Rain in Addis

Sarah talked about rain, and I remembered the night in Addis that it woke me up. 

Pounding on the tin roofs like it might break through, the fat drops splashed violently onto the trees, the houses, and the ground with deafening vigor. Even straining my eyes, I could barely see it through the dark window of my bedroom, but I tried anyway. Could that thunderous cacophony really just be the rain? Is this noise really shaking the whole house? It almost felt like a dream, but when I asked around the next morning, I discovered it had woken everyone up—not just me.

I open my eyes and I’m back on a front porch in Indiana, watching fireflies and hearing a conversation about gutters. My heart breaks a little as I realize I’m not in Ethiopia, and that I may never experience one of her majestic, dangerous, beautiful midnight rainstorms again.

These moments are both rarer and more frequent than I would have expected. When I find pictures I don’t remember taking, when I pour a strong cup of coffee, when a Gumuz word pops into my mind even though I can’t remember the meaning, it is accompanied by a pang of longing I would have never anticipated. After all, I was only there for three weeks—laughably short compared to the 6 or 8 or 10 week internships of my peers and friends. What had once seemed like an insurmountable mountain in my summer is now a shadow in the distance, a meaningful experience left to decorate the landscape of my life. For the weeks after returning, that feeling haunted me, and I continued to ask myself why I was mourning for a place I had never been to before and would probably never see again. I wrote in my debrief to Travis,

“I was expecting to deal with culture shock or jet lag, but I’ve been struggling more with a general sense of loss. How do you pour so much of yourself into a place for so long, only to ‘finish your internship,’ come home, and never touch the work you did there again? I feel like I wasn’t there long enough to make a big deal out of missing it, but it hurts when I think I might never go back or see some of those people again. It feels wrong to just put the souvenirs on my shelf and let the whole experience fade into a memory, a thing I’ll someday tell people ‘I did once.’ I wish I’d known it would be hard to come home—if I had, I might have fought to stay longer.”

This update is long overdue, but it’s been so hard to write. I couldn’t pick a story, pick an angle, pick a moral, pick a lesson… I wish I could just project the experience with a word. I wish saying, “it was so good” could truly encompass the whole.