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.

The night before, we had been met at the airport and delivered to the guest house by the FH/E Country Director and his wife, and we had made plans for them to take us out for lunch that first day. Our destination was the Kokeb Restaurant – which, Google knows, is still there in the same location, near the United Nations headquarters in the center of the city. The restaurant is on the top floor – the 9^th? the 12^th? – of a high rise building and they chose it for the view, not for the food. (Kokeb means “star” in Amharic, the national language of Ethiopia).

Now, if we had thought about it, we would never have set foot on the elevator in that building. That elevator ride was one of the scariest experiences we had in our entire time in Africa: it was cramped, and rickety – and seriously, who uses an elevator in a city where the power could go out at any time?! But we didn't know any better, so up we went. I remember eating some sort of European-style chicken dish for lunch, and I remember hearing the English language lesson* playing on the radio in the restaurant, but mostly I remember wondering whether there could possibly be another way out of there, and dreading the certain knowledge that I was going to have to get into that elevator again, of my own free will.

In my defense, the elevator is the only thing J remembers about that meal.

Spoiler alert: we survived the trip down in the elevator, but not before we learned that our only other option was a narrow spiral staircase – nine (or twelve?) flights down on the outside of the building. I don’t think we ever got into another elevator in Ethiopia; I still have occasional dreams of a scary elevator that (I now realize) probably stem from this experience.

And after lunch, we went to the office to meet our new colleagues. More on that next time.

*There was a chirpy little song that went (in part) like this: “Mother is making injera b’wat. We like to eat it right out of the pot.”