::Reflections in Neutral::

On my drive to work in the morning, there’s a spot which, although briefly, instantly transports me to the top of Churchill Road with the City Hall behind me. As I roll down in neutral, I look ahead down the narrowing stretch of busy asphalt to the unmistakable roundness of Commercial Bank. There, to the left, in the block of faded lime-green sits the Ministry of Defense. Across the street, the National Theater with its colorful wall curiously defies brightness. As if insistent on missing half of everything around him, the Lion of Judah locks his elongated neck in an eternal Eyes Right. At the very bottom, Legehar, once an imposing representation of Ethiopia’s foot inside the door of modern transportation, but now nothing more than a relic of a long-since missed opportunity.

I inhale the Addis air—a familiar mixture of exhaust fumes, dust, and stale neTelah—which, to a foreigner, seems pungent, but to those of us who breathed it as children, it is home. As with the view from Arada, Ethiopia’s great promise lies at her feet—prostrate.

Can Ethiopia rise like the Phoenix out of the ashes?