yoav ben-dov

debre zeit

this article in hebrew

harambee hotel, addis ababa 10:00 am, 14 oct 1998, my last day in ethiopia. i am here by accident. originally, i planned to stay at the guenet, where we lived for some time back in 1963. but the taxi driver who took me from the airport a week ago said there were problems at the guenet, and as i also felt something strange when i was there for the reservation, i let him take me to the harambee instead. again, i tried to choose something else, and for my return from the week-long tour in historic ethiopia, i reserved a room at the ras hotel, also an old favorite. but first i had to pick some luggage i left at the harambee, and as it was evening and the storage room attendant has already gone, i decided to stay there and cancel the ras.

actually, at first i did not even intend to visit ethiopia at all. i wanted to go for a month to north india, and the first delhi flight that the agency girl offered me was a supercheap deal in ethiopian airlines, with a two days stopover in addis. it was hard to resist the temptation to visit again, after so many years, the place where i grew up from age 7 to 10, and where i had the experiences that shaped my personality, for better or worse, in so many ways.

i also felt the time was ripe for me to go there. for some years i've been playing with the idea, now that ethiopia was open again, but did not get to do it. i even missed - quite deliberately, coming to think of it - the reunion events organized by other israelies, who also grew up in ethiopia, and apparently also had deep and sometimes complicated feelings about it.

it was only a year ago, during a trip to the world of afro-caribbean gods in cuba and jamaica, that i had a strong experience of re-connecting to a feeling of empathy with the mind and the plight of the african people, to the land of ethiopia as an image of free african civilization and also as a mythical, post-solomonic new zion, and of course, to the figure of emperor heile selassie, king of kings and conquering lion of judah, the everliving god of the rastafary movement, that i saw in person back then, when he visited the military air base that my father was helping to build. thus, on return from that caribbean tour, i told my friend in colombia that now i felt ready to visit ethiopia again. at least i couldn't go back on that. so i added another week to the stopover on the return path from india, and travelled around north ethiopia to see ancient cities, churches and palaces, streets and markets.

now, for this last day in addis, i planned to hire a taxi for the one hour drive to debre zeit - "mount of olives", also called bishoftu, the village where my family lived. i wanted to visit the lovely hora lake that was just under our house, to see the house itself if it's still there, and maybe the local school that i attended for one year. just the place, nobody to meet - there seemed to be little point in looking for the house servants, and from my parents' friends, i remembered only two names, abera and asefa, both killed by the derg regime following the marxist revolution of 1972.

so i finish my breakfast, sip my coffee, luggage found, laundry given, getting ready to go out and face the street taxi drivers, when one of three ethiopian men, who are drinking beer two tables away in the otherwise empty hotel restaurant, nods me hello and we start a casual talk. the usual things, where are you from, israel, ah, ethiopia and israel are old friends. yes, i say, we are solomon people - my favorite expression in ethiopia - and as usual, he repeats it and the conversation gets warmer with this sense of historic brotherhood. he tells me he's 35, he lives in virginia, usa, and works very hard changing his service uniform three times a day. now he is here for a short vacation, to visit his family - two sisters - who live in addis.

he says he just came back from langano, a lake resort some 200 km to the south. it's beautiful there. have you been to langano, he asks. yes, i say, many years ago. my family was in ethiopia in heile selassie time, and we used to do picnics in langano.

- what was your family doing in ethiopia?

- my father was an army engineer, and he was sent as military cooperation to the air force base in debre zeit.

- so, if you were in debre zeit in heile selassie time, maybe you remember the air force commander, general abera?

- i don't remember knowing him, i was too young, but i remember my father had a friend called general abera.

- general abera is my father.

he gets up and gives me an army salutation. i get up and salute back. we are both stunned. i just came back from a month in india, where i had all kinds of adventures with hindu gods and himalaian talismans. my hand still carries burns from the holy fire at the goddess temple in jwalamukhi. and for the last months, since my second pilgrimage to tirupati, i've been preoccupied with the image of the serent god adishesha, on which lord vishnu rests, and who represents time in its infinite recoiling and ever-repeating circles. so i am, in a sense, mentally prepared for such things. but this is really too much.

so we take a car together to debre zeit - this seems the only reasonable thing to do. at first i have difficulties recognizing the place. things changed, i changed. he shows me the old tennis court. yes, that's it. then the school. no, i say, there should be another school, that's not how it was. we drive further down the road but nothing. we go back, start to walk around, trying to correlate sights with vague and disparate memories, until we find my home, on a small hill just across the alley from general abera's house. i take some photos quickly, but we don't go in. air force officers live here, and after workneh - that's his name - has told me how his father died after spending six years in military prison, we don't feel like messing around with army people.

we go to the school instead, and talk with the vice director who shows us around. the school, which was inaugurated one year before i got there by the emperor heile selassie and general abera woldemariam, has grown since. it is now called adaa model senior secondary school, has a student population of about 4000 in two daily and one evening shifts, and its students achieve an exceptionally high level of success in the state exams. the vice director makes us speak to the students, and i promise to send him some school material in english, especially science and math textbooks for secondary level, that they lack.

two days later, back in israel, i tell my parents about my meeting with general abera's son. naturally, they are also amazed.

listen, my mother says, i have something to add to your story. in 1984 i was in new york, and a black taxi driver took me to the airport. he did not look like an afroamerican, so i asked him from where he was. he said he was from somalia, so i told him about our ethiopian years. and guess what - it turned out that he had an ethiopian university classmate and a close friend, who is none other than general asefa ayene's son. he told me about the son and his family, and for years i thought how strange it was, that only through such an accident we came to learn what happened to them.

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