Searching for My Addis Ababa
By Meskerem Glegziabher
“Pack anything you can’t live without, just in case.” This is what my parents casually advised as I packed for a two-month summer visit to the United States in 1998. The official plan was to visit extended family, help my big sister move into her new college dormitory, and hopefully rack up fun stories to share with my friends in Addis Ababa when school started again in September. Confusion and anxiety filled my head as I thought about my parents’ directive and finished packing.
A few weeks later, my sister and I met our relatives in Tennessee, my suitcase packed with all of my prized possessions. Ethiopia was on the brink of another war, and even at 13 years old, I had a sinking feeling that it would be a long time before I saw home again.
My aunt handed me the phone the following spring and said my mother was calling from Ethiopia. I was dressed in my newly adopted uniform of dark colors and my father’s oversized black leather jacket that dwarfed my frame. The kids in my middle school called me Daria, invoking the cynical animated TV character popular at the time. Convinced that my parents would send for me if they understood how unhappy I was in America, I had swapped my usually outgoing nature with quiet reservation, refusing to participate in any extracurricular or social activities.
I made very few friends in school. My teacher often allowed me to skip lunch and stay in her classroom with my one equally quiet friend, Rachel, reading and munching on snacks. While some of my classmates initially tried to include me in their conversations, eventually they just ignored me or occasionally used me as the punchline to their jokes: “Wearing clothes must be a new experience for you, huh?” or “So, what does zebra meat taste like?”
“My extended family welcomed me with open arms and tried their best to fill the gap created by my parents’ absence…I never quite felt like I belonged.”
My extended family welcomed me with open arms and tried their best to fill the gap created by my parents’ absence. My sister got on a Greyhound bus to visit me as often as her college schedule allowed. Yet both at school and with my family, I never quite felt like I belonged.
When my mother called, I yearned to hear that she wanted me to return right away. It was not to be: In no uncertain terms, she told me that I would not be coming back. The political climate was still volatile, and my parents were not willing to risk my safety and my future by bringing me home.
It took me weeks to fully accept what I heard. But gradually, resigned to my new reality, I shifted gears and decided I had to make the best of my high school situation. I joined the debate team, the church choir and a college dance team. I co-founded and served on executive committees of student organizations. From the outside looking in, I had comfortably settled in and was fully engaging in all aspects of my American life. Yet Ethiopia was home—and remained my ultimate destination.
It took nearly a decade, but finally in September 2008 my Ethiopian Airlines flight was in its final descent into Addis Ababa’s Bole International Airport. As I prepared to board the plane in Washington Dulles, I anxiously clutched a folder filled with copies of every important document I could think of: birth certificate, permanent residency papers, state ID. It had taken almost all of the intervening years since my arrival in the U.S. to get my residency papers sorted, so I didn’t want to risk this visit going wrong because of missing paperwork.
I was traveling with Ayida, a childhood friend who had also immigrated to the U.S., and we spent the entire 15-hour flight excitedly reminding each other of grade-school antics and plotting what we will do and see when we get to Addis. Unlike me, she was moving back home for good, and in the few lulls in our conversation I imagined how I would feel in a few years when I could do the same.
After what felt like a quick yet also endless journey across the Atlantic, I witnessed with tear-filled eyes the sparkling city lights outside my tiny window. Akon’s “Mama Africa” provided the soundtrack through my earbuds. After landing, I walked through the airport serenaded by the lilts and tones of strangers speaking my mother tongue; slowly, I shed the decade-long feeling of being an “outsider.” In its place was an electrifying hopefulness.
“Slowly, I shed the decade-long feeling of being an outsider. In its place was an electrifying hopefulness.”
For four months, I interned at the United Nations Development Programme’s governance and human rights unit, planning workshops for the National Election Board and a 60th anniversary celebration for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In my off hours, I reconnected with family, fit seamlessly back with my childhood friends who were now working professionals and visited all of my old favorite restaurants.
While the city had experienced a boom of new constructions and other visible changes, I found that all the things I loved about the city as a child remained the same: the unique combination of car horns and animal sounds that woke me up in the morning, its capacity to be cosmopolitan yet small and walkable, the incredible live music scene and the sheer ubiquity of food I loved. By the time I boarded a flight back to the U.S. in preparation for graduate school, I was recommitted to my original plan of returning to Addis and building a life back home.
As we flew away, a newly curated playlist of my favorite contemporary Amharic and roots reggae songs on repeat, I made plans to return with a graduate degree in applied anthropology to work with local grassroots development organizations. I made lists of new connections from my U.N. internship. I was certain that this trip was just a step towards solidifying my career path and my eventual return home.
In fact, it took nearly a decade for me to get back. In June 2017, I gazed out my ninth-floor hotel window, the twilight sky over Addis Ababa streaked purple and pink, hoping to recognize the city of my childhood. But what I saw below was bumper-to-bumper traffic, half-built and brand-new high-rise buildings, and giant billboards. My Addis was nowhere to be seen.
This time, I’d returned as part of a deferred honeymoon trip to introduce my extended family to my new-ish husband and show him my hometown. Staring over the city streets, I realized it wasn’t just the city that had changed drastically: I had finished graduate school, lived in India for a year, and married an American. After our engagement, in 2014, my (then) fiancé Keon and I had moved to Phoenix.
While he began a new job as a faculty member at Arizona State University, I finished writing my dissertation, grappling with the notion of “legitimate belonging.” In my work, I explored how popular narratives predicated on notions of gender, class and identity shaped who could make claims to a city’s spaces and resources. I analyzed how these narratives not only impacted how marginalized communities were perceived by others, but also how they influenced the ways those communities viewed themselves and their place in the city.
Over these years in Phoenix, my husband and I had cultivated a tight-knit network of friends whom we lovingly referred to as “our village.” We spent our time enjoying happy hours and weekend brunches with our village, traveling all over the world and visiting the lifelong friends we’d made. Eventually, I too began working for the university as a director of inclusion and community engagement.
“I gazed out my ninth-floor hotel window, hoping to recognize the city of my childhood…My Addis was nowhere to be seen.”
In Addis, moving through the city after a decade’s absence, I was no longer reminded of my childhood Sundays enjoying ice cream. Instead, I felt anxious, like I did in my early days in India as I struggled to cross Delhi’s notoriously chaotic streets. Dinner parties with old friends no longer gave me comfort but rather made me acutely aware of the divergent path my personal politics had taken from theirs around equity and socioeconomic stratification. Conversations during family meals about the banality of bribes and municipal corruption made me question my capacity to engage in that bureaucracy as part of my daily life.
I could see that the practicalities of moving back to Ethiopia had become increasingly complicated now that I had a professional career and an established home with my partner. But my growing doubt went beyond logistics. It all felt different. I no longer felt like I belonged—just like those early days walking through the halls of my middle-school in Tennessee. The conversations around me sounded unfamiliar, the air fit awkwardly around my shoulders. The feeling of “outsider” lingered.
Now, 23 years after first leaving Addis, ensconced in Arizona, with an ocean and seven residences separating me from my hometown, I find those old, tender echoes in other ways. Home is embodied in fleeting moments of familiar tizita songs. The smell of roasting coffee beans as they rattle back and forth in an aluminum pan over an open flame. The feeling of injera against my fingers and the taste of mitmita on my tongue. A warm hug from my sister, a deep belly laugh shared with my husband. Delicious cocktails and conversation with our village. And the sweet voice of my son calling out for me: “Mama!”
Meskerem Glegziabher is an applied cultural anthropologist and mother of Malcolm Ra’iy, a rambunctious toddler. She is a Clinical Assistant Professor and the Director of Inclusion and Community Engagement in Arizona State University’s School of Human Evolution and Social Change.