Room and Board.

Our home for the first few nights in Ethiopia was the SIM Guest House, located right in the heart of Addis Abeba, across the street from the Black Lion Hospital. The guest house was intended to shelter missionaries as they came and went to the big city from their homes in the countryside and it still operated that way twenty years ago, with a few rooms available for people like us – development workers in transition, or short term visitors who were affiliated with the SIM mission or its sister church.

The accommodations were… adequate. We had a room on the top floor that was meant for longer stays with a little kitchen and a sitting area in addition to the bed; more than enough space for us and our abundance of luggage. The facilities were down the hall and around the corner, the shower rooms separate from the WCs. Meals were served downstairs in the dining room, with everyone seated family style around long tables. We were grateful to the staff who provided coffee and delicious hot cereal every morning, along with an unlimited supply of purified water -- less for us to worry about as we settled in to our new surroundings.

To Begin With.

Twenty years ago today, on a Tuesday evening, we landed at Bole International Airport in Addis Abeba, the capital city of Ethiopia. We had been traveling all day -- all week -- all month, really -- from our old life as graduate students in Oregon toward our new life as volunteers in the Horn of Africa. We had obtained our degrees, packed and stored our belongings, and said our tearful farewells to friends and family. As newly minted masters in our fields, we knew a lot (collectively) about computer science and art history, but we also knew that we needed a break from academia. We didn't know anything about Africa in general, or Ethiopia in particular, or development work at all. Over the next few years we learned a lot on these subjects, and also a lot about ourselves.

I was 25 years old, and this was only the second time I had traveled outside of North America, so I was completely unprepared for Addis. The airport itself, dingy and dimly lit at night with flickering fluorescent bulbs; the bumpy streets lined with ramshackle structures of corrugated metal; the guest house where we hauled our comically large suitcases up three flights of stairs -- it was all so dark, so different, so foreign. But of course it wasn't foreign, we were. I was.

J had been through a similar experience when, at eleven years of age, he emigrated from the Netherlands to the United States. I wonder if as a boy he had searched the crowd outside the airport, as we did on this occasion, for the familiar faces that would welcome him to his new life. I wonder if he had stared out the window on the drive into the city, trying to get a sense of his surroundings. I wonder if he had strained his ears when he heard people speaking the local language, hoping for a chance to use one of the few phrases he had learned in advance: "Hello! My name is J. What is your name?" It was his perspective as an outsider living in the United States that had piqued my interest in an international adventure, and suddenly there we were.

We have been back for so long and are so far removed in many ways from our time there; but we are who we are now because of those experiences and we thought it might be interesting to see if we can remember what life was like for us -- twenty years ago, in Ethiopia.