Jonathan and Rebekah at Bole Airport in Addis Ababa.

Our home base in Addis Ababa was the guesthouse on the Mekane Yesus compound. My family lived in this house while I was in college in the U.S., so Chris and Jan, my youngest siblings, immediately encountered ghosts of their teenage selves sliding along the dark, hardwood floors and staring with morose and melancholy eyes from the downstairs bedrooms. I, ten years older than Jan, rubbed my hand along the dining room table and had my own vivid memory of a long-ago day when I must have been in fifth grade and a visitor to this house because my mother had made a rare trip to Addis Ababa where I was in boarding school. My mom had left Filewuha Hospital earlier that day with my newborn youngest sister in her arms, and we older three had been brought from boarding school to see the new baby and spend the evening as a family before Mom and the "little kids" had to head back to Maji. We were eating supper together when Chris toddled off to the back bedroom to check on Jan and ran back to announce, "She's got she's eyes open."

The ghosts might have been hallucinations, of course; we were that tired by the time we reached the guest house. The sky, outside the jet, seemed to stay light during the whole eighteen-hour flight: Newark to Rome -- where we weren't allowed off the jet -- to Addis Ababa. We'd dozed and tried to sleep leaning against each other and the sides of the seats, but, nah, deep sleep just doesn't happen much under those conditions. So it was simple to zonk the first night and think, well that takes care of that. "Don't get arrogant," warning voices whispered. "It's the second night that tells the tale." The voices were correct. The tale that got told for most of the rest of the trip was one of early morning wakeitude--in a word (or is it two?): jet lag.

Mekane Yesus Compound

Those dark morning hours were filled with a thin stream of sound: dogs barking, roosters crowing, eventually the occasional belching bus. We always knew we had slept well if we missed the Islamic call to prayer at 4 a.m. and lasted until the Orthodox call to prayer at 6:00. One gift of being awake at 3:30 a.m. was getting to hear the hyena -- not a laugh, but a high, weird sound, a wavering, warbling whoop. As cramped and bustling as Addis Ababa has become, I doubted I could really be hearing it (just a half-dreamed memory from my childhood?). But, no, others heard it too. Caroline says the hyenas are like coyotes in urban areas of the U.S., rummaging and bumping around the garbage cans at night. Apparently the hyenas and coyotes you will have with you always.

Our family's long and rich history with the Mekane Yesus compound and with the girls' school there, meant that we had more invitations than we could manage. Some days, we were invited out for breakfast, lunch, supper, and tea. One lunch, we went to a restaurant that Solomon Nega said served the best Ethiopian food in the city, and I ate varieties of wat I'd never tasted including one made with horseradish and another from a root that tasted a little like potato. "What's this?" I asked Solomon. He smiled and shrugged. He told me that last time he visited the U.S., people would point to pictures and say things like, "What's the name of this plant?" and he would say, "Grass." He chuckled. "I'm a city person. To me it's just grass."

Andualem, the model for the boy from Only a Pigeon. (Note: Be sure to read the "background page" for Only a Pigeon.)

That noon, the teenagers ducked the official invitation and went for lunch at Andualem's apartment. Andualem, no longer the little boy from Only a Pigeon, is now a mechanic for Ethiopian Airlines, a young man dreaming of travel. He won't be able to visit Great Britain or the U.S., he told us, until he has proved himself trustworthy in less seductive places. His first international trip will probably be to Johannesburg. I'd thought the teenagers might huddle, intimidated, in the compound, but accompanied by Andualem or another friend, Abebe, they were impressively brave about exploring the swirling city -- even if most of them did prefer the one fixed price souvenir shop on Churchill to bargaining in the suks.