When a Place Becomes Home
They are leaving Ethiopia today. For over 20 years, Craig and Allison Fowler have served in Ethiopia, helping establish and strengthen local church movements among the Gumuz people through leadership development, church planting, and community outreach. As the work has grown into a thriving, locally led ministry, they are now stepping into a new season. Here Allison reflects on the many years that they have called Ethiopia “home.”
Home: it’s such a simple word, that carries so much weight. Home is more than just a place of residence; it’s a familiar setting, a family unit, a part of our identity, a place to belong.
Over two decades ago, Ethiopia wasn’t ‘home’ to me. It was a place I was excited about, and a little scared to move to, with so many uncertainties. I don’t know exactly when it happened, but somewhere along the way, it became what it is to me now: Home. A place I found to belong, despite being so different. Maybe it happened when my daughter was born here nearly 20 years ago. Maybe it happened watching my kids play at the river day after day alongside their Gumuz neighbors. Maybe it happened the first time I realized I actually liked Ethiopian food, or when we had our first church service in Aygali, or when I could treat a patient at our clinic without needing a translator.
Most likely though, it happened little by little as I made bread for my family to eat and as I homeschooled my kids and sat with the Gumuz ladies and watched them shell their beans and dry out their sorghum so they could feed their families. It happened in the mundane tasks that took place day in and day out. It happened as we dug out of the mud in the rainy season and as we drove on hot, dusty roads in the dry season; as we moved from the village to the city; as our kids went to boarding school and came home again. As we became just a normal part of the Gumuz people’s lives and were accepted as the foreigners who were on their side. As the Gumuz people became MY people. When I was no longer a stranger in a strange land.
Home is … familiar smells, sounds, tastes: the scent of my neighbors roasting coffee beans as the smoke floats up the stairs of our apartment building or the smell of burning eucalyptus as people start their fires to begin cooking in the early morning; the sounds of people yelling out “cabbage, lettuce, onion” in Amharic as they walk up and down the neighborhood streets selling their goods or the Orthodox priest singing at all hours of the morning; the taste of injera b’wut – a food that at one time was so strange to me and now is so normal, and the warm, rich, sometimes too strong taste of Ethiopian coffee poured from a gebena (clay pot) into a small ceramic cup all the way up to the brim so that I burn my fingers every time I pick it up.
What will I smell, hear, and taste in a new place? Things that will feel so foreign but will hopefully someday become deeply familiar.
Home is the people we have lived and worked with for years, whose mannerisms and voices and warm greetings and genuine smiles have become a part of my life.
I have called a lot of places ‘home’ over the years. I know I will have other ‘homes’ in the future. However, as I sit on the brink of leaving this place, this home, and the people I care about on this side of the world, I pause for a moment and feel the significance of what it means to be home, and what it will feel like to lose it – even if just for a while, as I sit in the ‘in-between’ – before I find a new one.