We flew south from Istanbul through the first part of the night, my fiancé, Wen, and I. It was an uncertain time, this past winter—Turkey and Greece rattling sabers, Europe roiling, you know the rest. The waxing moon was a blood-red crescent, while in the uninhabited stretches of the Sahara below us, no sign of humanity could be detected, as if the end of days had paid an early visit.
And then, an hour after midnight, a stretch of soft orange lights appeared on the ground, reminding me of the village fires of my African childhood. The plane banked over hills, gray knolls resembling the backs of massive elephants, and the glow of Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, raced to meet us.
For two decades I had transited through…
