Making Progress.

By the beginning of July (nearly Twenty-one Years Ago in Ethiopia, now…) we had gotten our bearings and settled into our new life in Africa.

At language school we continued to improve our communication skills, as I wrote to my sister on July 6, 1995:

We feel like we are making progress in Amharic! When I came into the office today, I responded to peoples’ greetings and THEY DIDN’T CORRECT ME, which means I GOT IT RIGHT! Language school was pretty fun today – we learned numbers and then played BINGO! to reinforce our knowledge. In phonetic Amharic, your age (27) is “haya sabat” (ALMOST “haya simmint”). The numbers are pretty easy: eleven is expressed as ten-one (“asra andt”), twelve is ten-two (“asra hulett”), etc. Amharic doesn’t have words for million or billion so we use English instead. Of course, the only time we hear those numbers is when street kids demand, “Give us one million dollars!”

At the apartment, we had managed to set up our bare-bones household, though we were still waiting for delivery of that duty-free stove. We had acquired baking supplies and a 1962 Betty Crocker cookbook from a longtime missionary couple who were retiring and heading back to the USA, and I was looking forward to baking a carrot cake for J’s upcoming birthday. Funny thing about the cookbook was that it relied on a lot of prepared ingredients that simply weren’t available in Addis Abeba, like canned beans, cream of mushroom soup, and packages of Jell-o. It also didn’t have a recipe for carrot cake. We did the best we could with what we had, and were unreasonably happy when we found a source for bay leaves and cornstarch.

It took us a little time, but by the beginning of July we had found ourselves a church home at the International Lutheran Church of Addis Abeba. Most of the young expatriates we had met attended the larger International Evangelical Church, but the one time we went there it reminded us a little bit too much of an American mega-church, a format that had never appealed to us. It took a little encouragement (thanks, Steve and Beth) and effort for us to find ILC but it felt like home as soon as we walked in the door, in large part because we had attended a Lutheran church during our student days in Salem. The liturgy sounds the same, even when it’s spoken with a Norwegian accent.

By the beginning of July, it had also started to rain. Addis Abeba is dry for most of the year, but as I have mentioned before, there’s a no-kidding type of rainy season that runs from late June to August. Unlike the Pacific Northwest, it isn’t cloudy and gray all day long with constant precipitation. Ethiopian rainstorms are relatively short but intense, a heavy downpour usually accompanied by thunder and lightning, with bright sunshine before and after. It wasn’t uncommon for drivers, ourselves included, to pull over and wait out a rainstorm since windshield wipers often couldn’t keep up with the demand.

I remember one evening when there was a huge storm. We were already at home when the rain started lashing against our apartment windows – and it’s a good thing we were. The living room windows were sheltered by an overhang, but our bedroom window bore the full brunt of the weather, and began to leak. A lot. The windows were just pieces of glass in a metal frame with absolutely no seal or weather stripping of any kind, so water poured in through the seams, over the windowsill and onto the bedroom floor. We pinned our makeshift window curtain (formerly a blue-checkered tablecloth) up out of the way and deployed towels and cooking pots to catch most of the water. We listened to a Harry Connick Jr. cassette tape until the power went out, then we made dinner by candlelight, read a little bit, and fell asleep. We woke up a few hours later to the light of the full moon shining in through our curtain-less window and it all made sense: “Oh, he’s smiling, ‘cause he’s in love. The man in the moon is smiling ‘cause he’s in love with the girl in the world.”

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.

Finding Our Way.

One of the challenges about attending language school was its location. If you think of Addis Abeba as the face of a watch, our apartment was located at about four-thirty, in the southeast quadrant of the city, very close to the airport. The FH/E office was only about a ten-minute drive away, a fairly convenient commute unless there was a lot of traffic around St Ourael church. But language school was held at the SIM Press compound, across town at about eight o’clock on the AA dial, and we had to pick up Joy on the way, so learning to navigate the streets of Addis was also on the summer syllabus.

The south half of Addis Abeba. Scale: ???

I say “summer” because we were in the northern hemisphere, but the months of June, July, and August are the “big” rainy season in Ethiopia; it wasn’t cold by any means but it usually rained hard at least once a day and the bad weather exacerbated the challenges of driving. By the end of the season, there were potholes on the road large enough to swallow the Renault sedan, or at least do serious damage to its suspension. And other drivers – especially taxi drivers – would swerve unexpectedly to avoid potholes and other road hazards, which added an element of excitement to the daily drive.

In this era of Google maps, it’s difficult to convey how challenging it was for us to find our way around Addis Abeba twenty years ago, when our only resources were sketchy tourist maps and word of mouth. The vast majority of people walked or used public transportation, which meant there was literally no need for road maps. Drivers relied on landmarks: turn left at Olympia, for example, or go straight at the tukuls; there were no street signs but most of the streets weren't known by name, anyway. The closest main road to our apartment terminated at the airport about a kilometer away and was called Bole (bo-lay) Road after Bole International Airport. Other main roads led out of the city toward Debre Zeit, Jimma, Ambo, and Asmara, or up to Entoto, and were known by their destinations. One of the few streets everyone knew was Churchill Avenue, the main drag that connected the lower portion of town with the train station and post office to the uphill Piazza neighborhood.

Several main roads came together in the center of the city at Meskel Square and at Mexico, a traffic circle named in honor of the historic friendship between Ethiopia and Mexico. (Apparently, Mexico has been dismantled and rebuilt in recent years due to light rail construction). It was rare enough for an intersection to have traffic signals of any kind and rarer still for them to be functional. Here’s a video clip of traffic going through the west end Meskel Square; Bole Road is one of three main roads that meet at the other end of the square so we had to navigate this intersection on a regular basis:

We could avoid Meskel Square, Mexico, and some of the worst traffic by skirting the city center on our way to language school. Here’s how it worked:

1. Turn right onto Bole Road.

2. Turn left onto the Acropolis Road. According to the map, it’s actually called Ethio-China Street, but we never knew it by that name; we called it the Acropolis Road because that's where our favorite Greek restaurant was. Continue on this road until you reach the intersection with Debre Zeit Road.

3. Go straight across Debre Zeit Road. Try not to get crushed; there’s a lot of traffic and no signal.

4. Continue on Slaughterhouse Road until you get to the tukuls. The official name of Slaughterhouse Road is Alexander Pushkin Street. I don’t know what crime the father of Russian literature committed to have the smelliest street in Ethiopia named after him: enormous piles of bones with bits of rotting flesh basking in the sunlight, and the odor to match. Plus vultures. Ugh.

5. Go through the roundabout at the tukuls (still there!) and continue on Old Airport Road aka Seychelles Street, past Le Petit Paris (…we used several restaurants as reference points) and the Ethio Telecom building.

6. Turn left onto Victory Road, aka South Africa Street. A slight detour here onto unpaved neighborhood streets to pick up Joy.

7. Get back onto Victory Road and then turn left to continue on Old Airport Road, known here as Mauritania Street. There's a shorter way to go but it isn't paved, and that could be risky in rainy weather.

8. When you reach Save-More, turn left onto Jimma Road. Go over the bridge at Akaki, then turn right at the intersection where if you were to turn left you would arrive at Alert, the leprosy hospital.

9. Take the next right onto the unpaved, rocky side street that leads to the SIM Press Compound. Honk your horn as you approach the gate, and wait for the guard to admit you.

This commute took about 35-40 minutes on an average morning, though there were several days where traffic jams made us late for language school, and (spoiler alert) at least one day where we didn’t make it to school at all.

Where Is Gandalf When You Need Him? (Part Three)

This is the third and final installment by guest contributor J, who wrote this e-mail message describing a business trip with Walter the consultant to the FH/E project sites in South Gondar in mid-June 1995.

The new tire arrived and by 8:30 that evening we were in Nefas Mewcha, enjoying our special ferenj dinner of spaghetti and deep fried potatoes. We slept well that night and were awakened by a bright crisp morning. A breakfast of scrambled eggs and homemade local bread was waiting for us. That day we were to travel to Arb Gebeya, 26 kilometers across the mountains. The Land Cruiser’s tires were patched – with holes still clearly visible – and off we went. The hour-long drive gave me new ideas for roller coaster rides at Disneyland. The landscape was simply incredible. I could describe it as beautiful – because it is – but the extenuating circumstances diminish its apparent beauty. The major crop grown by the farmers in Tach Gayint and Lay Gayint (two weredas, like counties or administrative zones in South Gondar) is rocks! It is unbelievable that anyone would try to plow, plant, and grow crops on such terrain! Centuries of farming on the steep hillsides has caused massive erosion and consequently uncovered a great many of the rocks. The people are hard working, plowing their fields by hand or with oxen. They travel one or two hours by foot from their villages to their fields and work there all day. Young boys of six and seven are grazing the scrawny cattle and sheep from dawn to dusk. It would all make for a great documentary, but the story seems different when you have seen it firsthand.

The project staff at both base camps were unbelievably generous and hospitable. During my two days at Arb Gebeya (the capital of Lay Gayint wereda), I even enjoyed a shower from a tank filled with water fetched by the women working at the camp. In the evenings the staff gave us Amharic lessons to make up for the language school I was missing in Addis. The experience of seeing the project sites and some of the development work happening outside of the metropolitan area was worth the inconvenience of the travel. This is especially true in retrospect.

The adventure of getting from one place to another did not end with our arrival. One more flat tire and several hours of waiting at the Bahir Dar airport came before my safe return to Addis. All in all, that’s just Africa. I wonder, though, since I was on my way to Gondar shouldn’t I have expected some help from the wizard Gandalf?

The purpose of my visit to Gondar was to set a baseline survey in motion. The survey is conducted with many villagers in the rural areas. In all, 380 households are asked a series of questions to help FH establish a set of general characteristics for a certain area. It is a surprisingly scientific undertaking and Walter was instrumental in randomly selecting weredas, villages, and households for surveying. We expect the data to provide useful information about the needs of the people and where our resources are best allocated. Furthermore, many of the funding agencies (e.g. US Agency for International Development aka USAID) are requiring a rigorous analysis of the impact of our projects. This initial survey will give us data to compare against subsequent surveys. The survey will address issue of food and food security via crop production, household income and expenditures, family health, sanitation and access to water, etc. Each interview is expected to take one-and-a-half hours. Enumerators, or survey takers, are hired from each community and trained during a three-day session. I was there to observe and to help with the training. After the surveys are completed the data will be entered into the computer for compilation and statistical analysis. I hope to be involved with that process as well.

The next few weeks will consist mainly of language school for Sara and me. Although I missed most of the first week, Sara is doing a good job in helping me catch up. I hope to be able to converse enough to be able to understand the next guard who is sent to protect me.

Where Is Gandalf When You Need Him? (Part Two)

This is the second of three installments by guest contributor J, who wrote this e-mail message describing a business trip with Walter the consultant to the FH/E project sites in South Gondar in mid-June 1995.

The same lines, guards, waiting, checking and rechecking occurred on Wednesday morning. The plane left four-and-a-half hours late, and the Bahir Dar airport came into view at noon, twenty-six hours after our trip began. All this for a 35-minute flight! Bahir Dar and the surrounding countryside are quite breathtaking. Situated on beautiful Lake Tana, the tourist town is very close to the Blue Nile Falls, Ethiopia’s most famous natural wonder. After eating a good lunch and arranging a return flight for Saturday, we hopped into the Land Cruiser and sped on our way to Nefas Mewcha.

With the exception of a one-mile stretch, the road was lined with rough stones and gravel. A significant portion of the road was built by the Chinese, when Ethiopia was still communist, with careful engineering. The mountainous passes were skillfully carved out and bridges were strategically placed. Small ditches hugged the road to prevent the annual rainfall from eroding the infrastructure. Ironically, this engineering feat may have influenced the fall of the Derg regime in 1991; the road was strategic during the war and as many as 21 burned-out and abandoned military vehicles were scattered among the stones and rocks along the roadside. According to the Gondar Project forester, Yohannes (who was also our driver), Mengistu lost a lot of soldiers and equipment in the hills and valleys served by the Chinese road.

It took us only one-and-a-half hours to reach Debra Tabor, the capital of South Gondar. There Yohannes took care of some project business at the hospital, and 75 minutes later we were on the road again.

It was only 75 kilometers from Debra Tabor to Nefas Mewcha, but the remainder of the trip took us almost five hours. The roughness of the road had taken its toll on the tires and in the course of 60 kilometers we had two punctures. Unfortunately, the Land Cruiser was only equipped with one spare. Yohannes parked the vehicle on the side of the road and left Walter and myself alone among the tukuls (grass huts) and villagers while he went off to try to contact his colleagues at the project site. It quickly grew dark and cold (the elevation there is about 3,000 meters) and we decided to climb back into the Land Cruiser with the key in the ignition in case we needed it.

As dusk became darkness, a figure slowly approached the vehicle. At first we thought nothing of it, and many folks had passed us carrying water, herding their sheep or cattle, or hauling plows and yokes. This figure eventually took the shape of an elderly gentleman carrying a gun. Not noticing the gun, Walter rolled down his window and inquired (in English) what the man wanted. He replied in clear Amharic, to which we shrugged our shoulders and I awkwardly replied “Amarinya yellem” which means, very roughly, “Amharic there is none.” We all laughed, but I remained a bit nervous. Walter rolled up the window and the elderly man walked around the Land Cruiser and sat at the side of the road. We kept an eye on him and after several minutes we agreed to let the man join us in the back of the vehicle. We had understood just one word he had spoken: “Yohannes.” We reasoned that our driver must have asked him to be our guard and that if he had any hostile intentions, an inch of glass probably would not stop him. At the same moment a group of four men walked toward the “guard” and greeted him. The men handed us a note from Yohannes stating, “Don’t worry, I sent a guard to protect you and our base camp has been informed of the situation.” We were safe.

As the men continued to talk among themselves they decided they all wanted to come into the back of the Land Cruiser. It did not seem unreasonable, since it was cold, yet my mother’s warning about talking to strangers was in the forefront of my mind. I expected to additional four men to return to their homes after delivering the message, but they weren’t going anywhere. What to do? I tried to reason with them. However, after one day of language school I was in no position to strike up a conversation in Amharic. I said to them, “and, hulett, sost, arat, amist zebunya?” and shrugged my shoulders – pointing out to them that “one, two, three, four, five guards?” for two people and a vehicle seemed a little ridiculous, don’t you think? They laughed (mostly at my Amharic) and continued to reason with me. Then a breakthrough: I heard one of them say “FH”. I quickly inquired what FH was an abbreviation for, to get further confirmation that we were talking about Food for the Hungry. No luck.

Finally, Walter decided that it was time to let the guard with the gun inside the Land Cruiser. The guard refused to climb in without his cohorts and proceeded to offer his gun to Walter as a sign of friendship. Neither of us had ever held a gun and we both quickly refused. But the tension seemed to have broken and the five men persuaded us to let them in out of the cold. It turned out that we were paranoid “ferenj” (foreigners) and the men were guards for an FH nursery and forestry project site a couple of kilometers up the road. Yohannes returned twenty minutes later and his translation cleared up any misunderstandings and potential hard feelings. Rural Ethiopians are very friendly folks and we were embarrassed not to have trusted them.

Where Is Gandalf When You Need Him? (Part One)

This is the first of three installments by guest contributor J, who wrote this e-mail message describing a business trip with Walter the consultant (remember him?) to the FH/E project sites in South Gondar in mid-June 1995.

The phrase that I always need to keep in mind while I am here is: “Well, that’s just Africa.” I am kicking myself for not tattooing that on my right arm as I travel to and through the province of South Gondar. Walter, a consultant from Kenya, and I embarked on our journey to Nefas Mewcha at 10 o’clock Tuesday morning. Our flight was to leave at noon for Bahir Dar and from there we would travel three hours by car to our final destination. Unfortunately, no one had warned me about the Ethiopian airport experience.

Only passengers are allowed beyond the airport parking lot into the terminal building. So at every juncture, policemen and guards ask you for your plane ticket and your passport. The airport is quite small and the number of passengers that travel through there on a daily basis would be dwarfed by the traffic at the Eugene or Boise airports. Nonetheless, everywhere you go there are lines – lines to check your baggage, lines to pay your airport user tax, lines to check your passport (again), lines to use the phone, etc. So it was a good thing that we arrived two hours early for the domestic flight. By the time it was 12 o’clock, there was no indication whether our flight had already left, was about to leave, would ever leave, or was actually scheduled. There are no monitors, no information desks, and no airline officials; only guards. At ten minutes to one, the fun actually started: our flight was announced and we were all herded toward the x-ray machine and metal detector. Forty minutes later it was my turn to brave the ominous machines. Only minutes earlier I had witnessed one poor woman removing her hair pins from underneath her head covering so as not to displease the shrieking metal detector. I was poised and calm: after all, I am a seasoned international traveler. The machines posed no problem, but it quickly became clear that the machines were the least of my troubles. A set of small chambers, divided by curtains, awaited unsuspecting travelers. Women and men were guided into separate rooms, one at a time, and searched thoroughly. Apparently, I was let off easy – I only emptied my pockets, removed my shoes, and was frisked all over (I mean ALL over). In addition to such thorough searching, my companion was also asked to explain his camera (Photography 101) and to remove its battery. All lighters, matches, keys, pocketknives, fingernail clippers, etc., were confiscated and kept for safe keeping. Many Ethiopians spent as much as ten minutes in the tiny chambers. It was not until ten minutes before 2 o’clock that all passengers had passed inspection and we were ready to board.

One busload of passengers at a time was driven across the tarmac to the waiting plane. There we identified our checked luggage and watched the baggage handler load it onto the plane. I thought, “Finally we are getting somewhere!” until I noticed another line forming at the bottom of the airplane stairs. Every single passenger and every single piece of carry-on luggage was being searched, again. Men’s shoes were coming off, attaché cases were being opened, women’s purses were overturned, back-packers’ tents were unfolded, and everyone was searched ALL over, this time without the benefit of the privacy curtains. I was quite amazed at the calmness with which the Ethiopians accepted this invasion of privacy as part of travelling. Finally, at 2:30 the plane rolled onto the runway and we were off.

The steep climb afforded tremendous views of Addis Abeba. You could clearly see the entire sprawling city and the surrounding mountains. The captain, in perfect English as well as Amharic, informed us that the flying time would be 35 minutes, and invited us to sit back and relax. However, halfway to Bahir Dar we banked sharply to the left and seemed to be covering familiar territory.: the plane was returning to Addis due to mechanical difficulties.

Back on the ground, the time flew. I had met a young gentleman who was on a yearlong tour of the world, and we shared impressions and chit-chatted until 4:30 when the plane was again ready for departure. Working with Food for the Hungry, I was well aware that most people had not eaten anything since breakfast, including me. After all, we had expected to be in Bahir Dar (which means “near the lake”) by 12:30. Ethiopian Airlines had graciously provided a bag of peanuts and three tiny Danish butter cookies to stem our hunger.

This time we only flew about seven minutes before returning to our departure point. By this time everyone’s patience was exhausted. Back inside the terminal building, an official apologized for the delay and assured us it was all beyond the control of the airline. I reminded Walter that, in fact, it was Ethiopian Airlines who employed all of the mechanics. Nevertheless, all travelers were sent away for the night to return at six the next morning. We were assured the problem “will be fixed by tomorrow… hopefully.” The airline refused out-of-town travelers any hotel or meal compensation; luckily, I went home to my wife and my own comfortable bed just a short drive from the airport.