A place filled people who look and sound like you, and still alone

Some reflections from a brief, unexpected journey home

Dear friend,

I’m writing to you from the airport in Istanbul, waiting for my connecting flight to Addis Ababa. Home. The last time I was there, I had just graduated college and was about to start my internship in a newsroom when I got the news that my grandmother’s days were coming to an end. I dropped everything and flew home with everything I had, which wasn’t much at the time. Thankfully, her last days turned to nearly six months and it wasn’t until the following December when I got on a flight back home to Seattle. It was an unexpected gift, that time with her, and although I had not been back home before then since the day I left it as a child, I was so consumed with what was happening to her that I didn’t have time to dwell on the complications of going back to a place where so much of yourself - the good and the bad - is concentrated.

This time, I am only going to be home for a little over week, to fulfill an unexpected family obligation. And while I would not have chosen to make this trip, there’s also no way I couldn’t go. So here I am, waiting at the gate to board a flight packed with other Ethiopians, everyone overly familiar with one another, the feeling that we’re all on the same journey - literally and figuratively - permeating the air around us. People of the diaspora, on our way home for one reason or another.

In the arrivals hall at the Addis Ababa airport, there is a line for people who need a visa on arrival. Most of the people in that line, like me, were once simply Ethiopians until they took an oath of loyalty and belonging to another country. And now we ask permission and pay a fee to enter the place we were born. Oh, we have the same last name, says the agent to me with a smile. The last name that barely anybody can pronounce in my daily life overseas is so common here that I share it with a total stranger. Don’t worry, I’ve already seen your passport, says another agent to me when it’s time to pay for the visa. I’m familiar to them. Like they are familiar to me. I’m surrounded by people who sound and often look like me. And I wonder if this is what white Europeans experience all the time while in their home countries. This feeling that they are in the place where they belong. The places where I often linger on the edges, rarely at ease, never truly familiar, always aware of my otherness.

I booked a hotel for my first night in Addis, and the driver I arranged to take me there from the airport is immediately like a little brother. We chat easily during the short drive and he tells me that tomorrow morning he’ll take me to a place where I can get a local SIM card for my phone. The front desk agent at the hotel tells me the kitchen is open all night and somebody can make me a plate if I’m hungry (I am). Just as I’m settling into the room, there is a knock and somebody with a tray: injera, a couple of vegetarian dishes. It’s Wednesday. We abstain from animal products on most Wednesdays and Fridays so it’s just assumed I’d eat vegan. When I was a kid, I used to hate this feeling that we were all the same. That I couldn’t be unique because everybody was the same, expected to be the same. Which isn’t actually true. I was a dramatic child with an unhealthy obsession with being unique. Being a child immigrant in a very white city in the US fixed that quickly.

Someday, when I’ve figured out a way to share my story in a way that isn’t a confessional, I may explain why going to Nazareth (now called Adama) is complicated for me. It was the city my family moved to after I was born in Harar, a jewel of an ancient city in eastern Ethiopia. Harar for me is where it all begins and ends. But eventually I was snatched away from there and into the land-locked, humid, unwelcoming pits of Nazareth. I have never liked it. But it’s where my family settled and where I must go now.

I am on the new expressway from Addis to Nazareth, trying not to think about the fact that when I informed the driver that my seat belt didn’t work, he looked at me like one might a simple person and said slowly oh you don’t need a seat belt when you’re sitting in the back. I’m surprised when a traffic cop stops us for an infraction. Even more surprised when he tells the driver this should be a lesson for him, and lets us go after a short lecture about safety and how the road is shared with others. This is so starkly different from any interaction I’ve ever had with American “law enforcement.”

The papaya and guava trees in our family’s front yard are still there, still bearing fruit. Still the perfect guardians for those who sit beneath them with a book. Children still herd cattle at sunrise and sunset. People still use horse-drawn carriages to carry people and cargo. Nazareth seems to be frozen in time, but actually it has changed a great deal. Hell, it’s not even called Nazareth anymore. And that old anxiety, the feeling that the ground beneath me is constantly shifting, the steady drum of unease, is also still here.

Yesterday morning I woke up with the sun and decided to go for a walk around the neighborhood. I found myself on the old path to my school. One morning, several lifetimes ago, I walked into that school knowing it would be my last day. My best friend then, Hanna, always the one laughing and making jokes, told me through bitter tears that I was making a big mistake. We were barely ten years old. Mistakes or not, none of the decisions of our lives were actually ours. People decided for me where I would be and for how long and I did my best to find my footing. Most of my childhood was just me adjusting, making do, surviving. And, I think I did. Walking back towards my old school now, with new murals painted on the stone walls, a new name on the sign, I can’t help feeling like just behind me is ten-year-old me. I hope, more than anything, she feels secure. I hope she feels at home, I hope the ground feels solid beneath her feet.

Thank you for being here.