Does this mean i am a homeless of the world?

by AMANDA MOTA (Brazil)

A leap into the unknown Ethiopia

When I was young, I remember every morning seating on our brown fluffy sofa waiting for my mom to put on my shoes to go to school. While she was tying them, she used to tell me that I did not know it yet, but I belonged to the generation that would change the world. She was right, I didn’t know it. But guess what? The world would also change me. And this is a story about the beautiful "give and take” that is my travel life. On October 23rd 2018, I bought, in a six minutes impulse, a ticket to the other side of the world. Seven months later, I was packed for my first, but far from last, trip by myself when the African airline company I was traveling to Israel on, sent me an email stating I would have a one day stop over in Ethiopia, because of a scheduling mistake. It was then I realized that in one trip, I would go from the Ethiopian winter to the burning hot Israeli summer. From the cradle of civilization, to the country founded to save one. Not to mention, that in two days, I would go from one of the twenty poorest countries in the world to one of the twenty richest. I got on the plane knowing that all of my friends and family thought what a terrible idea was a 20-year-old girl traveling alone to the two, common jugged, worst continents in matter of women safety. But my fear was so much bigger than that, it came all the way back to the idea of not knowing who I was when I am alone. At the end, getting on that plane meant so much freedom to me, that I’m sorry that even for a second, I ever considered that loneliness. It was just me, breaking paradigms through Africa and Middle East. My first impression of Ethiopia was that it was darker than I was used to, there wasn’t enough brightness. A local guy showed me the way to the van that would take me to the hotel and I stepped right out of the airport into the mud and walked through it all the way to the parking lot. The vehicle left and it seemed that I got in a time machine, not a car. Somehow, Ethiopia felt like it was stuck back in the 1940’s. I don’t say this just because their calendar is different, but because of the old square cars and the clothes that people wear just like my great grand-parents did. The guys in cotton suits and the women in mid dresses with scarfs covering their hair. During my two days in Addis Ababa, I couldn’t control my curious fearless mind from wondering trough so many different foods, music, smells and people, walking through the crowded streets as if they had just left a soccer match. Between the vegetables and fruits on the side walks and the kids following me asking for money, i tasted, in a plastic cup in the middle of the street, the best tea of my life. Served by a woman who’s name I didn’t understand but got from the look on my face that I was cold, lost and had no money. Love is the universal language after all. Two days later, I landed in Tel Aviv and was held in the airport jail for seven hours just because I was coming from a country considered suspicious. Thankfully, Israel’s prejudiced first impression did not stick. Instead, it taught me uncountable lessons of respect, fairness and honesty during the two weeks I hitchhiked throughout the country. A place with so many various cultures, religious differences, and values, whose population could share the same restaurants, buses and even the same bench regardless of wearing a thawb, a kippah or a military rifle. I came back home with the understanding that the unknown can be an amazing place and If you knew me before this trip, you don’t know me anymore. While some people are afraid of change, I was always afraid of staying in the same place. But somehow this was different, I belonged to both worlds I visited.