When my husband and I tell people where we live, they usually respond – and this with a certain look on their faces – “WHERE?”
This is because Addis is a city like any other, and in this particular city my husband and I live on the wrong side of the metaphorical tracks; to put it more literally, on the wrong side of the marketplace which, to many residents of Addis, marks the dividing line between part of the city where it is desirable to live, visit, work and play … and the part of the city in which it is, quite frankly, NOT. My husband and I live on the UNdesirable side; in short, we live on the wrong side of the capital city of the ninth poorest nation in the world.
When Elias and I look out on our neighbourhood, we see rusted tin roofs, mud-walled huts, livestock (plenty of livestock), and 260,000 people crammed into an area of 63 square kilometers. (Okay, my non-mathematical brain might not immediately calculate that ratio; however, government statistics tell me that it is so.) We see people striving daily to make a living selling plastic washbasins, crude metal cooking pots and utensils, fabric, fruits and vegetables, or vegetarian samosas on the side of the road. Some merchants even sell second-hand clothes, the cast-offs of the Western world. These resourceful men and women buy their wares in bales, by the kilo, from a warehouse in the middle of Mercato, then bring them back to their neighbourhoods to sell. The clothes are washed, then turned inside-out and strewn over the rocky sidewalks for display. 
Perhaps the only sight more common, in this neighbourhood, than the insides of twenty pairs of Levi’s jeans baking in the sun is that of the maniacal blue and white taxis hurtling over potholes and around corners at break-neck speeds.This is Kolfe; this is my neighbourhood. Often, my husband and I are awakened in the night by the riotous barking of the huge packs of stray dogs that wander the streets at night. Occasionally, although you do develop an immunity to such things, we are awakened by the competing morning calls to prayer of the local mosque and the Orthodox church, both of which have little respect for the sanctity of the pre-sunrise hours.
On the morning of January 19th, however, we awoke to quite a different sound: sirens (unusual for any reason in the streets of Addis, let alone of Kolfe), whistles and the sounds of people screaming shattered the morning stillness. As unbelievable as it may seem, the din only partially penetrated my sleep-addled brain – just enough so that, for the rest of the night, I dreamed of kidnappings, plane crashes, death and destruction.
It was not until the next morning that I was able to fully distinguish the subjects of my dreams from the nightmare that had been. My husband went out, that morning, to buy some bananas from the little souk up the street.
Just outside of the gates of the school compound where we live stands a six-storey building – one of the only six-storey buildings in a neighbourhood in which most shops are the size of a large closet and ten square meters can house a relatively profitable café. This building accommodates a number of small shops, a restaurant and café, a movie rental business, and a large hall which shows Premier League soccer games on its big screen for the viewing pleasure of local fans (of which there are many) for an entrance fee of a few birr – and blares them on its powerful sound system for the benefit of the neighbourhood.
In place of this building stood a colossal pillar of charcoal. Shocked residents of the neighbourhood had congregated around its base, taking in the sight, discussing quietly amongst themselves the events of the previous night. Scattered at their feet were fragments of burned tablecloths and fabric and piles of broken glass from shattered windows.
From these windows, it was being said, several people had jumped to escape the fire that had raged throughout the building in the early hours of the morning. Some of these had jumped from the fourth storey or above. At least one death was being reported. Little was known, at that time at least, of the condition of those who had survived.Several weeks have passed now, and the building still stands charred and virtually empty, a monument to the terrible events of that night. It has been estimated that between six and seven hundred neighbourhood residents have been impacted, in one way or another, by the fire’s devastation.
Directly across the street from this building stands the school where I happen to teach and where my husband and I happen to live, a school that is known in our (predominantly Muslim) neighbourhood to be Christian. The students who attend here, if by no other standard than the fact that they don’t have to shine shoes or sell tissue on street corners to feed themselves and their families, are well-off in comparison with the children and adults of the neighbourhood. How do we, then, respond to such devastation in our immediate surroundings? How do we respond to the almost unimaginable suffering of our closest neighbours?
The students, when they arrived at school the following morning, were full of questions. A fire on such a grand scale, when it is not on the news but in one’s own neighbourhood, is a shock and a curiosity. But to say so would not give enough credit to the compassion of these students. They learned of the fire on a Wednesday. By the next Tuesday afternoon, the students had raised and personally donated enough money to pay for the surgery of the man most severely injured in the fire. He had jumped from a fourth storey window, shattering the bones in at least one of his legs and severely injuring his spine. Several school staff members went to visit this man and his friend, who was also injured, in their homes; they arranged for transportation to the hospital and for proper medical care; they spoke to the men and their families and to the doctors who would be involved in the cases. By the Friday, the students had raised more than 10,000 birr.
But in the face of such unspeakable tragedy, one might ask, even of that sum, is it enough? If our standard is the teachings of Jesus, perhaps not. It is doubtful that any one of the students (or teachers) gave or sold his own coat in his fundraising efforts. On the other hand, several students did bring in the equivalent of several months’ or even a year’s worth of their own pocket money. To my knowledge, not one of the students has the ability to go tell the men authoritatively to just get up and walk. But these students have, to the extent that they can, provided for these men to have the best medical care available to them. Is it enough? It’s what we can do. And when and if the opportunity arises to do more, I hope and pray that we will have the compassion to do that too.
It occurs to me that sometimes Jesus fed the crowds spectacularly; sometimes he touched one man; and sometimes he simply cried with those who were hurting. And in no one of those actions was his compassion any greater or less than the other. That does not excuse us from acting where and whenever we can to relieve the suffering around us. Jesus calls us to action; but he calls us first and foremost to compassion. Action motivated by anything less powerful will be less powerful than what he intended.
We here in Kolfe pray that God will use these doctors to restore two suffering men to full health; we pray also that God will use the suffering of our world to restore us to full compassion – the full measure of the compassion that God had for our world – and in so doing, work through us to restore our world to himself.
-- Heather
