Auld Lang Syne

Let me jump right in.  I feel like time is rushing by, suddenly, as we wind up our extended vacation and get ready to head back to Ethiopia the day after tomorrow.

Thanks to Wina, Donica's younger brother, my family has been able to browse through thousands of pictures from our past that were rescued from water damage and - in some cases - repaired after a leakage in my dad's storage room at his Nairobi house.  Wina spent hours and hours saving our photos, and since my dad keeps every single document that ever touch his hands, and since I spent a lot of middle and high school with a camera in my hands, there were a lot of pics to go through.  Thanks Wina, you're our hero!

Wina Tesfamariam

So I thought I could share pictures of some old faces that I love, and that we got to see again over the course of this vacation.  I just know that every single person in each of these pictures looks much better now than they did 30 years ago, and no one can tell me otherwise.  There were many pictures of dear friends that aren't included in this blog, only because I wanted to restrict my choices to pictures of people we were able to see again during our travels in November and December.  

Before I go any further, let me just share a picture I took of our Masai guide through Hell's Gate Gorge, a dramatic cleft in the Rift Valley of Kenya.  The guide was explaining that the Leleshwa plant produces a cotton-like flower that can traditionally be used to hold embers that the Masai tribespeople (herders) can carry with them to their next far-flung destination and use to start a fire there without much fuss:

At the end of this blog, I will explain the purpose of including this seemingly random picture up front in what is supposed to be an exploration of old friendships.  See if you can figure it out, shouldn't be too tough.

I think I'd better proceed in chronological order of our trip, starting with Addis Ababa, where we saw my friend Zeb Mengistu.  Anyone who went to school with Zeb will remember him as a low key but extremely funny guy.  Later, he became a calm, thoughtful fellow, and later still, an influential and gifted pastor.  But I knew him when.

Zeb, an early photo bomber, in the back.  Sixth grade.

Zeb leans against the tree, Eddie leans against Zeb.  8th grade.

Zeb sits next to me, across from Micah.  Last month.

I can't wait to visit Beza church in Addis on Sunday where Zeb will PREACH.  And then I can tell my Ethiopian students back at Blair High School that I saw Pastor Zeb in action.

One of the most lovely surprises while we were sorting through the pictures was Moges's voice shouting, "Stop!  That's Donica!"  Moges is my brother and Donica is his wife, and while they love each other dearly, they didn't really know each other as children at all.  But since we were part of the same extended Eritrean community, it was inevitable that we'd have been at some of the same functions.  And since, as I mentioned, Dad keeps every picture ever taken, it was likely that she'd show up somewhere in the Gebremedhin (my maiden name) archives.  Sure enough, I scrolled back and we all saw this cute face staring out at us:

Donica is in the center.

And here she is just recently, at a Christmas carol singalong:

Donica, whose dress closet I need to raid.  Just before Christmas.

Another great pleasure was being able to relive certain high school days.  Some of my funnest memories include a trip to Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania for a sports/drama tournament.  You read that correctly.  This was in the earliest days of regional cooperation between international schools, and they were just figuring it out.  So we packed some theater types, hockey and soccer players, and swimmers onto the plane and everyone basically had to do a bit of everything.  So we had basketball jocks playing small roles in the play and some actors who'd never held a hockey stick try to get the ball going in the right direction and it was basically a hilarious free for all.  My room mate and buddy in all this was my best friend, Patricia.  Here's a picture of us taking a break between hockey matches, trying to cool off in the impossible Dar weather:

Oh man, we can still crack up about that trip.  Here's one taken of us about a month ago.  Peeking over my shoulder is her younger son Mark, who never fails to remind me of a particularly embarrassing incident from high school that Trish shared with him.  It had to do with a gluteus maximus cramp I experienced and the effects that were witnessed by the entire PE class.  I'll leave it there.  Thanks, Trish.

But check out this other picture I found while looking at photos of that trip.  When I saw it, Mark was next to me and we both cracked up because we basically didn't care about each other one tiny fraction of a bit at that time (my senior year, his junior year).  Mark had come to Dar with the basketball team, and I'm pretty sure he was forced to play some hockey too, but we barely knew the other existed.  Clearly, I was tighter with his best bud at the time, Gary.  A year later all of that changed, but how hilarious to see this picture, which I totally didn't even remember existed:

Clueless Mark Woodward, Gary Ellem, Clueless Marta Gebremedhin

A really good friend in high school and during the college, post-grad years, was a guy called Max Kelly who we used to accuse of paying girls to say "Hi Max!" to him whenever we were out.  There were that many of them.  He was on that Dar trip, too, to play basketball and maybe play some random part in the play, who knows?

Max in the awesome uniforms of 1989

Growing up in Kenya means watching and learning from the best the country has to offer, and the best it has to offer includes the excellent poses Kenyans pull for photographs.  We replicated some of these one day at school when we should probably have been in class:

Max and Trish. 1989

Trish, Pablo, Max, Marta

As you can see, two important features are key for successful Kenyan poses; first, a thoughtful posture, and second, a closeness, if not intimacy with foliage of any kind.  Here's our modern rendition:

Mark, Marta, Moges, Max at Westgate Mall.  Just before Christmas

It seems to me that if you know one Gebremedhin, you must know them all.  So it is that Daire O'Reilly, one of Moges's best friends from high school, is like a brother to us (Mike and me) and the sort of guy whose house my dad even sublet for a bit.  So it was with great delight that we noticed his handsome face popping off the screen in a yellowed and damaged photograph from Moges's college days:

Although our time together this trip was extremely short, we drank some champagne, ate some chocolate, met his lovely girlfriend Sarah, got caught up a bit, and sent him on his way to Dublin for Christmas with his family:

Moges, Sarah, Daire, Marta, Mark

The wonders never cease.  For further perusal of Wina's rescued photos revealed how uniformly bad all pictures of me through the eighties were.  I had a bad afro, truly terrible fashion sense, and very thick eyebrows.  But every so often, a picture from that era would reveal a face that I maybe wasn't always so fond of in childhood, but which became about as well loved as my bros' faces.  And so it is that I move on to Hanoi, Vietnam, where we spent time with Nathan Belete and his wife, Kristi, who I've also known since early elementary school, but whose face was not among that old stash rescued by Wina.  So I have to leave Nathan's better half out of his blog and include only pictures of him:

Nathan, Mike, Moges, Moges's Members Only Jacket.  1987?

Nathan, 1986

I remember Nathan asking me to take the second picture when we were in 8th grade, and how long it took him to arrange that white scarf so it hung just right. Geez.  Anyway, like I said, he is like a brother, so my kids don't know him as the guy who used to make me really, really mad in 6th grade; rather, they know him as Uncle Nathan who works at the World Bank and knows a lot of stuff and is really smart.  He's humble enough to tell you that he is lucky to have Kristi as his wife, especially since a certain Zeb Mengistu (see above), was at one time quite keen on Kristi.  But then, so were a lot of fellows, as I recall.

Eli, Nathan, Micah, Daniel outside Nathan's office in Hanoi. Mid-December.

Alas, I don't have very old pictures from Nairobi to share of the other beloved family members we visited on this trip - the KL Woodwards, as they are sometimes known.  But the lack of old, mildewed photos of them does not indicate a less rich love and appreciation for them in my life.  It just means I don't have any embarrassing childhood stories about them.  Now that there's a new generation of people to share these stories with, it's especially tricky territory.  Take my butt cramp story that Trish chose to share with her kids, or those things I could say about some of the other characters in these photos, but which they're already jumpy about since I may have let some things slip to their kids, causing general unease and maybe even mild distress.   But we all turned out okay, didn't we?

Before I end, I wanted to share these last pictures.  I really wanted to write this blog about how Nairobi, and Kenya as a whole have changed.  Anyone who knows Nairobi and saw these pictures would never believe that these were taken on one of our periodic walks from our Lavington neighborhood to downtown Nairobi - a tradition my dad began and one of our fondest memories as siblings (I think).  Hard to believe there were fields to cross, and little streams to jump over.  That whole area we use to walk through is totally built up.

Mike, Moges, Marta. 1985?

It doesn't look like Mike could have made it...

Typically, we would walk all the way to the Hilton Hotel and have a burger
at the rooftop restaurant.  Dad must have decided to pack a picnic lunch.
I think this is outside the Serena Hotel.

So, as I said, I really thought I'd write about the changes I've seen in Nairobi over time.  But as I looked through these photos, I realized that the old saying is really true; the more things change, the more they stay the same.  Yes, Nairobi has changed a lot since I was a kid, and in recent years I have sort of dreaded visiting, a little bit.  But rediscovering these pictures has been grounding. In a rapidly changing Nairobi, it's so good to see these faces and be anchored by the friendships they represent.  I've been struggling for a long time, like any third culture kid, to figure out what Home really means.  I've decided that it's many different things for many different people.  In fact, for most of us, it isn't just one thing, and Home is rarely just one place.  But the friendships Kenya has generated and fostered through the years make me feel rooted - and not in a geographic way, but in a...soul way, for lack of a better way to put it.  This sense of home will perhaps go with me as I return to Ethiopia, and eventually back to America, kind of like the embers held by the Leleshwa flower.  These early friendships and relationships were the landmark ones, the ones that have taught me what friendship can be.  So I take their blessings and pray I pass on some of their warmth to spark other, equally deep and meaningful friendships. 

This entire trip - from Ethiopia to Kenya to Southeast Asia to Kenya and then back to Ethiopia - has been a reminder of the richness and importance of old friendships.  But when I stop to think about these friendships, I am reminded of how vital our American friendships are, as well, and the comforting tug back there we feel when we think of them.  

So, in the spirit of the New Year, I hope we all raise our glasses and sing Auld Lang Syne with gusto!  We should all pull out some old pictures, thank God we all look sooooo much better, and relish the gift of friendship, old and new!

PS.

I lied, I have one more picture.  When dad said a lot of the pictures were damaged I thought this one might be lost.  It is a picture I think about every time one of my boys - usually Micah - wants to cook with me, and it reminds me of what a wonderful mom I had and how much I miss her.

My mother, Mehret Samuel, and me.  1978