Remember those days? …Remember when “inat hager Tri” was more than getting a phone card to call home?

At about 6:00 p.m. every night, women who had spent their day cooking, cleaning and waiting in interminable lines for the community genda to open would gather up their pencils, exercise books and toddlers and head to the qebellE.

“Ayiii,” a woman in her late sixties could be heard saying. “Ahun menged lie b’mot, tmhrt bEt sithEd motech libal new?”

Men who had spent the day minding stores, bartering good and services, and mending and shining shoes would, at about 5 p.m., amble on back home to grab a quick meal before filing into a cramped, dimly-lit room at the qebellE to “Ha… hu… heee…. Ha…”

And then there was you. You who spent the day at school trying to look up the skirt of a passing Menen School girl; you who spent the day forfaying English class to sneak into a Tej bEt for a morning of and hulet Kwa kwa-ing; you who were fussing over your bad hair day and excoriating the girl who wore domestic shoes; you who spent the afternoon chatting about how your lab result was skewed because your lab partner kept smelling sulfur dioxide and passing out; you… you whose mother just screamed “Ant keysi!” at… that same you, at about 6:00 p.m. was also heading towards the qebellE, magically transformed into a respectable educator thanks to MengE…

And worlds collide…

Tell us your favorite memory of that time when what was real and what was not so easily melted into each other.