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.

           SIM Guest House, Addis Abeba. Our room was on the third floor at the far right, at the top of the staircase. Photo courtesy of David Strauss, www.davidstraussphotography.com.

We quickly learned that everybody who was anybody – at least in the missionary world – would eventually show up at the SIM Guest House. Within the first 24 hours of our visit we ran into Phil Lewis, a former missionary kid (born in Ethiopia in the 1930s!) who was at the time the pastor of Potter Valley Bible Church in California; his son Nathan was (and still is) the pastor of my parents’ church in Beaverton, OR; his son Stephen would be our pastor in Salem in the early 2000s. We had corresponded with Phil while we were still in Eugene but he had expected to leave Ethiopia before we arrived, so it was a pleasant surprise to meet him after all. Within the next two days we also met a medical missionary, Dr. Bascom, whose sister-in-law Ruth happened to be the mayor of Eugene at that time, and we encountered several families who had studied at the Summer Institute of Linguistics in Eugene. My giant UO coffee mug turned out to be a great conversation starter.

We ended up living at the guest house for about three weeks while waiting for our apartment to become ready for us, and I have one vivid memory from that time. We had not been expected to stay so long, and someone else had booked our particular room for one weekend, so we were forced to relocate ourselves – and our gargantuan suitcases – to the other wing of the guest house for a couple of nights. This involved dragging four 70-lb. suitcases down two flights of stairs, across the compound, and up another flight, where we crammed everything into an older and smaller room. It was a tight squeeze!

That night, in the middle of the night, we were awakened by someone shouting SO LOUDLY outside our window! It was pitch dark and we were confused and disoriented. We just could not figure out what was going on. The shouting continued for several minutes but as our adrenaline rush faded we realized we were safe enough, and we eventually fell back to sleep. That was our introduction to the pre-dawn Muslim call to prayer. Our window faced the Anwar Mosque, one of the largest mosques in Ethiopia and only a block or two away from the SIM compound. The call was broadcast over a loudspeaker so that faithful Muslims (and sleepy foreigners) would know exactly when to pray. Amazingly, the acoustics were such that we never once heard the call from our room at the other end of the building – to which we returned as soon as possible.