! While they don’t come from your ‘neck of the woods’, you might just find they are your ‘cup of tea’.

You may remember that our last issue of Hope Notes began with an interview with the Waktola family of Sasiga, Ethiopia. They enthusiastically told us that having coffee with friends and neighbours was the number one thing they did for fun. So we decided to dig a little deeper into where that comes from.

Anyone who has ever spent time on a farm knows how fickle the field of agriculture is. A little bad weather, a natural disaster, or an insect infestation can derail a farmer’s work so severely that they have to start over.

What the water didn’t know, though, was that the hyacinth is one of the most productive plants on earth. It boasts an incredible reproduction rate; doubling in size each day, and sending out runner stems to establish tons of “daughter plants”. The story goes on to describe how the hyacinth did just that …

Deforestation is a global reality that significantly contributes to climate change.