Ethiopia

In May, 1991, Worku Sharew, a pacifist, went looking for a gun. The final battle of Addis Ababa was underway, with the unravelling forces of the Marxist lunatic Mengistu Hailemariam more crazed than ever as they dug in in an attempt to hold the city. Addis was encircled by Tigrayan, Oromo and other rebel forces. Worku told Joe and me that everyone expected "a bloodbath" as the communists went down fighting and many scores would be settled of a non-ideological nature.

Worku headed a household of 16 in his compound in the Ambo Road section, a residential neighborhood near the city's main market. In his house were his new wife Abeba (their two daughters were born later) and 14 siblings, cousins, nieces and nephews. As a free-lance guide and interpreter for the top writers and photographers who visited Ethiopia, including a National Geographic team, Worku was both chief breadwinner and repairer of bad situations---of which there had been many over the 17 years since Emperor Haile Selassie's overthrow and murder. (In Addis, people believe, perhaps correctly, that the emperor was buried under Mengistu's toilet.)

Unable to locate a gun with which to protect his family, Worku supervised the building of barricades. Everyone hunkered down for the weeklong siege. While thousands died in those horrifying days, the worst fighting bypassed Worku's neighborhood and he and his family survived. Worku's friend, the artist Worku Goshu (Worku is a common name in Ethiopia), has a painting in his gallery well-known in Addis, called "To the Light." Semi-abstract, in oil, the painting shows Ethiopian faces, eyes open, floating in darkness toward a bright center, the fall of Mengistu. (Mengistu lives in Zimbabwe now, a guest of fellow-tyrant Robert Mugabe. When Joe and I were in Harare ten years ago, we heard that the crews who haul Mengistu's garbage report that it consists mainly of empty liquor bottles.)

A few days ago, in that same house near the Ambo Road, Joe and I were Worku and Abeba's guests for a traditional Ethiopian feast. The meal included rich and pungent keye (red, spicy) wots (stews) and superb injera (sour, spongy bread to asorb the wot). The meal concluded with the ritual of the coffee: the roasting of the beans over a ceramic brazier; the passing around of the beans to take in their aroma; the grinding of the beans with a mortar and pestle; the placing of the grounds in a black ceramic pot, which was then filled with hot water; the cooking of the pot's contents over the brazier. The Addis power failed during the ritual, so we contentedly drank our coffee by candlelight.

The coffee ritual had to compete for our attention with Betamariam, 9, and Misgana, 6, who attend English-language schools. Worku and Abeba, a lovely and gently self-possessed teacher's assistant, joked that their children spoke better English than they did. Betamariam said she wasn't sure whether she wanted to attend college at Oxford or in America. Worku (a former student of mine whose American education I helped arrange in 1964) bemoans the abandonment of Ethiopian educational institutions by the country's privileged classes. However, my guess is his formidable children will follow his example and not his words.

I recalled another former student, Getachew Birhanu, as being a skinny little kid who was bright but shy, and a little sad. Now he is a portly, jolly, confident wheeler-dealer who seems to steer his Toyota with his knees and shift gears with his teeth as he plunges up and down the Addis hills, a cell phone in each hand, doing petroleum deals and planning a dairy farm. Getachew and his wife Kelmwa also over-fed Joe and me wonderfully. And they, too, recalled the bad years, when Getachew, then a TV journalist, was denounced by somebody for having a casual conversation with an American official, and he had to give up his career in order to save himself and his family.

(Worku Goshu got in hot water with a painting of the Blue Nile falls on exhibit in Germany. A Mengistu official accused him of disclosing the location and configuration of the falls to "the enemy." Worku Sharew, then the Ethiopian Tourist Organization's chief English-language editor, was instructed to tell visiting Israelis who wished to visit the Falashas, Ethiopia's ancient Jewish tribe, that he knew nothing of any such people. He disobeyed---leading the Israelis to the northern Falasha villages, the first intelligence-gathering step of Operation Moses, the mass removal of the Falashas to Israel---and then quit his job.)

Worku and Getachew took turns showing Joe and me around Addis, a city I once knew well but now barely recognize. The post-Mengistu economic expansion has been impressive, even though "these guys"---as the Tigray-dominated government is often referred to in mostly-Amhara Addis---are what Getachew called "communists in camouflage." Anyway, some Ethiopian Robert Moses has gone to work on the city---which when I arrived in 1962 was just a gigantic African village---and it's got a "ring road" and avenues and boulevards going every which way, and a skyline that looks like San Diego's. Someone insisted to us that a rich Arab was planning a 120-story office tower in the Piazza area at the top of Churchill Road. I said that was going to require an awful lot of eucalyptus scaffolding.

Joe and I stayed at the Ras Hotel, a $30 a night Mussolini-era relic. Peace Corps/Ethiopia types may think of this as carrying sentimentality too far. It's good we stayed there, though, for on our first day we walked into the bar and spotted---Peace Corps! They are back, after a ten-year absence. About 40 volunteers are spread around the country doing AIDS education and prevention work in conjunction with established NGOs. The program, as the five young men and women we met described it, sounded a bit vague and wobbly at some of the sites. But the volunteers have been on the job for under two months, and they seemed to us clever and game and, with backgrounds in public health, qualified. So they might end up being useful.

Health note: the Peace Corps Volunteers we met were in Addis on short medical leave, dealing with stomach and breathing problems. Addis is at 8,000 feet, and Joe and I both felt the effects. I'm posting this from Djibouti, at the lower end of the Red Sea. (I'm researching a spy thriller to be set here.) There are no altitude problems here in the former French Somaliland, but breathing in this heat and humidy is like breathing through a wet sock. More on Djibouti later. Joe, of course, finds it enchanting and can't wait to hurry back---despite his opinion that many of the Somalis here and all of the foreigners "look like killers." The small Djibouti section in the Lonely Planet "Africa on a Shoestring" guide refers to the train that runs between Djibouti and Dire Dawa, Ethiopia, as now being "dilapidated and unreliable." That of course piqued Joe's interest, too.