We made lots of other friends at the guest house, but I
didn’t write their names down and I couldn’t begin to spell them out: The
manager (Tyre), who discovered my guys love of American football, got a ball
for them to play with; the gate guard had never held a football until my guys
showed up. He threw the ball with them for hours. The sweet, sweet cooks who
took such pride in their work; Te-Te and her sweet hugs and soft voice, and the
other girl with the crazy hair. All were so sweet and so willing to work to
understand what we needed. The Bethel Guesthouse truly has a remarkable staff.
Other than Aiden, Solomon was probably the hardest for the
kids to say goodbye to. He was just a general all-around nice guy. He taught
Owen to love sugar cane, he brought us Sambusa to celebrate passing court, he
took Ian and Owen to meet his sick daughter. He ran into the middle of the road
(in Addis traffic) to save a baby kitten. He endured Alexa asking him to
‘change his face’ and playing with the curls in his hair. His favorite sayings
were: “As you like”, “That’s really nice”, “He’s crazy”. I am certain he is
about 95% of the reason we had such a great experience.
At 7:00pm the time had come for us to be at the airport.
Solomon dropped us off, said our goodbyes, and went our separate ways. It took
us about an hour to get our luggage checked, through customs and security. We
hadn’t eaten so we picked an eatery (I was having flashbacks of the Chinese
place so I didn’t eat). Alexa and I went to a couple of the souvenir ships
instead. They had fixed prices, but most were higher than the barter price in
the market. I did buy the ‘Amharic for Visitors’ book. The kids had been
wanting to get one, but questionable people were selling them on the street.
After supper, we went to our gate. We had to go through security AGAIN (they
made me give up my brand new, unopened coke I purchased at the restaurant).
Owen got patted down by security in every checkpoint we went through. Either
they thought he looked suspicious or they wanted to touch his muscles. We never
decided for certain which it was. Ryan said it couldn’t be the muscles because
they didn’t pat him down.
Then we had to go into this gate area to wait, for an hour
and a half, with no coke, no water, and no bathroom. It was unlike any airport
we had ever encountered. While we waited, Ian bounced, Alexa rested, and Owen
studied Amharic.
