Chapter 2
Preparing for Africa
My wife was very happy from the news that our dreams at last could come true. In two days her humour turned to worse. I had to speak to the executive taking care of experts abroad. She said I would have to travel without my family. Only after I got my housing facilities would they permit my family to follow me. I promised my wife I would do everything to help her in following me as soon as possible.
At the company it was a fact that I would leave for Africa. On my place a young man was found, but he would not come until I left. He would be short on my place and then there would be a great transformation in company structure, with six of the seven top managers sent to retirement.
My colleague from the room was to have a business trip to Bangladesh in May. He had to go to take the same vaccinations I was. His arm ached and he had fever. When he returned, he said he would not go to Africa for any sum. As he was arriving there and the door of the plane was opened the heat was so oppressing he almost fainted. Well, he could not drive my courage away.
During my last weeks intrigue has not rested. I have got a call from a man, whom I did not know, but I would. He introduced himself as one of my would-be colleagues at the Addis Ababa University. He wanted to see me. I told him how to get to us and waited.
He came with his wife. First I had the impression that they would be helpful. Later I realized the opposite. They told us all we wanted to hear. We put a lot of questions, they answered patiently. In the meantime he also got what he wanted. It was he on the first place to make my mission last only two years by convincing Ethiopian officials that his colleague from the Budapest Technical University would be a better lecturer than me. As a lecturer I could have got extension to my term automatically.
Thus I became an expert for the Ministry of Transport instead of a lecturer. And in the coming years it would be arranged that the transport experts would go home after two years, while lecturers would get their extension.
After his visit I went to the TESCO and tried to be informed. I learned that my host company in Ethiopia has been changed for the ministry. (I did not know then about the intrigue mentioned above.) At that moment I did not care about it, I was convinced I could do what was expected of me.
I got my vaccinations and was ready to leave. My flight has been scheduled to June 18, but, as I had arranged my leave from the company and went to take my passport and money, I was told the Ethiopian Airlines cancelled their Frankfurt-Addis Ababa flight that week. The next flight would be one week later. I spent the week in my flat at home. It was the hottest season. The heat was overwhelming and I did as little as I could.
During this last week at home I was found again by Y. She wanted to see me, and that time I did not reject her request. We met not far from her workplace in a café on the shore of the small puddle overlooked by my former secondary school. It was good that I met her. I had been proven right for my decision 16 years before. She looked much older than me, not only the actual two years, but much more. She was smoking and I never take a smoking female a woman. She was telling me how she left the young man who was the first adventure of her married life and how she had had a lot of lovers.
Actually I did not understand what she wanted. It was the last time I heard about her.
The week of waiting has passed and I went to take my place on the airplane. For that week’s flight another expert has been given the pass. He was selected for the Addis Ababa Ministry of Construction. We first met in the vaccinating station and after that at our "mother”, the executive taking care of us in mission.
I tell here only about the most important events, as I collected the story of my mission in Africa in my book Canned Roaddust. The first leg of the trip has been to Frankfurt-am-Main by our national airlines, the last place to hear our own language. The flight was somewhat more than one hour, and we have got our lunch on the plane. The Ethiopian plane was due early afternoon, but something was out-of-order. The information desk forecast it for about midnight, but our time could not have been utilized as we had no visas and on the airport there was no way of securing one. There was another problem. About 150 pounds of baggage has been with me and the cloakrooms have been closed because of the latest terrorist attacks all over the world. There was only one way: to wait and have an eye on the baggage.
Even the information service was faulty -- or careful --. First our gate number has been given false, and we had to move with all the baggage a quarter of a mile to the actually right gate. It all went as in the Soviet Union. The baggage has been taken, but was placed beside the plane, and everyone had to lift his own baggage onto the cart.
The plane has been almost empty. As soon as the Ethiopian folk music sounded and the air-conditioning began to work I tried to sleep, but sleep would not come.
The hostesses in their national dresses were pretty. Their face have been European, only black. I had learned much about Ethiopia from a book of a compatriot who, as a jobless doctor, accepted the offer of an Ethiopian ras (king) in 1921 to be his own doctor. He stayed in the country 15 years, has been serving other kings, even ras Tafari Makonnen for a time, before he became Haile Selassie I. He left the country after the uprising against the emperor in 1936 followed by the Italian occupation. I knew from his book that the greatest uniform nationality in the country was the Amharic and they had a Semitic origin. This is the reason, why their faces are more European than Negroid. Only their hair is curly from the many centuries of cross-breeding with Negroid people by chance.
Our first stop has been in Rome. We could stay in the plane during refuelling. It was a 40-minute break, after that we flew over the Mediterranean to Cairo. Again forty minutes, then take off.
Khartum. It looked like dry mud. Nothing to attract my eyes. The air began to be hot.
The next stop has been Addis Ababa. On the last leg we got our lunch, but it was only a snack. It did not interest me too much, I wanted to look down on the African landscape. For a long time it looked like the Moon. There was no trace of any life, only a stony desert, mountains, valleys, canyons. Only their colour varied from grey, almost black through red, brown to yellow.
At last there was a strange announcement in the loud-speaker, repeated in English: we were landing in Addis Ababa in 20 minutes. The land around the capital was fertile. There were meadows with sheep, woods and small squares of cultivated land. We have almost touched a mountain at least five thousand feet higher than the surroundings and after that the capital came into view. With a big circle the plane avoided flying over the town and landed.
By local coins I could phone to John, the representative.
About 26 hours later, that our plane took off at home, we were met by him. Being young -- I was 38 then -- does not mean you are not tired. Without sleep it was a long trip.
John took us to the hotel where the experts were living, until moving into their flats. That time would be six weeks for me, the shortest that far, and there was somebody for six months in the hotel.
I expected a heavy rain in Addis, but it was a clear weather that received me here. That time I did not know the time-table of rainy season. As we were moving into town in John’s car it could have been in any town at home. Sometimes I saw people in dark suits with a Girardi hat on their heads. They looked like ordinary men from my country. My astonishment came only at sighting their black faces.
Drawing nearer to the centre we saw people in ordinary Ethiopian dresses, women in shamma, men in gabby. The first can be chatacterized as a diaper material wound up as a sari in India. The latter is a similar textile, only made by multiple weaving to make it thicker. It is worn as a poncho in South-America.