For Christmas, an exchange of cultures.

Byline: Bob Welch The Register Guard

Christmas looks different to Lura Pierce this year.

Ethiopia will do that to you.

"I just want it to be much simpler," says Pierce, who visited the impoverished African country recently. `We think: `Buy, buy, buy.' Of course, over there they want to come over here.'

Somewhere, she realizes, there must be a compromise: Americans, realizing how materially blessed they are in a whole-world context, perhaps becoming less greedy. And Ethiopians, realizing the importance of schools as a means to get beyond the poverty, perhaps becoming more educated.

Not trading places. But learning from one another.

You start thinking of such things after spending 10 days amid the poverty, which Pierce did last September as part of a three-person contingent from Eugene's Westminster Presbyterian Church. The others who went were Don Carter and Michael Raz, joining eight other Presbyterians from Ohio and Idaho.

"What is it," she wonders, "that one person can do to make the world a better place?"

Before going, she had heard of the new schools popping up in the villages. But she had also heard about how much American aid had wound up in the pockets of the greedy, not with the children who needed it.

"I was curious and a little cynical and wanted to go as a fact-finding person," says Pierce, who teaches at Shasta Middle School. "Were they really building these schools?"

And what of these diverse factions supposedly working together? Christians in a Muslim culture? And what about the different ideologies among the Christians themselves, some liberal, some conservative?

But here's what she found: schools being built. And more oneness of purpose than she often finds here in the states, where we're divided by all sorts of labels. "I'd sit down with the women and it wasn't Christian to Muslim, but woman to woman, teacher to teacher," she says. "Christians here (in the United States) don't get along as well. But in Ethiopia, the barriers were gone. And I was like: Why can't we get along like that for the good of our children?"

Pierce might be familiar to some Register-Guard readers. She was featured as one of the five funniest people in Eugene in a story the newspaper did in 1993.

Indeed, humor was key in an adventure marked by broken toilet seats, mosquitoes galore and one towel to last you for a week. `I looked like a larger-than-life foreigner in a comedic film resembling, at times, an episode of `I Love Lucy' where Lucy travels through Ethiopia in her large, wet, manure-encrusted tennis shoes,' she says.

But amid the humor, there was much to humble Pierce: children sickened from cholera, for example. And much to encourage her: the oneness she felt when Muslim women gave the U.S. women cinques (sticks), symbols of protection. An Ethiopian woman who hopes to become her people's first female minister. And the young teachers in each village, proudly introducing their students and having them sing for the visitors.

"It caused us to weep," says Pierce, whose church, Westminster, has launched a $40,000 campaign to establish a school and provide water relief in Ethiopia's Kobe District.

She had heard the stories of money being funneled elsewhere; read Paul Theroux's "Dark Star Safari," full of tragedy and despair about the African experience. And, yes, there's no shortage of that in Ethiopia, Pierce found.

But slowly, she says, good things are happening. "Two religions are coming together for the sake of the children."

Here, in the land of plenty, there must be a lesson for us, too, as we bicker among ourselves, holding tight to our "team" while people in need suffer. Perhaps the Ethiopian adage Pierce heard applies not only to that African country, but to ours as well: "When spider webs unite, even they can catch a lion."

Bob Welch can be reached at 338-2354 or [e-mail].