ADDIS WAS the world of Solomon and Kabada, two brothers of no more than 10, and benevolent street beggars in bare feet.
"Can-a-da, Can-a-da," they yelled in unison, wide smiles creasing their young faces at dawn outside the guarded gates at the spacious Gihon Hotel, which sits in a corner of the Jubilee Palace grounds. The stone bridge crossing the trickle of urine, because there is no sewage system in the capital, was an invisible barrier, but as formidable as a wall of steel, between the Third World and the affluency of Westerners, however, few as the clouds of war descended upon the city.
On this day in November, 1990, two Canadians -- Kaye Corbett and Lyle Harron -- were followed everywhere they went in Addis, from the Gihon to City Hall, to outside the Jubilee Palace, where soldiers nervously fingered their rifles, to Lenin Square, to the palatial Hilton Hotel, while trying to dodge the muggers and the pickpockets in the mean streets.
"Him, him," Solomon and Kabada would say, in broken English, pointing to would-be-pickpockets. Two older thieves tried to double team Lyle Harron, an oil company president, by reaching in his pockets, but Harron had wisely put his passport and valuables in a small leather neck pounch. It would be safe there for a while.
The two, obviously bright, youngsters, with no future, and their blind and crippled mother lived in a hovel in the Great Shanty Town, which sits in the middle of Addis like some giantic cancerous tumor, besides another trickle of urine mixed with water. Homes, if that's how they can be described, are usually no more than 10 feet wide and eight feet deep and piled with dirty, almost blackened tufts of cotton, as if someone had taken the stuffing out of a mattress and spread it haphazardly.
They play a game with their Canadian friends, telling them, with great sincerity, for their need of money for schooling in the form of pencils and notepads, realizing that proper education was part of their dream world, a buffer to the cruel world of Addis.
Even the missionary stations were off-limits to these beggars with their angelic smiles. As each business compound has a gatekeeper, only ferengi (foreigners) seemed welcome and Solomon and Kabada were treated with menacing glances and long wooden sticks were swung at them with wild abandon.
One of their street pals, Mengistu, by name, and, undoubtedly, named after the dictator, showed the Canadians his bandaged arm, which had been broken in three places from a stick-wielding gatekeeper. Then he smiled. It was part of life, which he accepted.
As Harron and I left Addis and Ethiopia, Solomon and Kabada were handed 20 Birr each, an act of charity, indeed, but also an act of expediency, for Ethiopian currency can't be exchanged outside the country.
It was also an act of stupidity.
While we were packing our luggage, both Solomon and Kabada were mugged by their fellow street urchins and they had cuts and bruises across their faces and arms.
"Please, mister, take it," Kabada muttered, handing me the remaining five Birr. It was all that remained of the 40 Birr, nearly the montly salary of an Ethiopian laborer.
"Give it to me before you leave."
He smiled and then ran away into the streets, filled with black soot from belching buses and braying donkeys.
Addis was the world of Dr. Jerrell Fink, the principal of the Ethiopian Seventh-Day Adventist College on Ras Desta Damtew Street, a block and a half north of the Gihon.
A warm, gregarious man with a white beard, whom some call Doctor Faith, claimed Africa was his home, although he originally comes from Virginia.
Even with Addis under the threat of falling, he was concerned with the northern holy city of Aksum and Tigre province, where he heard the locals were burning window frames and doors for firewood.
Although radio and television reports were sporadic, Dr. Fink's colleague, education department's Abebe Disasa said he'd heard the Eritran capital of Asmera was being shelled on a regular basis, and that only one port, Asab, was still open since Massaw was now closed, and he believed the only way for Addis to survive was for food, fuel and all the essentials to be trucked in.
Nearly all the gas stations were without fuel and on Saturdays, particularly in Addis, there were three-mile lineups of locals trying to get enough kerosene to heat their homes.
Another result was that the houses of the rich, constructed perhaps for those lords and their heirs, and those of the poor, some who were the nobles' servants anc camp followers, were often situated in close proximity to each other, though zones of different types of housing came into existence in later years.
Several of the older embassies, dating back to Menelik's day, including the Italian, British, French, Russian and German, lay on the northeastern periphery of the city while those recently independent African states and also Israel, which was given diplomatic status in 1989, stand on other roads, including those to the new and old airports, to the southeast and southwest, respectively.
