Spruced me up

I think I made the most of Singapore, and Singapore made the most of me. When I look back on the seven years I lived in that tiny Asian city-state, I admit I felt shy around her at first. Her upscale, driven, efficient ways made me nervous. I was comfortable in places that felt less pristine, more frayed around the edges. I felt more at home where struggle existed out loud, even on the way to peak performance.

So, I made a pact with Singapore when I first arrived in 2010. I would focus on her good side, create meaning, and be grateful for the hundreds of benefits she offered, if she would let me settle in gently. I’d contribute once I surfaced through my haze of transition. In the end, Singapore took me in, spruced me up from the outside in, and gave me a job to do. I launched my kids and helped international families choose their best-fit school on the island. I supported thousands of students as they transitioned to Singapore from around the world. I loved my team, found my stride, used my gifts and made peace with remarkable Singapore. 

Losing face

A ways down the road, I noticed something was wrong. The stamina and intensity it took for me to excel in that world started to blur people’s faces in the streets where I lived. I couldn’t see them as well as I used to, and I wasn’t sure they saw me. Most worryingly, sometimes I didn’t care. 

I also noticed a growing ache to embrace my fraying edges and tend to my children, my marriage, my neighbours, my soul. I wanted that more than I wanted a Singapore-calibre life. As a family, we began to dream — what and where was the most beautiful life we could imagine? It was a place where raw and real mattered a lot. Where maybe the clocks ran a bit slower instead of keeping pace with the Hong Kong stock markets. Where the life we wanted could coexist in the same city with the work we chose, and not be relegated  to summer holidays. Where we could linger to greet a local community we knew by face and name. Where neglected things could be restored. My husband and I knew it was time to leave Singapore for a restart that offered time for different contributions and connections. But, we didn’t know where to go, until the pendulum swung.  

A softer relationship with time

After we took time to reflect deeply, we narrowed the options and imagined our Beautiful Life to come. Then, in 2017, we leapt continents to Ethiopia, exactly seven years from the time we moved to Singapore. We went from sea level to the ‘Roof of Africa’, where over 80% of Africa’s mountains huddle in the highlands around Addis Ababa. On our way to the airport to fly to Africa that summer, we passed an abandoned hotel sign that said, “See you in 2010.” Amused, I snapped a photo as we drove by. 

We landed in the only country on the planet that marks time with a Coptic calendar. In Ethiopia, time runs 7 years and 8 months ‘behind’ the Gregorian calendar most of us use. For me, it was 2017. For Ethiopians, it was 2010. Literally. On the wall of my new bank in Addis Ababa hung a clock and calendar for Ethiopians and a calendar for foreigners. A new friend had just renewed her local driver’s licence. Though issued in 2017 — in my world— her licence would expire in 2012, five years before she received it.
 

As the long rains ended that year, “Happy New Year 2011!” appeared on shop windows, written in plastic yellow flowers on the glass. Soon, other yellow Meskel flowers would bloom across the highland fields to announce the coming of ‘Spring’ — in September. 

While these surprises were a bit disorienting, flickering like a twilight zone, they also softened my relationship with time and with my own aspirations and regrets. Just by landing there, I had suddenly gained more than seven uncanny years. Ethiopia was not replacing, but regifting the time I spent in Singapore. Without warning, hints of restoration started to appear. Here, I had another shot at living slowly into my values and looking into people’s faces. 

The appetite of locusts

‍After we arrived in Ethiopia, the locusts unexpectedly swarmed. They devoured vast swaths of East African foliage and food crops. I devoured the news about them, too, trying to understand how, in just minutes or hours, pests can destroy what we’ve planted, grown, depended upon. According to a report about the locust surge during that time, a swarm the size of “a single square kilometre…[could] eat as much food in a day as 35,000 people.” It devastated communities already struggling with food insecurity. In the end, the locusts abandoned their trajectory toward Addis Ababa, but the threat of a threadbare city made me realize how quickly life as we know it can be lost. I imagined my neighbours standing hungry and stunned in the countryside farther from us. I remembered an Old Testament prophecy that says, I will restore to you the years the locust has eaten.‍

At times, in Singapore and before, it had felt like locusts had eaten years from my own life. At the rate that locusts swarmed East Africa, in just two years, they could ravage enough food to feed 25.5 million people. That’s a lot to devour, a lot to restore. 

Coffee spoons and saving face

In Addis, the aroma of roasting coffee always hung thick in the air, begging me to sit most days with a steaming cup from Fiker’s coffee stand around the corner, or at home with friends like Betty or Etaferahu. Elsewhere, under striped roadside tarps, in courtyards and sparse living rooms, wild coffee beans crackled and spat in blackened pans over open coals. People greeted each other with a bow, with questions and answers, with embracing and shoulder bumps, with time and a look in the eye. Hostesses circled to present the roasted beans to a seated crowd. After hand grinding and slow brewing, they poured the first of three cups, and scattered frankincense on glowing coals until it twisted upward in wisps of perfume. Throughout the city and country, neighbours set this same stage for a different audience, all sitting on plastic stools, talking and talking some more, measuring their lives in coffee spoons and connection. Saving their faces for each other. I embraced others, and was embraced, too.

I’ve come to believe that time can bend for us all, wherever we are.

Time can bend

I’ve come to believe that time can bend for us all, wherever we are. I used the time I regained in Ethiopia to walk and live at street level, where struggle was not hidden behind busy lives and achievements. Struggle lived out loud among the candle sellers in wheelchairs, the injera hawkers, the beggars and believers at the gates of the church and the children who asked me to step on their scales on the sidewalk (again) for a single Birr. It lived out loud as people gathered to make sense of the senseless: martial law, civil war, Covid. They spruced me up from the inside out.  

When beauty is in everything, packaging is unnecessary.

I loved the open vistas above the Blue Nile and the way the roosters, the singers and the sun would wake up together in the mountains around Ankober, too. When beauty is in everything, packaging is unnecessary. You even see it in the way a woman makes her best home in the garbage dump, dignifying a plastic house with a welcome mat and a stool for guests. It was an honour to live near those with hard earned homes, hands and faces. 

 In our weary beginnings, messy middles, and awkward endings, time can be whatever we need it to be. I believe that wholeheartedly now. We have all the time in the world to live with intention and to embrace our frayed edges. Beyond the swinging of pendulums, the ticking of clocks, the accepted dates on Gregorian calendars, the high expectations of peers and place, maybe even the foreboding of passing years, many unexpected surprises await us — perhaps even the restoration of years. 

‍Mona documented her time in Ethiopia. You can see a few of her photos in the photo album below, or explore her photos here and here.