Ethiocross Blog

The National:-The Ethiopian Full Gospel Church in Beirut holds its services in the borrowed chapel of an Adventist high school on the outskirts of town. When I arrived there one recent Sunday morning, the room was filled with women, many of them crouched on the floor, facing backwards, their heads pressed down against the seats of the pews. Here and there I could hear the stifled sounds of weeping, but otherwise the room was eerily silent.

Six days earlier, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 409, heading for Addis Ababa, crashed into the Mediterranean Sea a few minutes after departure from the Beirut airport. Ninety people died.

For six days, Lebanon mourned, and on the seventh, Sunday, it was the Ethiopians’ turn – Sunday is the only day migrant workers reliably have time off to gather. Thirty-two of the dead were Ethiopian, including the crew, and one of them was a twentysomething housemaid named Heny Gebre, a parishioner at the Full Gospel Church. Gebre had been living and working in Beirut for three years. Her home, which she shared with her sister and a few other women, was in a rundown neighbourhood called Quarantine, whose name bears the lingering stigma of its former days as a holding area for incoming port cargo. In practice, however, most of her time, day and night, was spent at the residence of her employers, in the upscale French-Christian neighbourhood of Achrafieh. On the day of the crash, she was on her way to visit her mother in Addis Ababa for the first time in years.