Sister Camilla the Blaspheming Nun (and other short stories)

by Laura Roberts (United Kingdom (Great Britain))

A leap into the unknown Ethiopia

I landed in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in the afternoon of Wednesday 5th July 2017, bleary-eyed and not 100% sure what day it was. My journey had been long (via Dubai), filled with delayed flights and the odd hour of snatched sleep, but I was finally here. This was my first time flying abroad solo, to a country neither I nor any of my family had been to before, so while I was feeling quite the cocktail of emotions (a splash of excitement, a twist of apprehensiveness, shaken up with a profound weariness), the most prominent one was relief that I’d managed to successfully catch two separate flights and make it in one piece. My next task was to locate the member of the Projects Abroad team who would act as my chaperone. I was due to volunteer with the company in one of their care projects, at the Kidane Mehret children’s home. I stood outside Bole airport, armed with my suitcase (which had taken a rather nerve-wracking thirty minutes or so to appear on the baggage reclaim carousel), and scanned the large car-park for an individual holding up a Projects Abroad sign. It then started to rain heavily, which really helped. I ventured down to the car-park, dragging my suitcase behind me and trying to ignore how cold my flip-flopped feet were, and was soon met by Abera, who greeted me with a warm smile and a firm handshake. I apologised profusely that I was now around two hours late, and let him put my suitcase in the boot of his car. We then drove into Addis Ababa, and I finally allowed myself to feel more excitement than any other emotion. The first significant difference I learned of between the Ethiopian culture and my own is that it is not customary to use street names with regards to locations, but rather neighbourhood names. ‘Okay,’ I said, as Abera announced each neighbourhood we drove through (Bole, Arat Kilo, Sidis Kilo), ‘How do you know where one neighbourhood ends and another begins?’ ‘Hmm,’ he mused, ‘That’s a good question. You just know.’ So, that was reassuring. I would be living with Girma Demissie and his family in the Shiromeda neighbourhood, on the outskirts of Addis Ababa. This neighbourhood was quite dramatically different from the more westernised-looking Bole neighbourhood (so-called because of the airport). Concrete roads turned to dirt ones and brick-built homes turned to lowly structures of corrugated iron roofs and daubed walls. Mothers carried their babies on their backs, strapped to them with scarves, and there were sporadic groups of goats stood idly at the roadside. I finally met my host family, and they were wonderful; they were endlessly generous and embraced me as a member of the family as soon as I’d stepped through their front door. I was also introduced to the wonder that is Ethiopian coffee… Work at Kidane Mehret began on Friday 7th July. Children ranging from babies to sixteen-year-olds were cared for, and I was mostly responsible for the four and five-year-olds. I was faced with the task of teaching them English (which proved a challenge as a) I had no experience of teaching English to anyone, and b) it was their summer holiday and they absolutely did not want to have lessons, thank you very much). For the most part, they just wanted to play, and I’d be lying if I said I had an issue with that. The children’s home was, and is currently, under the direction of Sister Lutgarda, who I didn’t meet properly until a week or so into my stay. On my first day at Kidane Mehret, I met Sister Camilla, who was a kindly Maltese woman with a proclivity for blasphemy (she often muttered “Jesus Christ” under her breath when the children were misbehaving). My three-week trip to Addis Ababa, and my time at Kidane Mehret, was essentially a series of “firsts”. It was my first time flying solo, my first visit to Ethiopia, my first experience of a culture so vastly different to my own. But I would return in a heartbeat (if for no other reason than they really do know how to do their coffee properly).