To the Girl at the Airport in Addis
You rush into the elevator as the doors are closing. I don’t hit the close button, but I don’t hold the doors open either. Instead, I watch you as you enter.
You: young, clear faced, alert. Clutching your shiny maroon passport with the uncracked spine, wearing a light grey hijab and a white apron with the blue stencil of an employment agency logo. The girls you are with and dozens more throughout the airport wear the same outfit with slight variations. You move through the airport in clutches of four or five, propelled by anxiety and youthful excitement, eyes watching everything around you like a kettle of hawks.
Me: not that young, blank-faced, avoiding unnecessary social interaction, navigating the process of leaving Ethiopia via Addis Ababa Bole International Airport on the same flight to Nairobi that I’ve taken again and again over the past three years. Insulated from bureaucracy by the legal assurances of welcome in both countries. I’m irritable, eager to get to the gate and tune out the world with my noise-cancelling headphones, wondering if I’ll have enough time to download the latest episode of Silo on my phone. Wondering if I’ll find anyone selling a fasting macchiato this time of year (lactose-intolerant, and I don’t) because I left the house without having coffee that morning.
“Home was aimless Sunday afternoon drives through Addis with my parents, coming back to guests visiting unannounced.”
The first time I moved away from Addis, I was certain it would only be temporary. I was sixteen, on my way to my sisters’ one bedroom apartment in Chicago’s North Side. It was 2005 and most schools in Addis, including mine, had closed on and off throughout the year following the tension and eventual police violence around the general elections in May that year. Provisional results from the polls had pointed to historic gains for the opposition, but the Prime Minister had declared victory, preempting the official announcements from the National Election Board. Accusations from the opposition of vote rigging, as well as the Prime Minister’s invocation of a state of emergency, which included an order to stop all vote-counting processes, quickly followed, leading to mass protests. By November, government forces had killed 193 civilians, and at least 20,000 people were arrested, including many opposition party leaders. My original hope was to complete my undergraduate studies abroad and come home, so leaving a couple years earlier than planned didn’t seem like a big deal. I was certain that after a brief educational stint, I’d be right back at home with my degree, somehow contributing to the greater good. The school closings and mass arrests felt like blips. But although I did move back home as planned after college graduation, I left again two years later.
In Chicago, I reeled between exhilaration and paralyzing fear. It was like standing at the edge of the observation deck on the 103rd floor of the Sears Tower (never Willis) watching the gridded city spreading out to meet the pancake flat horizon, my internal pendulum swinging between wonder and vertigo. I went to live music shows and underground DJ sets and free outdoor movie screenings. I explored abandoned railway lines and faraway neighborhoods. But even as my world expanded, I clung to home. Home was aimless Sunday afternoon drives through Addis with my parents, coming back to guests visiting unannounced. It was the fragrance of roasting coffee filling the rooms of the house every day after lunch, and strangers sharing smiles and eye contact with each other, softly saying, “Selam.” Home was fresh bread from Shoa Dabo Bakery whose delicate white slices looked like a child’s drawing of a car, and rushing to Enrico Pastry after church to snag a tray of boxegna cream puffs and other delights before they inevitably sold out. I wrote my college application essay about my first return to Addis after leaving, and I hung a nylon Ethiopian flag in my freshman dorm room.
When I find my check-in desk at the airport, I look out for you. You are not in my check-in line. Perhaps passengers flying to the Middle East check in somewhere else. Most of these passengers are moving to work as domestic workers. In Saudi Arabia, where most of them are, there are around 750,000 Ethiopian domestic workers. Every year, some are deported back to Ethiopia, but then another wave replaces them. In 2022, Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia agreed that about 100,000 Ethiopians would be deported back to Ethiopia. The following year, Ethiopia’s government committed to sending 500,000 domestic workers to Saudi Arabia.
I also don’t see you at the border control line. But there are other agency girls in the snaking queue behind me. I can’t tell if you’re there or not. A girl behind me surges whenever the line advances, as if her quickness to react will make the line move faster. When it’s just me in front of her, she surges again, gently pushing my body and almost moving beyond me, even though there are no open desks. I think of you when I tell her, “Ayzosh, it’s ok, they’ll tell us when they’re ready.” I imagine I am riding a cresting tsunami of bodies pouring out of Ethiopia, wave after wave pulsing out of the country like aortic spurts of blood.
I’m the youngest of four girls by about a decade. When I moved into my sisters’ apartment in Chicago, I felt like a burden. Being smaller and weaker than everyone around me, I was infected by an aura of helplessness, manifesting in the conversations I was excluded from, or the glasses that slipped through my fingers, or the movies I was deemed too young to watch—and I hated it. Our age gap also meant my sisters and I were born into different worlds. They moved to America in their late teens and twenties and by the time I joined them, their lives looked impossibly grown up as they managed complicated worries like leases, jobs, and loans. I moved when I was sixteen and the stakes felt lower for me because they had already walked the path ahead of me. My chore of choice was dishwashing and I would leap to wash dishes whenever I could so I could feel helpful. Years later, one sister told me what my mom said to them when I moved: “Make sure her hands don’t get ruined from too much dishwashing.”
My sisters grew up in the 70s and 80s, under the socialist dictatorship of Mengistu Haile Mariam. In Mengistu’s Ethiopia, no one was allowed to drive on Sundays, and they used state-issued ration cards for fuel and food. Mengistu and the group of soldiers with whom he ruled—the Derg—had come to power after overthrowing the monarchy of Emperor Haile Selassie. They had made Ethiopia a socialist state, secretly assassinated Haile Selassie, executed most of senior members of his government, and instituted sweeping land reform and nationalization. My parents had met in university, the eye of the revolutionary storm, where student groups had protested since the 1960s, and my oldest sister was born in 1974, the year the emperor was overthrown. In the years of the Red Terror, the government carried out a violent campaign of domestic cleansing. People heard shots ring out after curfew, and bodies were sometimes left on the street for the morning commute, labeled as traitors. My parents told me they left home every day praying everyone would return at the end of the day.
I wonder how your family survived and if they ever told you stories. We didn’t talk about it much in my family. My parents worked hard to build normalcy for us at home, but things seeped through. Like stories about my cousin staying at our house to hide from forced conscription. Like the people who were executed in public. Like all the disappearances and arrests. The Red Terror was followed by famines where droughts escalated into the Derg blocking humanitarian aid. In 1991, Mengistu and the Derg were overthrown by a coalition that included many ex-university student activists.
Here’s what my oldest sister Malefia remembers of TV during the Derg: It was black and white, with entertainment broadcast only on weekends. Communist propaganda. And during the weeknight news: proclamation after proclamation, and soldiers marching to martial music. She said back then every musician who released an album had to include at least one song “for the love of the country.” On Saturday nights they would air a Russian film with subtitles.
Things were different after Mengistu’s overthrow. By then, both my parents were mid-career, and the end of the dictatorship also saw the proliferation of color TVs, freely circulating VHS tapes, and opportunities to travel internationally. Here’s what I remember about TV then: The state was the only broadcaster, but it was in color. We would rent bootleg VHS tapes of old Westerns or the Roots miniseries or a tape full of back-to-back music videos. By the time I was in 7th grade, we had access to DSTV, and I remember watching M-Net, Channel O, and SuperSport.
“Do you know what you are giving up? Would you choose differently if you did? ”
At the security checkpoints in the airport, you bunch together in a group, and the airport attendants don’t wait for you to ask questions before telling you where to go and what to do. As I look at you, I feel anxious about your future. In Addis, we’ve heard stories of women in the Middle East being held hostage by the whims of cruel employers, physical abuse, psychotic breaks. Sometimes, the stories talk about towns full of young men who can’t find wives because all the young women went abroad to work. Some families sold off their livestock to finance the travel of a daughter with the expectation (not hope) that she will be the one to lift them out of poverty. Rumors and facts intermingled.
I think back to the tone of your voice when we were together in the elevator. Am I imagining the tremor in your voice? Your eagerness to escape the metal box feels familiar. When I first left Ethiopia, I was nervous, too. For the first half of the school year, I couldn’t keep my breakfast down. I remember my sisters dropping me off most mornings and rubbing my back in the parking lot.
I’ve moved back and left Addis again several times since then, but that initial move was a turning point. In Addis, I grew up in a thick web of meaning. Everywhere I looked, I had aunts, uncles, cousins, friends. Even if a lot of people eventually left, the fact that they had been there before made Addis feel like the heart of our collective. Last June, my parents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in Addis. They had a small ceremony in the church where they married and made a mark on the hand-written register of their union. Many of the original wedding attendees came to the party. Unlike many in my extended family who had to leave because of the Derg, or later because of the war with Eritrea, my nuclear family stayed in Addis through the 90s. And unlike a lot of friends and relatives who had emigrated without the right papers, or with too much to prove before going home, or who no longer have a home to return to—I can go back if I choose. I’ve chosen to leave again and again. But that connection to place, that rootedness my parents have, is something I gave up the first time I left.
I chose my path, but did I know what I was giving up? Do you know what you are giving up? Would you choose differently if you did?
The last time I see your group, you are moving through the last security checkpoint before moving on to your gates. No one is immune from the slight dishevelling that security checks prompt: removing metals from the body, and shoes too, shoving them in cracked plastic bins, pushing those bins along the conveyor belt to the x-ray machine, bumping into strangers putting their shoes back on while reaching for your own possessions. Trying not to leave anything behind. And leaving everything behind.
About the Author
Rebecca Emiru is an Ethiopian-Eritrean writer based in Nairobi. Drawing on her social science background, she explores the interplay between systemic forces and personal experiences in her writing. Rebecca holds an M.Sc in Development Management from the London School of Economics and a B.A. in Political Science from Amherst College. She is passionate about speculative fiction and good coffee.
Read Rebecca’s “Behind the Essay” interview in our newsletter.
Edited by Carey Baraka.
Header photo by Safwan Mahmud.
