The First Day, Part Two.

After lunch, we loaded up into the Land Cruiser for the relatively short trip to the FH/Ethiopia head office.

We didn’t know it at the time, but we would soon learn that there was an informal automotive hierarchy in Ethiopia, with the Toyota Land Cruiser at the very top and the Soviet-made Lada sedan at the very bottom. The Land Cruisers were, in general, owned by organizations rather than individuals – your embassies, your NGOs* – and driven by those in the very upper echelons of management. FH/E had two shiny white Land Cruisers, no doubt courtesy of U.S. taxpayers, and one of these was designated for the personal use of the Country Director, who, together with his wife, had been our host at lunch. We drove a short distance through the winding streets of the Kazanchis neighborhood, turned down a dead end gravel road, pulled though a tall metal gate, and there we were.

The First Day, Part One.

We… don’t really have clear memories of our first morning in Ethiopia. And this might be a good time to acknowledge that neither one of us kept a written record of any sort during our time in Ethiopia. I have always found my journal writing to be short-sighted and self-indulgent and embarrassing in retrospect; I am a highly biased and extremely unreliable narrator of my own life. So I’m not sorry – but the fact remains that a lot of our experience there has been lost to the ages. At times like this, I try to check in with J about what he recalls, and see if we can jog each other’s memories.

So we agree that we must have trundled down the hall for showers that morning – though we can’t remember whether or not there was water; there wasn’t, on some days. We must have eaten breakfast downstairs in the communal dining room, almost certainly a bowl of excellent whole-grain hot cereal followed by a second course of institutional eggs or pancakes. We must have introduced ourselves to the people we encountered, though we can’t remember whom we might have met on that particular morning. For example, I don’t recall the names of the young couple who were staying in the room next door – though I do remember that she had studied midwifery, which (I learned) is pronounced “mid-whiff-ery”... we never saw them again, after those first few days as neighbors.

But we remember lunch, specifically.

How On Earth?

For people who didn’t know us twenty years ago, we wanted to let you know how on Earth we ended up in Ethiopia.

As I mentioned earlier, the fact that J was born and raised in the Netherlands added an unanticipated dimension to our relationship. Here I was, married to a man who played Monopoly in a different language, and who relished foods that were not familiar to me; who preferred to watch soccer over basketball and who cheered for another country’s athletes during the 1992 Olympics; who shared my antipathy for the first Iraq War but for entirely different reasons. From the very beginning, J and I were engaged in a conversation that challenged my lifelong notions about nationalism and the USA’s role as a superpower. As a result, I wanted to have an international experience that would take me out of my comfortable assumptions and help me to understand his global perspective. So that motivated us to explore the idea of living overseas, as volunteers.

This whole volunteer idea was not as crazy as it may seem – after all, the Peace Corps is built on this model, and they get thousands of applicants every year! We were in good health, as were our parents and siblings, and we had few financial burdens (we deferred J’s student loan), so it seemed like the perfect opportunity for us to spend a few years on the other side of the planet.

We knew there were a few options out there and since we were still in grad school we had plenty of time to explore them. I won’t bore you with the details but we ended up at IVCF’s Urbana Missions Conference in the winter of 1993, met with representatives from several organizations, and decided to pursue a position with Food for the Hungry’s Hunger Corps. Idealistic as we were, we appreciated FH’s mission of addressing spiritual hunger as well as physical hunger – and we had a friend who had already had a positive experience as an FH volunteer. We were accepted into the program, went through training in the summer of 1994, spent a few months raising support, and were on our way to FH/Ethiopia by the following spring. We were both assigned to roles at the head office in Addis Abeba, where J would be the Management Information Systems Coordinator and I would be a Donor Liaison Research Officer – whatever that meant.

And that's how we found ourselves in Ethiopia.

These people have no idea what's in store for them!