Vintage E-mail, With Endnotes.

From: j-----@padis.gn.apc.org

To:     ohsu.wpo2 (deppmeie)

Date: 6/30/95 6:24 am

Subj: tomato and cheese omelet

Hi Sis,¹

Thank you for the doily! Did you know that I have been coveting the doilies you’ve made for Mom and others, and now you are helping me not to break the tenth commandment.² Doesn’t that make you feel good? It is gorgeous, and we are pleased to have it in our home. It’s really perfect, because not only does it look nice, but it reminds us of you and it will be easy to pack and bring home. So, thanks again.³

We were very happy to receive the package⁴ from Mom and Dad this week. (Obviously we got it, since that’s where the doily was). It was like Christmas and my birthday⁵ all rolled into one. Of course we were thankful to get some of the things we had asked for, like sponges and Kool-Aid⁶ and twisters⁷, but the surprises really pleased us – dried fruit and OAT SQUARES⁸ and wheat germ. Thanks for your part in making the audio tapes. It was really nice to hear some familiar music! J was listening to Jackson Browne while making breakfast Thursday morning.⁹

It’s only 11 am and already it has been a very happy day for me. J made breakfast for me (tomato and cheese omelet in our new frying pan), and I opened my doily and birthday cards. J brought out from hiding our half-kilo chocolate bar – but now that we have Hershey’s Miniatures we can wait on the chocolate bar for a while. He also gave me a silver cross pendant, a very beautiful Ethiopian design. We need to buy a chain before I can wear it, though.¹⁰

We came into the office today to check e-mail and do a little work, since we don’t have language school. (The last Friday of each month is prayer day for SIM, the mission that runs the language school). My friend and co-worker Joy brought me a gift from Kenya, where she was for a conference last week – it’s a woven bag like the ones that were popular in high school, but this one has a drawstring at the top.¹¹ After lunch today we are planning to go to an exhibition on Women in Development. Some of the FH/E nurses are participating in the exhibition and have brought some handcrafts made by FH/E women’s groups to sell.

Learning Amharic has been challenging so far! Last week we learned the alphabet and this week we started on simple sentences like “My name is Sara” and “I am a student.” I’m sorry I can’t write those for you in Amharic on the computer, but I’ll send you a handwritten sample of fidel soon.

I hope you have a good time celebrating Mom’s birthday¹² this weekend. I think I sent her postcard too late for it to get there by Saturday, but it’s coming. Eat a piece of pizza for us! We will be eating pizza tonight with a group of friends in celebration of three birthdays – mine, J’s¹³, and Renate’s (she’s a German veterinarian working with the Southern Baptist Mission). We’re also going to the Hilton to play miniature golf, though I’m pretty sure it’s going to rain on us.¹⁴

Wow, I just found out that we have a package¹⁵ waiting at the post office. Guess we’ll have to add that to our list of afternoon activities.¹⁶

Enjoy yourselves this weekend!

Love, Sara (the old lady)¹⁷ and J

OKAY, WAIT! I just got your e-mail from earlier in the week, and sadly it is too late to reply. I was thinking of calling Mom and Dad today, but J suggested that it would be easier and cheaper to have you call us sometime next week. So, how about if we set a date for early next week? How about if I say call us at 6 am your time, 4 pm our time, on Tuesday? The problem with 8 am our time is that we have to be at school at 8:30, and it’s across town; we have school until 3 pm,¹⁸ but we can get to the office by 4. We’ll check our e-mail on Monday, so if you have an alternative suggestion let us know!¹⁹

**********

¹ Lisa.

² You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor’s. Including, I suppose, her doily.

³ We still have the doily.

⁴ Our first package!

⁵ It was actually my birthday.

⁶ Fruity flavors help you drink more fluids when you’re not feeling well.

⁷ I… have no idea.

⁸ My all-time favorite cereal.

⁹ He still does this.

¹⁰ Purchased chain, have worn, still love. A+ gift.

¹¹ Sorry, Joy. I still have a bag like this that I bought for myself, but I'm not sure what happened to the one you gave me.

¹² The day after mine.

¹³ Ten days after mine.

¹⁴ I’m pretty sure our miniature golf plans were rained out, as I have no recollection of that outing.

¹⁵ Our second package!

¹⁶ We had to pick up our packages in person at the main post office. More on that later…

¹⁷ Seriously? I was 26.

¹⁸ Nice to know, as we couldn’t quite remember the hours.

¹⁹ I do not miss being ten time zones away from my family, or trying to set up international phone calls by e-mail.

Monday Morning.

The morning of Monday, June 26, 1995 was as ordinary as any morning could have been for us, two months into our extended residence in the capital city of a developing country. J had returned home after his short visit to the north and we were starting our second week of language school. We were probably humming the little mnemonic tune that helped us memorize the characters of the fidel as we ate breakfast and prepared to leave the apartment. Once in the car and out of the gate, we turned south towards Bole Road, on our new morning route to pick up Joy.

We… didn’t get very far. Even from our gate we could see that Bole Road was blocked off, the intersection packed with people. So we reversed direction and headed north on our street, the route we would normally take to the office. We thought if we could reach a main road in that direction we could work our way around to Bole Road, and from there continue on our familiar route to the other side of the city. But that… did not happen. Try as we might, we could not find a way across Bole Road to the south and west of us. Police and pedestrians blocked every intersection; our Amharic wasn’t good enough to ask for details but the message was clear: get away from here.

Keep in mind that there’s no radio in the car to tell us what’s happening; there’s no app to provide us with an alternate route around the congestion. We had little to no concept of how the city was laid out and had barely even seen a street map, let alone have one with us in the car.

After about half an hour of trying to get across Bole Road, we decided to change tactics and head for the FH/E office. Once there, we thought, we could call Joy and tell her to find her own transportation to language school – we’d catch up with her later in the day. (Remember, we couldn’t call her from home because we didn’t have a phone at home, and we didn’t know anyone in our building who did. To be fair, we didn’t know anyone in our building). But even that plan was optimistic, because we also couldn’t find a way to cross Asmara Road to the north of us, to get into the Kazanchis neighborhood where the office was located. At one point, frustrated and dumb, we parked the car on a quiet side street and tried to make our way to the office on foot, only to be stymied by a small waterway – in retrospect, probably the Kebena River – that we couldn’t get around or across.

So, we turned around and went home. I’d like to think we spent the afternoon studying; I know we didn’t waste hours watching tv – because we had no tv; we didn’t goof around on the Internet – because there was no Internet; we didn’t even have a short wave radio to distract us.

On Tuesday morning, we got up as usual, and went to language school.

It is hard to imagine now, but our isolation was so complete, we didn’t know until we got to school  that there had been an attempt to assassinate the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, as he arrived in Addis Abeba on Monday morning for a meeting of the Organization of African Unity. The ambush had taken place on Bole Road, somewhere between our street and the airport, which was about a kilometer away. Though his car was riddled with bullets, Mubarak himself escaped unharmed; his driver turned around and went right back to the airport. By the time we were out in the car, the focus had turned to locating the perpetrators who were, presumably, contained in the same cordoned-off portion of the city that we were attempting to navigate. Two Ethiopian policemen were killed along with five gunmen; a Muslim militant group called the Islamic Group in Egypt later claimed responsibility for the attempt. For more information, you can read this vivid report of the incident from the Los Angeles Times.

I suppose that was our first experience with terrorism, and it was our closest brush in terms of physical proximity, and at the time we probably weren’t as freaked out by it as we should have been. We took it more seriously later on, when it became more personal.