After 20 years of silence, foreigners in Ethiopia and Eritrea call to say hello

"I do not know you, you do not know me, but I come from Ethiopia and I'm so excited to talk to you."

This was the message that Roman Tafessework Gomeju had for overseas on the other end of the phone line when she called a hotel in neighboring Eritrea this week from her home in Addis -Abeba, the capital of Ethiopia.

For 20 years, this phone call would have been impossible.

In Ethiopia, in the early 1990s, a border war broke out between them during this decade, blocking both countries in hostilities and killing tens of thousands of people.

Cross-border travel is prohibited, embbadies are closed, flights canceled and telephone calls on landlines and cellular networks are not permitted between the two countries. This week, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed of Ethiopia and President Isaias Afwerki of Eritrea announced an official declaration of peace between the two countries. Economic, cultural and diplomatic ties can be forged again.

And now, with the phone service restored, some people started calling strangers, just to say hello.

Gomeju, 32, remembers hearing stories from his father about the beauty of Eritrea. He had lived in Asmara, the capital of Eritrea, for five years and told him about good food, clean streets and friendly people.

"I thought:" Wow, it's a place I want to see once in my life, "and that could not happen for the last 20 years because of the war," said Ms. Gomeju.

When she learned that a peace agreement had been reached, she was eager to share her enthusiasm. with the Eritreans.

"It was as if a dream came true, and when I saw that the land line was working, I said, OK, who should I call?" Ms. Gomeju said. . "I do not know anyone there, and I'm not from that area, I do not know the language, but I felt I should call somebody."

So she looked for online hotels in Asmara and dialed one of the numbers.

The woman at the other end of the line spoke another language – Tigrinya, a language spoken by many in Eritrea – but Ms. Gomeju handed the phone over to a friend who translated. The woman from the Asmara hotel said that she was as excited and happy to talk to someone in Ethiopia

"When someone answered my call I could not believe it, did I really call Asmara? " Gomeju said. "It's a moment that I will not forget in my life."

After the call, she posted a message about her on her Facebook page where dozens of d & rsquo Friends replied that they planned to make their own calls.

In another Twitter message, Natan Belachew, also from Addis Ababa, described a similar experience after dialing a random number and talking to a woman in Asmara. ] And foreigners were not the only ones to enjoy the restored lines of communication. Family members and friends separated by the years of war strove to call each other