From Women by Women , a portfolio edited by Charlotte Strick in issue no. During a school break over the long rainy season, when I was fifteen, my father and I took a trip to Addis Ababa. On our way home, the bus stopped in Bedele, a town known for a popular beer of the same name, for a lunch break.
We had an hour before the bus departed again, and I asked him to eat quickly because I wanted us to go for a walk near a row of hotels brothels a few minutes away from the restaurant. I wanted him to help me find Elsa, a woman who used to work at a hotel across the street from our house. Like most of the women there, she was a waitress by day and a sex worker by night. The hotel belonged to a woman who also happened to own one of three TVs in my hometown. While it was a taboo for girls and womenโunless one was an out-of-town professionalโto go to the hotel itself, we were allowed to visit the lounge next door, where the TV was kept, to watch a game of soccer or a popular Sunday-afternoon program on national TV.
The sex workers came over to the lounge occasionally to serve beverages. Several months before my father and I found ourselves in Bedele, I caught Elsa while leaving one of those events and invited her to our home to tell her about Jesus.
She accepted my invitation. I poured the bottle of Fanta she brought me into two glasses and added water to make it last. Before she left, I gifted her my Bible, a precious possession I had obtained through correspondence with an organization in Jerusalem. It was a successful meeting, I thought, and we had kindled what was sure to be a lasting friendship. There were always comings and goings at the hotels; the women moved on after a few months in town.
But I had expected Elsa to say goodbye and promise to write. My father agreed to help me look for her. We finished lunch and went to the row of hotels. I was too embarrassed to go door-to-door asking if Elsa was there. It would have been suspicious, too: Why were a seemingly respectable father and daughter looking for a prostitute? Many of the sex workers were runaways who had fallen out with their families or were fed up with village life. My sister and I were once served tea at a hotel in Bedele by a distant cousin who pretended not to know us.
