I never did find out where the boundary of the Mercato was. I spent many mornings there, but when we left Addis a few years later, I still didn’t know. I concluded that no one knew, and when asked where I had been I would just point to a general direction and say “The Mercato.” Not bothering to explain which side since I didn’ t even know how many sides there were. The Mercato was a huge outdoor market in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. At least part of it was. To me it was a whole section of the city with an open-air food section, shops with handicrafts, some music stores, the list goes on.

I got interested in Ethiopian Crosses and started to collect these in silver or silver plate. I bought a book and delighted in combing the Mercato for ‘finds’. I have a collection of paintings of Barbara Goshu, a local artist, a few swords, and lots of other odds and ends.

When we still lived in Antananarivo, Pat went to Addis to see the next city we would be moving to. He came back with tales of coffee bars with huge Italian espresso machines, and “Pasta! Sunny, you’ll love it. With the Italian influence, they have lots of good restaurants, not to mention the Ethiopian food.” He knows my penchant for spaghetti, a Filipino staple. Our son Bryan does too. We moved, and it was all that and more. The housekeepers I had both made their own pasta and bread, tossing in sprigs of rosemary from our garden in with the sauce for flavor. To this day, I refuse to do the same as it makes me too homesick.

The first house we lived in was small and was formerly used as an office. But Pat promised to make it livable and he did. We even fixed up the garden that had a big rue bush as the main attraction. By the time we moved to a bigger house, the smaller ‘Bole House’ as it was known was converted to a very pleasant home. The second house was bigger and was in good shape. I bought many plants and sowed flower seeds to great success. Our helper Bekele, a young man who also played with Bryan, took care of the garden. Elsa took care of the house. There was a tall eucalyptus tree outside our gate, and we had this huge rosemary bush against the wall vying for space with all the other healthy plants. The size of the house lent itself to party-giving, and we had big parties almost every month. I cooked for 70 guests a lot of times, and it was years after our Addis experience until I was able to scale down to cooking for three again.

Some mornings I played tennis and swam at the Hilton, where the water in the swimming pool was from a hot spring and it was shaped like a cross. For lunch most days I would pick up my friend Gloria from work at the U.N. and ate at one of our favorite restaurants around town.


Gloria and I had lots of mutual friends, but the two of us were the constant. From the two of us radiated a web of friends that we saw socially so that our days and nights were always spent at lunch or dinner with people. The evenings ‘at home’ would be a movie and light supper with our closest friends. One of the treasures in my memory book for Ethiopia would have to be Gloria, and we remain good gal-pals to this day.

While sorting through my albums for photographs for you to see, I realize I don’t have as many excellent pictures as I would like of Ethiopia. There were no pictures that evoked the clear, sharp air and bright yellow sunlight. Could it have been one of my ‘off’ periods for picture taking during those years? Or maybe my camera just couldn’t capture the excellence and sheer joy I felt in experiencing life in Ethiopia. It simply was no match to the real thing.