Three weeks with my brother - Nicholas Sparks [101]
“How’s Dana?”
“The babies are keeping her busy. Her last CAT scan was good. There’s no sign of the tumor. But man, you should see those boys. They’re so cute. It almost makes me want kids.”
“Almost?”
“Not now,” he said quickly. “In a few years, I mean.”
I laughed.
“So what do you think of all the buy-out and merger rumors we’ve been hearing lately?” Micah asked.
We’d heard that American Cyanamid—the parent company of Lederle Labs—was supposedly on the sales block, and thus all of the attendees at the meeting had been worried about the possibility of losing their jobs.
“Who knows. Whatever happens, happens. After everything we’ve been through, I’m sure we’ll land on our feet.”
Less than two weeks after the meeting, as 1994 was coming to a close, we learned that the company was to be bought by American Home Products. In January, the company began the slow process of restructuring; to keep my job, I had to move to Greenville, South Carolina. Micah was offered a position just south of Los Angeles. While I reluctantly took the transfer, my brother decided to give up his job.
“I can’t leave,” he said to me. “This is my home, and besides, I can’t leave Dana and dad.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’ll probably go back to real estate and see what happens. How’s your novel coming?”
“It’s just about done. Before editing, I mean.”
“Are you going to try to get this one published?”
“I think so.”
“Is it better than the first two you wrote?”
“I guess I’ll find out.”
“Hey, maybe you’ll be out of the pharmaceutical business soon, too.”
“Maybe.” I sighed. “We’ll see how it goes. I’ve given up trying to predict the future.”
CHAPTER 15
Lalibela, Ethiopia
February 9–10
We’d started the morning in Jaipur, had flown to Agra to see the Taj Mahal, and later that afternoon we boarded the plane once more for a flight to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. We arrived late, landing well after dark.
Even in darkness Addis Ababa surprised us. Our impressions of Ethiopia were largely based on what we’d seen on tele-vision or read about in newspapers, and I suppose I imagined a city similar to Phnom Penh, or even Jaipur. Yet Addis was far more similar to Lima, and we were struck by its cosmopolitan atmosphere. Long, well-manicured greenbelts lined the main thoroughfare, the streets were clean, well lit, and used only by cars, and for the first time in weeks we saw elements of American culture; billboards advertised Coca-Cola and jeans from the Gap.
Our guide spoke excellent English, and when we asked him about the city, he nodded.
“Yes, Addis is a modern city. But it is not normally this clean.”
“What do you mean?”
“Last week, they held a major meeting with all the nations of Africa represented. The government has been cleaning the city for weeks to make a good impression.”
Still, there’s only so much cleaning one could do. Addis Ababa, on the surface anyway, seemed incredibly, almost shockingly, wealthy compared to the cities we’d recently visited.
In the morning, we rode back to the airport and boarded two small propeller-driven planes for the flight to Lalibela.
Lalibela is the spiritual home of the Abyssinian (or Ethiopian) Orthodox Church, but is most famous for the monolithic cave churches carved in the thirteenth century. King Lalibela had ordered their construction, and using forty thousand slaves, eleven cave churches were carved from stone. What makes the churches unique is that they don’t sit aboveground; instead, they had been carved into the earth so that the rooflines of the churches are at ground level.
The airport where we landed was located in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by peaks of the Ethiopian highlands. Aside from the airport, there were no other buildings at all and the land was reminiscent of southern Nevada, near the Sierras. Few trees grew in the rocky soil, and low-lying scrubs stretched across the valley as far as the eye could see.
Lalibela, we learned, was roughly twenty-five miles away, and two thousand feet higher in elevation.