On 11 June 2019 Ethiopia Observer published Arefaynie Fantahun’s interview with Frédéric Garnier, a 72-year-old retired French dentist who returned to Dire Dawa with his wife and adult children about sixty years after growing up there while his father worked on the Djibouti–Addis Ababa railway.
Garnier described arriving by cargo ship via Djibouti as a toddler, remembering the eastern city as home, and feeling both nostalgia and disorientation at how the place had changed, with video of his return recorded in French for the Observer feature.
Kept as culture and city-history archive, the Observer interview dates a personal return story that preserves mid-twentieth-century railway-era Dire Dawa memory.
Sources: Ethiopia Observer