Musings on being home

I always knew that coming home was going to be hard. Hard to keep alive the experience I just had, and hard to rejoin my life here knowing that I've been changed in ways I don't fully understand. Of course, after all these years, even after months away, my established life in Seattle is so familiar and so comfortable that it was easy to slip back into routines: teaching, coaching, playing weekend soccer, and spending time with friends and family. The pattern of my first few weeks was recognizable - and predictable: I clung to the world I had just left behind, trying to feel like I was still in Addis. I listened to Ethiopian music, ate Ethiopian food, wore the souvenir soccer jerseys, shared pictures and stories with anyone who'd listen, and actively kept in touch with the community of friends I'd made... and yet, as each day passed, the rawness and intensity of the experiences I had waned. What had seemed so "real" was fading, all too quickly crowed out by the return to this "reality."

That leaves me to sort out just how my time in Addis affected me. I describe the city to people as sprawling, crowded, polluted, chaotic, and yet somehow beautiful (well, not exactly beautiful, but alluring in its own way). Some of it is just how raw and real life feels there; the residents of Addis live a life much more like the majority of the planet's population - a life so much more materially rational and sustainable than the resource-rich, wasteful, and unsustainable life we live here in the U.S.

Living in Addis put me at a distressing nexus of most of the core issues I care about: poverty, equality, and the environment. Ethiopia is, for example, one of the poorest countries on the planet, and yet its population is still growing due to a fertility rate that's double the global average. Further, despite being considered Africa's least unequal country (a sadly low bar), the gap between the wealthy and the masses is considerable - and growing. The country's rapid - and needed - development is also taking a toll on the environment that risks being irreversible as precious water gets polluted and land gets deforested and otherwise degraded. It was discouraging to see the strain that population growth and development are putting on such a beautiful place.

And yet, despite these challenges, the people were, in the main, strikingly generous, kind, outgoing, and hospitable. They were also proud and hopeful, especially the students I worked with. As I've recounted many times, I can't imagine visitors to this country being greeted so openly and treated so warmly. I also can't wait to see the ways that these ambitious young people find to contribute to their society.

So, much like South Africa, Ethiopia is now in my heart. I have had the cliché "Africa bug" for a while now (see #7 on this list of "7 good reasons for avoiding Addis Ababa."), but there is something lingering about what I'm dubbing "the Ethiopia effect." Maria Thomas (who died in a plane crash in Ethiopia in 1989 while on her way to visit a refugee camp on the Ethiopia-Sudan border) wrote the following about the allure of Ethiopia in African Visas:

"If you ask people who have ever lived in Ethiopia, they tell you that you never put it behind you... if you stayed, you never wanted to leave. And after you left, all you wanted to do was go back, and when you couldn't get there, you found Ethiopians on the outside, or they found you, or you found each other across the world like this, as if by magic."

In her story, "Ethiopia," Thomas describes small and large details of daily life in Addis and of its physical setting that I recognize, despite the decades that separate our time there; she touches on both the beautiful and the horrific (and on their seemingly incongruous simultaneous existence), and she also relates experiencing that life through the expat lens in ways that resonate eerily with my own experience:

"It was amazing to me that in this strange setting we could keep the surface of our lives the way we did, days that went on as days do anywhere, in what now, as memory, seems to me like awe."

Awe indeed. Now what?