courtesy photo Chrissy Fiala sits surrounded by children at Gift of Love House, an orphanage for HIV-positive children in Ethiopia where Fiala spent the last 10 months working.

by Theodore Wiesehan

    When her parents learned of Chrissy Fiala's plans to undertake 10 months of mission work in Ethiopia, naturally they became nervous.
     "They didn't want me to go," Fiala, 27, said. "I think they were a little worried about my safety, of course."
     While the trip was not Fiala's first to a developing nation - she spent a total of 18 months in Honduras over the course of four separate mission trips - watching their daughter depart for unstable countries is always difficult for Joe and Elsie Fiala.
     "There's no really getting used it, actually," Elsie said at the family's farm house northeast of Bee. "We still worry, but she's an adult now and you can't tell your kids what to do when they're adults. We're hoping she'll stay home this time."
     With a smile, Chrissy responded, "Igzebir yaokän" - a phrase meaning "only God knows" in Amharic, one of the languages of Ethiopia.
     "It's a phrase we used a lot," she later said of her time in the central-African nation working with Mother Teresa's organization, Missionaries of Charity.
     Indeed, Fiala's time in Ethiopia held its share of uncertainty and instances where the fears of her parents were well-founded, as a controversial election a few weeks into her stay spurred political violence and rioting. Working on the outskirts of Ethiopia's capital city, Addis Ababa, Fiala found herself in the thick of things.
     "It was a fairly serious situation actually and it made you think, 'Am I actually going to get home alive this time? Have I really done it this time?'" she said. "We were locked inside the mission. NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) were evacuating. It was crazy, but…I don't tell my parents that when I'm there."
     At the time Fiala was working at Homes for the Dying, a center for people in the final stages of AIDS. Due to roadblocks, roadside bombs and mobs stoning taxis and cars, the vans that picked up the deceased from the home were unable to get through for a week and the shed used to store corpses began filling up.
     "There were guards outside our gates," she said. "There really were groups of people waiting outside our door for refuge to get inside our mission and we just had nobody in, nobody out. Workers had to spend the night. Police were outside the gate. There were machine guns going off and roadblocks."
     Fortunately, after a week the uprising died down enough to resume a semblance of normality, though Fiala said violence spurred up unexpectedly on occasion.
     One particularly harrowing encounter occurred while Fiala was taking children with tuberculosis from an orphanage to get X-rays. Because of the degree of the children's illness, she began to make her own way back to the orphanage. X-rays in hand, she boarded a taxi - which, in Ethiopia is more of a minibus crowded with people, goats, sheep and chickens, she explained.
     "I get halfway home and everybody was running out of the taxi and I was like, 'what's going on?'" she said. "I had all the X-rays with me and the orphanage was on the other side of this roadblock and…all these soldier were running by, full riot gear.
     "At that time my heart was thumping. I actually ran right along with the soldiers and had the X-rays tightly grasped in my arms and made it across. There was some rioting and roadblocking going on and…you just hope that gunfire doesn't cross your way."
     Once across the roadblock, Fiala found taxis dumping passengers and heading back the other direction, so she caught one safely to the orphanage.
     "(I) made it back safe, but I didn't know…when you're in the middle of that you're just like, 'OK, come on God. I'm here working for you. Protect me."
     While no stranger to the perils involved in mission work, Fiala found the situation in Ethiopia quite unlike those she encountered in Honduras.
     "In Honduras we had (guards with) AK-47s guarding our orphanage because the thieves would come," she said. "And they actually shot and killed a guard right at our nursery – at our baby dorm. They shot a guard and stole his gun and dragged him off.
     "(In Ethiopia, the violence) was more political, definitely political, whereas in Honduras they were so poor they were just after the money and goods and tools."
     Upon arrival in Ethiopia, Fiala dove right into her work at Homes for the Dying, caring for end-stage AIDS patients.
     "Straight off the airplane I got right into the dressing of the wounds," she said. "There were about 1,000 elderly, adults and children, and disabled children also…they were dying from everything from tuberculosis, malaria, AIDS."
     After three weeks at Homes for the Dying, she was moved to Gift of Love House, an orphanage for HIV-positive children, to oversee the preparation and administration of anti-retroviral medicines.
     The orphanage held between 380 and 400 children, all infected with HIV and 180 of whom had AIDS.
     "I got up at six in the morning and I prepared the syrup medicines, which were approximately 60 (doses) of probably four or five different syrups," she said of her duties. "They have to be done right before giving, so an hour before giving I'd start preparation of them and then at 7:30 I'd administer the medicines.
     "Then for, I don't know, two hours I'd prepare tablets then for that evening and then take kids for x-rays, chest x-rays, to see if their tuberculosis is progressing for the worse or for the better."
     Because of the weakened immune systems of many of the children, Fiala said that tuberculosis spreads quickly among the children and is the cause of death in many of the patients.
     Following X-rays, Fiala began her evening routine, involving two hours of preparing medication tablets for the evening, and mixing new syrup medicines at 6 p.m. From 7 to 8 p.m. she administered the medications and from 8 to 10 p.m. prepared tablets for the next morning.
     "And then start the whole day over again the next day, every day," she said. "I had two days off this year - when I had typhoid. I was in bed for two days."
     Health is another risk for mission workers in the developing world. During her stay in Ethiopia Fiala had typhoid twice, giardia (a disorder caused by a microscopic intestinal parasite) twice, funguses, as well as a few mysterious reactions.
     "I had sores all over my tongue once and my eyes swelled up twice," she laughed. "I have no idea why."
     None of it was as bad, though, as the flesh-eating worm in her leg that she endured in Honduras, she said.
     When describing Ethiopia, however, what Fiala speaks of most is not political violence or rampant disease, but the children of Gift of Love House.
     Her eyes light up and she smiles wide when describing Wondessen, the little boy who sat with her every day as she prepared medicines, or the infant who was brought in severely malnourished and is now Fiala's healthy goddaughter.
     "The kids have nobody there. Nobody," she said. "And it's special just to be that person that's going to be there for them – even though it was just almost a year. It should have been longer and you hate to leave them, but just to be there for the children is really wonderful and to be that person to love them because they have nobody else."
     Fiala returned home Aug. 6, and already the orphanage has asked her to return for another year.
     They are holding her position open and leaving her a month to decide, though for the moment Fiala remains uncertain.
     "They're (the orphanage) hoping that I come back," she said. "My parents are not hoping I go back. And I am somewhere in between, because I really don't know. We'll have to see. Whatever God wants is what I want to do.
     "I'm open to do it. I'd love to do it," she said, and paused.
     "Igzebir yaokän."