Frightened

When I left the plane in Addis Ababa, I heaped with dozens of other passengers at Ethiopian Airlines' transfers queue. I got a one day visa, had my passport stamped and walked along to the parking lot, where there were several vans parked, each one with a hotel's name in the front window. Mine said "Friendship International", which gave me an involuntary smile - could it be a good sign?

I sat in the front seat and asked the driver how long until the hotel. "No longer than three minutes, ma'am." I was a little disappointed because I wanted to take this opportunity to see a bit of the city, knowing it would be a terrible idea to go out alone at night to explore it.

This disappointment disappeared about two minutes later.

The van turned a corner and I saw a group of men laughing and talking loudly, walking along the sidewalk and the street-side. Each one had a machine gun resting on their shoulders. I noticed a few golden sparks here and there - chains, watches, rings. They wore T-shirts, shorts and sandals, which immediately eliminated my hopes of them being police officers.

One of them spotted the van and signaled the others. They started laughing. My heart started pounding. An entire movie began playing in my head - a sign to pull over the van, all passengers in the street, aggressive words in an unknown language, more laughter, an explosion, the driver thrown in the gutter, an armed guy taking the wheel, the order to get back in the vehicle, the certainty that a journey I hadn't even started would end then and there.

I blinked and the scene dissolved - we were parking at the hotel and nothing had happened. I took a deep breath. I was the first to check-in; I entered the room, took a shower, relaxed. I checked the position of Ethiopia on the map - neighbor to Sudan, Somalia and Saudi Arabia, just below Egypt. It is a region full of conflicts about which we hear little or nothing.

A month later, on the flight back home, I sat next to a Guinean who works for the Red Cross - he was on his way to Togo for a mission with children separated from their families during ethnic conflicts. I told him about my brief experience in Ethiopia and we had a long conversation about Africa's social issues, which are far from any solution. I learned about armed struggles that I'd never heard of before and about the work of activists and social scientists to soften the continent's scars.

At that time, I remembered this "The Oatmeal"'s illustration satirizing an aspect of the media - that chooses a subject in vogue and sucks on it until exhaustion, often ignoring other issues just as important; and one aspect of the viewer - that swallows the news dully and often irrationally, switching values ​​and manifesting in ways that are almost always useless.

The sad thing is looking within and realizing that I often fit into this satire.

Well .. acknowledgement is the first step to change.