Emigre: journey home, dos and don’ts recounted

The woman sitting next to me had red hair and her friend was blonde and wore a white fur coat. They both looked like superstars from the 70’s – an appearance that took me back in time as I remembered bands like Ottawan and Boney M. Ah, those were the days – Disco.

I was on my way home to meet my fiancé for the first time. I caught my plane back at JFK and here I was, on my connection flight on board Eritrean Airlines leaving from Frankfurt. The feeling, as usual, was strange yet great – an all-Eritrean cabin (almost) and a crew speaking in Eritrean languages.

It’s all been arranged. Hanna is my-wife-to-be. She’s 19, beautiful and I’ve been told she’ll make a good wife. But the important thing is, my uncle said, she comes from a long line of fertile women. She’ll give you many children, he added. So here I was, on a journey of a lifetime, I guess.

As soon as we settled in our seats, the red-haired woman and her blonde friend started asking me a series of questions – where I was from, where in Eritrea I was going, for how long I would stay there, why I was going and more. Within fifteen minutes, there wasn’t much they didn’t know about me.

They lived in Sweden and they both spoke Tigrinia with a slight slur. Both in their mid-thirties and born and raised in Asmara, they had lived in Sweden for 13 years. Every sentence they uttered contained an English word or two and they seemed to put a lot of effort into looking refined.

“Never eat salad when you get there” the blonde sister warned me, “and make sure you haggle – otherwise, they’ll take advantage of you.” The red-hair duly added, “Don’t drink the water there – my cousin last year developed into a vessel of worms on his return to Germany.”

They? I thought I was ‘they’ too. Who, the natives? – I felt like a bit of sarcasm. But I thought better of it and left it at that. From there, all the way to Asmara, it was non-stop – ‘always order Kuluwa at a restaurant’, ‘don’t drink cold milk’, ‘if an old lady says …’ and what have you. Amusing, it sometimes is – how Eritreans going back home for a visit feel compelled to explain the behaviour of the ‘natives’ to each other.

And then, it slipped, despite my intentions otherwise I told them the main reason of my journey. Lite (– for Letebrhan) – red hair – was annoyed but Fiori was ok with it. Lite said it was disrespectful to women in the diaspora but Fiori said she was on the same mission ‘to bag me a man from home’. And that was how the topic of the discussion changed. It went on and on between my two new friends until we landed in Asmara while I came in and out of sleep.

As we got ready to get off the plane, Lite took out a white fur coat from her hand luggage and put it on. When we went past customs, as if on cue, they both produced funky looking sunglasses and put them on. Suddenly, I noticed they were both dressed in identical outfit. The only thing different was their hair.

The three of us then walked the distance from the terminal to the gate outside looking like some throwbacks from another time and era – and I swear I could see some of the people by the gate struggling not to laugh at the sight of us.