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.