Roman’s eyes swept from my bouncing knee to tapping fingers as the bajaj weaved through Aksum’s traffic. What I had hoped would be a quick drive was reduced to swerves and jolts by the rain. I tried to conceal the anxieties pricking at me, running my fingers through what few birr remained in my wallet. How would I pay for the bajaj? What if I couldn’t get cash after all? Would I be stuck here? It was my final day in Aksum, my penultimate in the country before leaving for work in Kenya. Delay was not an option, but seemingly everything that could go wrong had, and I had no one to blame but myself. Sympathy softened the corners of Roman’s mouth as she asked if I was okay. My motivations for going to Ethiopia were the churches of Lalibela and the Ark of the Covenant in Aksum. The former I had known only as pixels streaming on a classroom projector, the latter through scripture and colorful felt pieces in Sunday School lessons decades ago. Two cities blossomed to five as I began my journey. I enjoyed the cosmopolitan Addis Ababa with ease, making friends over glasses of the honey wine tej as dancers and instrumentalists of the tej bet showcased their culture and talent. Bahir Dar’s waters were calmly traversed with a guide who helped me practice Amharic. In Gondar and Lalibela tourists were neither plentiful nor hard to find, yet travelers’ necessities easily accessed. By my arrival in Aksum, I had bought into the self-delusion that I could navigate the country on my own. It took Roman to show me how wrong I was, and why. My first night in the hotel bar, she sat across from me and as I began speaking to her in Amharic, her head tilted and her smile changed from welcoming to bemused. Second-guessing my newly acquired phrases, I tried every compensatory linguistic trick I knew, my frustration quickly replaced by Roman’s infectious amusement. She mercifully stopped me by sharing, in English, that she couldn’t understand; she was from Aksum and spoke Tigrinya, not Amharic. What followed was an evening of welcome conversation in English and, where that failed us, laughter and a free willingness to confuse and be confused. In the days that followed, the internet outages, power blackouts, and my inability to speak Tigrinya piled on each other like a threat. Yet every evening, Roman’s company and conversation dispelled any dread I felt and renewed my love for Ethiopia. Lying in Kaleb’s tomb, for once I was excited to say yes when my guide asked if I wanted pictures. These were for my brother, Caleb. The coincidence shouldn’t have surprised me, given Ethiopia’s history with Christianity and the fact that all of my siblings and I are named after Biblical figures. What sweetened this coincidence was that in Ethiopia for the first time I felt a connection with this religion that was so strongly my family’s, yet never mine for lack of faith. But where faith falters, history and reality proceed unaffected. Yet the Amharic phrases of my guidebook were no help in Aksum. Nor had my guidebook prepared me for the infrastructural and technological challenges I faced. Unable to pay by credit card, and ATMs useless without power, I grew desperate. Thus, on a rainy day in June, I joined my new friend in a bajaj with little faith but no alternatives. When Roman’s question reached me, my silent, unconvincing nod was met by her verbal reassurance. Entering the bank, Roman exchanged nods with a young male banker who, it turns out, was her brother. He helped me withdraw funds, using power from the bank’s generator, and with 6,000 birr in my hand, I finally felt relief. Roman laughed as she half-asked, half-stated “You are good now.” Roman’s reassurances, which I had heard as promises and unprovable predictions, were in reality logic and reason based on lived experience. Those things that seemed insurmountable obstacles, prerequisites to even legitimately being in Ethiopia, were laughable, passing concerns to Roman. Freed from the illusion that I could see Ethiopia on my own, I began to truly appreciate those who opened my eyes.