Dislocation

I do not want to be sitting on this airplane. I did not want to pat our dogs one last time before we got in the car at the break of dawn. I did not want to look around my bedroom, our living room, taking stock of what we are leaving, wondering if we will ever be able to live there again, what state we will find it in when we do. I have done a lot of leaving in my life. This is the worst, with war on our doorstep, yet somehow still in the calm yellow eye of the hurricane. Well, I suppose it would be worse if we were trying to leave once war was upon us. And that’s why we are on this plane.

We’ve had a couple of weeks since most of the foreigners left town. None of the evacuation triggers had been pulled. It looked like all these foreigners had over-reacted and left before anything was really wrong. Honestly, we were a little bit irritated that our school had stopped instruction for two weeks while all their teachers went to a conference in Kenya that was rescheduled to facilitate an early exit from Addis. That left our kids with very little to do at home.

Each day we exercised, went to work, and tried to focus on doing the most pressing tasks that required our physical presence. A huge new agriculture and food security project is about to start up, and Paul worked very hard with our Food Security Program Manager to get the final proposals and action plans through the pipeline. We have also been trying to adjust plans for a large MCC Humanitarian assistance project for internally displaced people (IDPs). Those internal refugees, mostly Amharas who fled their homes in July when Tigrayan forces invaded their homeland, had gathered in the town of Dessie. But then Dessie itself was occupied the day the project was to start. Many of the IDPs fled further south, while we remain cut off from communication with the program manager in Dessie. We were making plans for the project to be implemented in a new area close to the capital…

Meeting with Mennonite Church leaders

And I also completed the task of interviewing 7 young adults and recommending the best candidates to the International Volunteer Exchange Program, something that is much better done in person. And we were able to meet and plan with leaders from the Bible Society of Ethiopia. We are supporting their gathering of Church leaders, postponed from early November (due to the state of emergency) until this coming Monday, November 29.

Granted, it has not been easy to focus, with this looming uncertainty. But we were looking forward to sending our kids to half-day study halls next week at their school for some phys ed and social interaction during a month of online school. Paul and I were doing our best to contribute to our little international congregation, leading music and the service, with its human resources much depleted by the departure of virtually all foreigners. I was planning to preach there for the first Sunday of Advent. We had decided to just plan an extended Christmas holiday in Tanzania, departing on December 15.

Equestrian center riding

A week ago, we began to hear rumours of a new Tigrayan Defense Force incursion further south. Fears were expressed about possible rebel sleeper cells in Addis, getting ready to support the rebel military coming south. And then on Thursday, our housekeeper told us that her brothers in Amhara had just run for their lives ahead of TDF soldiers. She had lost contact with one altogether. Our Ethiopian colleagues started to talk with us at lunch about making plans to leave. Shortly after, filled with apprehension, I took the kids to try to do something “normal” out of the house to burn off steam. We met up with a friend and her son for our kids’ first riding lesson at the nearby Equestrian Center. They both really enjoyed themselves and did very well for a first lesson, even cantering a bit by the end of the hour. It was great to take them to enjoy something new and interesting in Addis. Also surreal to watch them having fun, while my friend and I were anguished about our deep desire to stay and yet our concern for our kids’ well-being. In the car, I had to talk with them about the very real possibility of an impending departure and encouraged them to start thinking about what to pack.

David: I have no carrots!!

By the time we got home, our staff concluded that these were just rumours and we relaxed a bit. Yet on Friday night, just before we started watching a movie with the kids, I got a text from an old friend, a security professional, who happened to be in town on business. This incursion is real, he said, and it is a big deal. You should plan to leave sooner than later. (Maybe you can begin to taste the emotional roller coaster.)

Saturday morning found us very anxious, trying to decide what to do. Should we all make plans to leave? Should Paul stay for a while longer, especially to accompany this church leaders’ meeting? We decided to first take a morning walk with the dogs at Gulele Park, to clear our heads and make decisions. But when we got there, we found the gate barred, with more guards around than we had seen before. This was clearly a sign of heightened security – the park leads up to the hills and the border of the Oromia region. It could potentially be used as a gateway into Addis by Oromo extremist militias. The poor dogs saw the gate, were desperate to go for a run, but we had to return home with them.

As compensation, Paul and I took them for a walk in our neighborhood when we got home. The poor dogs were pretty terrified to leave the compound on foot, knowing what manner of strays and other dangers lurked outside, so we made it a short walk. We saw more signs. Our next-door neighbors had significantly reinforced their corrugated iron sheet fence. Another family had a fully loaded pickup ready to head out of town, a satellite dish perched on top. Most ominously, a local public building along the nearby watershed, long unused, was suddenly bustling with activity, a new crop of military recruits being dropped off there. We headed back home and I started packing.

Amaryllis plucked too soon, but gorgeous

And how do you pack to leave before a war? Our compound would not be a military target, but there is no telling what might happen if there should be a total breakdown of civil order. We had already had a long meeting with our guards earlier in the week, telling them to shout and scare off thieves, call neighbors for help, etc, but not to fight to protect MCC assets. We could return and find everything untouched. Or we might find the compound looted or burned… if and when we can return. We continue to pray that there will be a solution to this conflict, but so far, all signs point to all parties seeking a military resolution only.

On Sunday afternoon, we were finally able to connect with an old friend and fellow church member from Burundi days, Simon. He’s Ethiopian and we were very grateful to hear his perspective as an NGO professional and also a patriot. What is so difficult about this situation is that the prime minister just decisively won an election in June, an election that was carried out very well, with credible results and good oversight. By the standards of the continent, it was a hugely successful election, in terms of delivering the wishes of the people. And so people like Simon felt like things were sorted, that we could breathe for a while. The invasion of Dessie in October took everyone by surprise, and people have remained in denial. How can such a small portion of the population bring a military force to overthrow a democratically elected government? Simon also had some chilling warnings for us about what he could see coming in the next few days, and by the time Paul and I reached home from that visit, we had decided that we all needed to leave together in the near future.

On Monday morning, we had a final hour of Amharic lessons. We are just learning to compose sentences using the Amharic fidels, and really starting to understand conversations around us. In fact, we now have quite a good handle on a certain set of vocabulary: war, gun, dangerous times, security, the situation in the country. The tears started as we told our language teacher Yididiya that we had to leave sooner than we wanted. Like all Ethiopians we know, she reminded us, God is good and God is there. But she too is very afraid.

From there we met with all our staff to discuss what we had learned over the weekend. Each of our program staff firmly felt that it was time for us to go, all of us. Paul talked about the moral difficulty in leaving, the value of accompaniment, the ideal that the captain goes down with the ship. But as we looked at the situation, we recognize that we are totally powerless to do anything to help anyone in these circumstances besides providing them with resources to weather any storms. And there are solutions to the banking problems which we could put in place. Indeed, as anti-American sentiment has grown significantly in the past weeks, we are much more of a liability and danger to our colleagues by staying. We ended our meeting with a long time of intense prayer and weeping and anguish. It is so hard to know that the millions of prayers of Ethiopians remain apparently unheeded, that disaster has already come upon many along the road between Dessie and Addis, and that a city of 8 million people will likely be besieged or swept up in war in a matter of days. And yet we still pray that this will not happen, that there will be another way to end the conflict.

The following hours included the requisite COVID tests, getting our tickets finalized, gathering additional things to take to our neighbors who left for Tanzania 10 days ago, trying to think of everything possible that we could finish up before we left. We met with the crisis response team from our headquarters, to get things prepared for the internal fact sheet that would be sent out once we had evacuated. I've seen those fact sheets go out about disasters in other people's MCC programs. I never thought there would be one about my evacuation. We had a final time of prayer and tears with two staff members who were at work Tuesday evening.

There are many awful things about this situation and here are some of them. It is just awful to be running to safety and leaving in harm’s way people who have become dear to us. Awful to think of the cost to date of this war, in lives and infrastructure, and the additional cost to come. So many lives and families destroyed, so many emotional wounds. It is awful to have made one hard transition this year, to have left Tanzania, and then to have dug deep and invested in our new community, to have worked very intensely to try to feel at home in a new place, and to find ourselves uprooted again. Just awful to leave our two sweet dogs. Also it is awful to realize how this conflict is so misrepresented by western mainstream media, where the actual drivers of conflict are so consistently presented as the victims. If you watch the news, it’s a good reminder to always question the interpretation you are being given. If you actually want to have an historically informed viewpoint, here is a good analysis.

And an update after having landed:

We are now in Arusha, temporarily staying in some of the luxury tents on our old compound (our friend’s place is not quite ready for us; we evacuated too early for that). There were good reasons to come here, as we have a lot of systems still in place in Tanzania. Valid driving licenses. Working, registered sim cards. Knowledge of where to go to solve problems, shop, get mobile money, etc. A church community and friends to welcome us (our old bible study actually left a box of groceries for us at our compound). Our membership at our old club is still valid until the end of the year, so we have come here this morning for a good swim and wifi access to attend to a few work things. Probably this will be our base for online school and PE for the kids, as well as work.  It is peaceful and quiet in our old compound though it is not yet green, as the rains are late, (but they are coming). Well, quiet except for the birds that started making a glorious racket outside our tent walls at 5:45 am.

But it also feels very, very wrong to be here. Last night, we went to dinner at David’s favorite restaurant, George’s. As we sat there, a good friend approached us with her daughter: “Am I seeing a ghost? Is that really you?” We got the same response from the owner and his wife as they left to go home. We loved living here, but we departed definitively in July. It would actually feel more appropriate to have landed in a refugee camp rather than back in “the land of the lotus-eaters” as we sometimes jokingly referred to this touristic paradise. But here we are. You just never know when you will find yourself doing the next right thing and yet it is not the thing you want to be doing. We are trying to have faith in God’s goodness and presence in the midst of all that is going on, and would appreciate your continued prayers for us, for our colleagues, for the nation of Ethiopia.