Letter

August 13, 2017

I’ve sometimes asked my AP Biology students to write letters to themselves at the beginning of the school year.  In the letters I ask them to consider what their goals and expectations are, what fears they have, and what words of encouragement they’d like to give themselves.  At the end of the year, they get their letters back.  And then I ask them to write a letter to in-coming students.  I love reading those letters.  

Truthfully, I don’t think I’ve ever passed the end-of-year letters on to an in-coming class.  But in those final days of the school year when the big exam has come and gone and the seniors have graduated and left the rest of us behind, I relish the chance to read those letters; I take in the self-confidence in their words, and their very specific pieces of advice.  What’s especially cool to see in the letters is an almost universal instinct to encourage the in-coming students, whether the writer was an amazing, average, or poor student.  The letters give even the most private of my students a chance to flesh out some thoughts - not just about the class, but about diligence, honesty, boredom, frustration, joy, excitement, and discovery.

As I’m thinking about all this, it’s almost 1 am on July 5, 2018.  A few hours ago, Daniel, Elias, and Mikias landed in DC and are now beginning the process of becoming Daniel, Eli, and Micah again.  Markos and Marta, who were in no particular rush to return to the States, will also land in DC eventually, and will go back to being Mark and Marta.  It is a surreal notion.  It truly makes me feel light-headed, just thinking about walking up to our American front door and stepping back into our old lives.  In trying to wrap up these blog postings, I realize I just don’t have the right words available to me.  They don’t exist.  To even attempt to convey what this year has meant to us in a way that’s both readable and does our experience justice - it’s beyond my capability as a blogger.  

So I’ll just write a letter to our family.  I’ll imagine (because it’s a comforting thing to do right at this moment) that this year is spreading itself out in front of us again - and by some incredible, beautiful sorcery, I have the chance to lay it all out for us.  Here goes.

Dear Markos, Marta, Daniel, Elias, and Mikias,

The rainy season is a b*#!h.  But it will end.  By September, the meskel flowers will turn the country-side yellow and there won’t be a day without sunshine.  And while you may want to complain about the leaks in the house and how many towels you go through cleaning up the tile floors, you will have the opportunity to visit lots of homes where you will be served coffee on mud floors under corrugated iron-sheeting punctured by holes. And you can consider how little protects some people in Mekele from the rain storms that you will watch from the comfort of your shiny, four-story home and its solid walls.  Sit back and enjoy the rain, consider it a blessing.  Watch people walk through mud in plastic sandals like it ain’t no thing.  Listen to them celebrate each rain drop because in this part of Ethiopia where famine hits the worst, it means a good harvest, and a promising year.

If you’re sick, don’t do what you would do in America and just make a throw-away comment about it.  In America, people will sympathize and move on with their lives.  In Mekele, they will call you every day and maybe even come to your house to see if you’ve gone to the doctor or otherwise sought treatment.  Even people you’ve just met will do this.  They will rain down blessings on your head and look at you with such concern that you feel sorry for them.  So unless you want to alarm people and be spoiled by love and concern, don’t mention your sore throat.  

Speaking of sickness, don’t assume you know everything there is to know about medical treatment in Ethiopian towns outside of Addis.  For instance, the Mekele emergency room in which you’re being treated may look like a war zone, but the doctor who’s treating you may have done his training in Germany.  Or you may lose your voice for two straight weeks and (after ten phone calls a day from concerned friends and relatives) finally agree to see a doctor.  Because you’re still a beginner and will make a lot of ridiculous assumptions, you may assume that no doctor in Mekele will know what the inside of a throat looks like.  But you will find that an excellent ENT is able to diagnose your problem very effectively using a camera and some good local anaesthetic.  While you’re sitting in his practice waiting to be seen, you might notice that one floor up is a dermatology practice where you could have your age spots and wrinkles taken care of.  If that’s the sort of thing you think about sometimes.

People will shout “Ferenji” at you from very far away when they see you coming.  Often they’ll say it just loud enough so you can hear them and turn around.  Little tiny kids will scream it so loudly that they bend over with the effort.  But then they’ll run on their little toddler legs with their hands outstretched to say, “Hi!  Hi!  Hi!  Hi!  Hi!”.  Try hard not to feel self-conscious.  Remember that often “Ferenji” just means “Hi”.  Of course, you would think it strange if a white person in America greeted a person of color by yelling, “Foreigner!”.  Cultures are different, and their ways of connecting are different.  Also remember that those young men who love to tease you as you walk  by are the first ones who would spring to your aid - even if what you need takes a whole day.  If remembering these things doesn’t help, just put your earbuds in and keep walking.

Learn to read the Ethiopian alphabet immediately.  It will be very useful in helping you pronounce words correctly.  For example, if you can distinguish between the harsh Tigrinya “H” and the softer “H” sound in “howie”, you won’t make the mistake of introducing someone as your fire, instead of as your brother.  And if you can distinguish between a harsh Amharic “T” and the softer one in the word “wetat”, you will correctly identify a youthful person as young, and not milk.

If you’re a middle-aged woman and always conscious of weight-gain, don’t feel bad when the women of Mekele call you fat.  In the city of Mekele where everyone is small and thin, “fat” is a complement.  In all likelihood this information won’t be helpful the tenth time someone smiles at you and says how lovely and plump you are.  If so, look at pictures of people in America and feel confident that you’re doing okay.

You will grow very accustomed to using pit latrines and will wonder who invented the idea of sitting your body down on a toilet seat to begin with.  

You will notice that no matter how dirty things seem and how unhygienic, no Ethiopian in his or her right mind would EVER eat without washing the hands.  Make a habit of this.

If you get a dog, it doesn’t matter what he does, he will be a part of your family.  If you can’t find an owner for him when you leave and mention that you want to put him down, be prepared for the looks of horror that overtake people’s faces.  Be prepared for them to say that killing an animal is a sin.  Don’t mention that the animals you sometimes see on the streets - the donkeys, horses, dogs - occasionally look like they’d be better off dead.  Just nod and say you’ll think about it.  And when you ask the roving “vet” if he’ll put your dog down and he refuses for religious purposes, re-double your effort to find a decent way of ending the dog’s life.  Don’t be surprised if you discover that there are plenty of vets at the college who use very humane techniques to put pets down, and that it’s not the big deal you made it out to be in your head.  But when an excited prospective owner shows up to take your dog, watch his eyes light up with delight at this beautiful, playful creature.  Keep your cool as you muzzle your dog and help him into the car that will drive him away.  Don’t cry so hard at night when the neighborhood dogs bark all at once and wake you up - and your dog is not among them.  Take comfort that you paid attention to all the horrified protests and kept your dog alive - knowing that somewhere across town, he’s chomping on his dog toy and probably not thinking about you at all.

When you say your goodbyes, you have two choices, neither of which will prevent you from crying so much you literally feel sick for days.  First, you can take the band-aid approach - a stealth goodbye that is sudden and complete.  This will leave you open to many phone-calls in which children will demand to know if they’re seriously not going to see you again, to which you’ll find yourself promising to return soon, maybe next year, in fact definitely next year.  The other approach is to keep returning to them every day and saying that you’ll return the next day, maybe.  And if you show up the next day, great.  If not…then you’ve fizzled out, supposedly.  Just be prepared for children to shove letters and cards, little gifts and cookies into your hands.  And as you read the letters and cry your eye-balls out, you should probably know that there’s really no good way to say goodbye.  

On your last day in your house as you recall how much you first loved the view through the windows, consider how the country-side is turning green again, now that rainy season is just beginning.  Again, be thankful for that.  Look down at the road project that you’ve watched from your first morning in Mekele; notice how wide the road has become, how it’s just a matter of weeks before they begin the process of paving it and providing one more access from the city out to the country-side.  Put your forehead on the window one last time and listen to the neighbor kids playing soccer in their driveway, the calls of the trader-man who trades goods with households once a day, the trucks in the distance hauling dirt from the road project.  Open your eyes and look towards St. Gabriel’s church and its loudspeakers that stole so many hours of your sleep.  Maybe it’s never been the most peaceful neighborhood, but this is the house where you will have built a home.  Take in the view; try to trap it in your mind because you have grown to love it so much that leaving it is like leaving someone you love.

Then, when you go downstairs and put your shoes on and open the gate for the last time, be glad that your dog is not about to dash out behind you and maybe nip at a passing stranger’s calf.  Hope that his new owners get him, and are throwing something for him to catch.  Smile at the young woman who took care of you all year and hug her, knowing that your sobs are as much about saying goodbye to her as about you having to go home and do all the cooking again.  And when you pull away from the house that welcomed you every evening after a day away - the house that caught every available ray of sunshine and filled your days with light - just be glad for the experience, for every blessed second of it.  For breakfast, lunch, dinner, and Tigrinya lessons together as a family every day.  For “shhhh” during an important TV show involving a certain character called Hazal (a show which will end its run while you’re on a road-trip, preventing you from knowing what exactly became of that beautiful and cursed young woman).  For sitting down together and watching “The Office”, “The West Wing”, and “Brooklyn nine-nine.”.  For blackouts and candle-lit conversations about school work, politics, language, culture, martial arts, inside-jokes, family history, future plans…everything you never get a chance to talk properly about in America.

As your plane takes off from the airport in Mekele, your head will probably be stuffy with tears and your heart so heavy it hurts a little to breathe.  Think of all the years of planning your family put into this year away, look down at the city of Mekele as you rise into the air and point out the red roof of your house which is always visible from the plane. Hug your spouse, and say, “We did it.”

Love,

Mark, Marta, Daniel, Eli, and Micah

July 2, 2018

The boys say THANK YOU

Thanks to the donations of friends and family one hundred families received d-Lights.  The process of choosing the families was carried out by the four social workers at Operation Rescue Ethiopia, and their manager, Anteneh who is going over the list with Eli, below:

Eli goes over list of the 100 families most in need of d-Lights.

Signing the check.

Once the donated money had been transferred to Operation Rescue Ethiopia's bank account, there was still a lot of paper-work to do to make the purchase official.  Here, Netsanet (Assistant to the manager) signs the check for the d-Lights, while Eli, Micah, and Getachew (Operation Rescue Ethiopia's manager) look on.

At the d-Light office

Eli and Micah deliver the d-Lights to ORE

Above, Eli and Micah are delivering boxes of the solar lights to Operation Rescue Ethiopia for distribution.

Below, Eli explains to the mothers how the d-Lights work.  He gets translation help from Anteneh.

Eli and Anteneh explain.

Teame, a social worker at Operation Rescue Ethiopia helped translate Eli's instructions, as well.

Teame and Eli

Finally, the d-Lights were distributed.  Below, Birho (social worker and Operation Rescue Ethiopia nurse) signs each d-Light to a family while social workers Alem and Anteneh look on.  Micah is handing out the lights.  In the background, the final social worker at Operation Rescue Ethiopia, Merid, is taking pictures.  These kinds of activities can be encouraging for other international donors to see.

From left to right, Alem, Anteneh, Micah, Birho, mothers receiving lights, Merid in the background.

THANK YOU to all of you who donated.  Your kindness and generosity is making a direct impact on people's lives.  Even we have a d-Light, and with frequent power outages, it is a very useful thing for families to have.

Even though we gave out 100 lights, it was hard for the social workers to choose the right families to receive them.  And other families came forward and asked if they could have some, too. 

It is not too late to donate to this project.  Even if your money doesn't go to d-Lights, it will go towards supporting some of the most desperate families in Mekele by providing food, hygiene facilities, school aid, clothing, nursing care, and social care support.  In fact, one of the best ways to support the work of caring for vulnerable families at ORE is to sponsor a child, using the link below.

You can donate (or sponsor a child) at: http://www.fieldsofpromise.org/?page_id=72   We understand that it is not easy to provide a note to make sure your donation goes to the Woodward Family Project.  Don't worry, every time a donation is made, it is reported to us by the US administrator of that website.

Thank you again.  We boys will be departing to the US in three short days after almost a full year in Ethiopia (our parents leave a few days later).  We are so grateful you have supported us along the way, and that you have also supported the work of Operation Rescue Ethiopia.

Staying Present

It’s been a while 

....since I posted anything on this blog.  Repeated efforts to convince other family members to blog have fallen short - not because they don’t want to write, but because each week goes by faster  than ever before now that we’re ending things here.  And each moment seems to be accounted for.

And yet, this ending seems interminable.  Each day I wake up with a nervous feeling in my belly; I experience this emotional paralysis while waiting for the day to start.  It’s the paralysis of not knowing how to either live with or speed along a painful process of saying goodbye.  There’s the technical part; get rid of stuff, shop for gifts, finish up trainings and lessons at ORE, get the last of the boys’ school work done and off to the DHL office, find a job for Azeb our house help, find an owner for the dog, clean the house.  Then there’s the emotional stuff.  The goodbyes.  I just typed out a long list of goodbyes and then deleted it.  Not yet.  Not yet.

So anyway, time is speeding by slowly - if I can put it that way -  and this has us in a bit of a funk.  I told someone the other day that it has become nearly impossible to commit to anything, get invested in anything, or get energized about anything.  At this point it’s all about figuring out how to end things.  The friend who heard me said a prayer that contained a very wise request; “Help the Woodwards stay present until the very end.”

So in the spirit of staying present, I refuse to let this blog die.  Darn it, it’s almost Thursday, and I have to post something, if only to go through the motions.  So this is a blog post that includes the stuff that struck me as funny, frustrating, or moving, but that didn’t seem to be blog-worthy; the scraps that stayed on the cutting room floor of my mind.  Now, they will have their moment.

“The thing about cooking from scratch in Mekele is that you have to make the scratch.”

I don’t know if this has been said about other locations in the world, but it was so apt that I wanted to shake the hand of the woman who said those words.  I have seen friends attempt to make corn flour from grinding popcorn.  I have learned to make tortillas.  I have partaken of the ice cream made from avocados and condensed milk. I own a recipe for condensed milk. I’ve helped to make the most delicious cookies, some of which - as a final garnish - were dipped in peanuts that were hand shelled, dried, roasted, and then ground by a friend.  I’ve run a fistful of gooey, glutinous dough over a hot frying pan to make spring roll wrappers. 

Arianne, a Phillippina who can cook anything at all, demonstrates how to fry the perfect spring roll

I am NOT GOOD at cooking from scratch, at least not the Mekele way.  Even with the help of some very motivated ladies with cookbooks that tell you how to make your own everything, I just can’t help looking at the ingredients available in the shops and feeling exhausted.  We’ve had the same few meals in rotation for 11 months because I'm so resistant to experimentation.  I will not, like my friend Sandy, attempt to make corn-flour from popcorn.  I will not dry chillies and then extract some essential oil from them and then perform some other miraculous act to produce Korean barbecue sauce.  That is not who I am, and it’s one of the sad, humbling lessons I’ve learned about myself here.  Where food is concerned I’ve learned that I’m a path-of-least-resistance person.  Our rotation of meals is this:  Saturday-Monday/Tuesday - Ethiopian food cooked by Azeb.  Tuesday - some sort of pasta.  Wednesday - some sort of chili, or taco thing.  Thursday - maybe some sort of chicken thing - soup, roast, salad, fried (once).  Friday - oh thank God for Friday - we eat out.  Then it’s back to Saturday.  I mentioned Azeb's name once in all this; truthfully she cooks all the meals with occasional, minor assistance from me.

Cooking well here requires inventiveness.  Take, for example, what our Swiss friend Sandra (that same corn-flour enthusiast) once said.  We were talking about cake.  I said something about carrot cake and how that would be easy enough to make, but what about the cream cheese frosting, which my research showed me you can’t make from scratch unless you have a starter?  Her eyes grew really wide and she said, “I saw this once in Switzerland!  You know how cows have four stomachs? Maybe we can identify which stomach has this one enzyme you need to make a starter for that kind of cheese.  Let’s get a cow!  Once we have that enzyme-“  

Well you can imagine, I had my hand out to stop her by the time she said the word “stomachs”.  I would live without cream cheese.  I would live without it, by God, if it meant slaughtering a cow for it.  

This delicious carrot cake was made for a baby shower.  The cream cheese
frosting did not involve the killing of a cow; just some advance planning and the
transport of some frozen goods from America with the hostess's visiting relative.

What have I missed about the US?  Oddly enough, I've missed the very thing I hated perhaps most in the world: grocery shopping.  I can’t wait to breeze into the store and buy whatever I need right there and then.  Never again will I look at a won ton wrapper the same way.  When I get to the cheese section of the store, I might cry.  I will buy chicken breasts, pre-ground beef, brown sugar, icing sugar, heavy cream, milk in liquid form, every thinkable vegetable or fruit I desire - in season and out.  You responsible enviro-conscious shoppers - just butt out of my reverie. I will buy every blackberry in the land, no matter how much fuel was consumed to get it to my kitchen.  My family - who will cook side by side with me from now on - will eat so well that all of our friends will clamor for dinner invitations.  And cooking will be so easy that we will insist that they come over whenever they like, no advance notice necessary.  They will ask if we cooked everything from scratch and we’ll say - because we’re honest people - “By American standards, YES!”

A Chopped challenge:  What could you make with the ingredients in the picture and some tomatoes, onions, cabbage
carrots, and (surprise ingredient) string beans?

The Cloud Can Be Your Enemy

I just want to provide a word of warning for people like me; people who don’t understand that when you buy music, sometimes it hangs out in The Cloud.  If you’re in the States or many other places, that’s a fine place for your songs, because as long as you’re connected to the internet, you can listen to them.  Only don’t forget to actually download them onto your iPod or phone before you come to Mekele.  Because you will be sitting down, desperate to listen to all your music, but only able to access the most inexplicably random selection of songs that decided to descend from The Cloud and live in your ipod/iphone.  If you live in a land with slow internet and want to spend a year listening to anything other than some old Quincy Jones, one or two Beck songs, a selection of Broadway anthems, some random movements of a symphony, and three jazz standards, then you should make sure you liberate your songs from The Cloud and confirm that they are firmly embedded in your listening device.  Or else you’ll be singing along to Beck, calling yourself a loser, baby, and meaning it.

So near, and yet so far...

Some Clubs Will Never Die

I’ve written about Devotions/Fight Club several times.  The last time I wrote about it, though, was to announce its demise.  I didn’t write about how it rose again from the ashes; crippled, inglorious, and perhaps - as a direct result of its near death experience - with a slightly avant-garde twist.  Take, for instance, our first performance back.  It was about Jonah and the Whale, a bizarre story all by itself.  I did not wish to direct this particular group of thespians anymore, but they made me do it.  As a result of their headstrong attitudes and my more hands-off approach, we ended up with this costume in the mix:  

You might ask what place a clown costume had in the story of a reluctant Jonah traveling in the belly of a whale to Nineveh to preach to the terrible people of that Assyrian city.  You’d be right in asking that question.  The answer is that the clown suit was the whale.  It might have confused the young children in the audience, but they’ll get there eventually.  All great art challenges convention.  That will be the lasting legacy, perhaps, of Devotions/Fight Club; the clown suit and what it represents…

Never, Ever Take Good Health Care For Granted

I once sort of mocked a friend because he and his family would never spend any time in a country without good, reliable hospitals.  I want to go back and tell that friend to keep on keeping on.  I don’t know how people from the West come here to Mekele with small children and just trust that everything is going to be ok.  There are plenty of westerners who live in even smaller, more remote Ethiopian cities, and this amazes me.  There are one or two things that make me realize I could never live here long term with my children.  One of them is the serious lack of reliable health care.  I’m grateful that most of the time, children’s injuries are not life-threatening.  But sometimes you see kids here with conditions or scars that would simply not exist back in the States.   

I’m sad that Micah will have a pretty significant scar on his jaw from the dog bite (see prior post).  But when I hear of a friend who cut her hand and had it stitched without anesthesia at the same hospital where Micah got his wound stitched (which got infected, by the way, and then fell out, resulting in our now treating with iodine and prayers), I’m grateful we were so lucky.  It has been my greatest fear that one of these boys hurts himself and requires medical attention, because honestly, as brilliant  and resourceful as the docs and nurses here are, they just don’t have much of anything.  

I count down the days now…fourteen more days for these fellows to not have to go to the hospital, thirteen more days, twelve.  And soon it will be none.

The President Isn’t So Scary From Over Here

It has been beyond refreshing to be away from the US and the bitterness of the political/social scene there.  I hate to use the word "refreshing", but I can't think of a better term to describe what has happened to our world-view since we left the States.  Our perspective shifted, and we were reminded that the world is a big, big place, where people face many immediate and relentless challenges daily.  We've watched reporting about the US, and read a lot of social media postings about the president.  As the year has gone by there is one goal we (Mark and I) have grown to share very clearly.  When we return to the States, we will remember that the vast majority of the world goes on, despite what Donald Trump says or does.  And while we will always protest whatever he's responsible for that is blatantly wrong, we will survive him better if we don't pay him quite so much attention.  If some will accuse us of escapism, that's fine.  It's important for mental health. 

Breaking News!!!

That's it from the scrap pile, but I should mention one new development from this part of the world that's pretty exciting.  I’m writing from Adwa, a town in Tigray quite close to the Eritrean border.  We are on a final tour with my dad, who has returned to bookend our time here in Ethiopia (he dropped us off back in August, so many moons ago).  Anyway, Mark and I were watching the news earlier when we heard that the Eritrean president had accepted an offer of peace talks from the Ethiopian prime minister, the first steps to ending a twenty year stalemate over a border issue.  We shared this news with Dad and he raised his arms high.  It’s something he had been praying for for decades.  And now, things might actually change.  The Eritrean-Ethiopian border not too many miles from us might open up - not during our time here, unfortunately - but one day soon.  

Mark scales the wall to Debre Damo Monastery 

Could it be that once we've been home in the States for a while and soaked in the relative ease of life back there - back in the bosom of our friendships and routines - we will begin to plot our next move?  Will the time come for us to do another year, this time in Asmara, Eritrea, my other homeland?  The men in my family stood on top of the flat top mountain that hosts Debre Damo monastery yesterday (oldest church in Africa), and looked towards the Eritrean border.  I was not allowed up because the only female animals allowed up there are hens (for the eggs) and cats (for mouse-killing), but when they descended, the boys pointed out the mountain that sits on the border.  It hurt to know that some of my closest relatives are behind that border; out of reach, and basically out of touch.  Wouldn't a year in Eritrea be something?

Looking out to Eritrean Border from Debre Damo Monastery

All Good Things Must Come To An End But When God Closes A Door Somewhere He Opens A Window And How Can Baby Donkeys Possibly Be So Cute?

The answer is that we will probably not be leaving Silver Spring, USA for a while.  We have a kid going to college in a year, and two others not far behind.  All good things must come to an end, I suppose.  It's time to get back to work.  Time to save up again.  Time to start shaking off this paralysis, get through the goodbyes, and march forward with gratitude.  Time to anticipate and overcome the challenges of staying present - more so than ever - back home in the States.  The few broadway songs on my iphone remind me of one of the best lines ever written for a musical; "When God closes a door, somewhere he opens a window."  

While I distinctly feel the weight of an ending, it's ironic that windows seem to be opening up all around me.  The rainy season is just beginning here.  Farmers are plowing the fields after a hot, dry season.  Little baby goats, sheep, cows, and donkeys bounce along beside their mothers on the roadside.  The lush green countryside that greeted us when we first arrived will rebound, but we won't be here to see it, and that's okay.  Unbelievably, Ethiopia offered a hand of peace to Eritrea, and Eritrea looks like it might just accept it.

Things move on, and so will we.  

Farmer plows his field

 

Little man, enjoy this time in your life.

PS.  Hazal eloped to marry a member of the Balkan Mafia, but her birth mother got wind of it and shot that guy down at the altar.  Hazal returned home in her wedding dress and collapsed on her bed in tears.  Why does she make such self-destructive choices?

The Foo Fighters Weigh In

Visiting is pretty, visiting is good…. 

I started writing this blog post and these opening words from the Foo Fighters song “This is a call” kept coming to mind.  That song wound up on my iPod thanks to my cool cousin Selome who downloaded a bunch of music for me something like fifteen years ago.  I cannot make sense of the rest of the song.  But that is not the point of this blog.

The point is to try to jibe what everyone says about visiting Ethiopia with our experience of living in it.  To hear it told, visiting Ethiopia is not only pretty and good, but the prettiest and goodest.  I’ve heard it my whole life from tourist friends; “Ethiopia is amazing!  I can’t wait to go back!  Oh my gosh, the people…so kind, so beautiful!”

And really the point of moving here for a year is so that we don’t have that wide-eyed wonderment that comes with the territory when you’re a tourist.  No; we wanted our boys - our whole family - to know the country.  And if at the end of it we could walk away and say Ethiopia is pretty, Ethiopia is good, well great.  If not…

The day we left Silver Spring

Well, what then?  What if you’ve lived in a country for a year and no amount of open-minded curiosity can quite make-up for the resentment and bewilderment you regularly navigate?  What if your kids feel even less Ethiopian than they did when they first moved?  Do you decide that your grand experiment to connect with a culture and its people is a failure?  Do you accept that you’re too mired in your own expectations and anxieties to receive the full blessing of this radically different culture?  Do you concede that a year is too short a time to connect with a country?

Or do you turn yourself back into a tourist and go visiting?

My college friend Mary’s visit to Ethiopia gave me just that opportunity.  She came armed with an especially wide-eyed enthusiasm for all things Ethiopia, being a resident of Doha, Qatar, world traveller, and lover of less beaten paths.  She held the distinction of being our last true visitor, and found herself in the company of a family who didn’t quite share her head-space. For my part, I was done trying to find the charm in the people of the country, its terrible toilets, strange jumbling of history with myth, etc., etc,. etc.  Mary got off the plane at Lalibela already practically teary-eyed at being in this “amazing” country, finally, while I was like, “Let’s go see these churches already.”

Mary arrives at Lalibela Airport

We did go see the churches in Lalibela.  They are indeed amazing.  I had to remind myself of this.  I had to put my hands on the stone walls and recall that they were built by priest-kings using nothing but sharpened pieces of metal, rock, and single-minded devotion.  This is not unique to Lalibela.  In Tigray, priests climbed impossible cliff ledges to dig into mountain faces to create cool, darkened hollows filled with color and the scent of incense.  The more difficult the challenge of creating a worship space, the more magnificent that space.

An areal view of the cliff with Abuna Yemata Chuch in Tigray (entrance is the little oblong hole far left on ledge;
The little white figure on the ledge is the priest.  Note the lack of railings.)

My father navigates the ledge outside Abuna Yemata Church

The nine Syrian saints who helped to establish Christianity in Ethiopia
(Abuna Yemata Church ceiling)

In Lalibela, many churches were built out of single rocks, springing from the vision of priest-kings that were part architects, part sculptors.  Lalibela was the geographical center of the Zagwe dynasty (begun around the 10th Century AD), which  followed on the heels of the Axumite kingdom (between 1st and 7th centuries AD).  While the Axumite kingdom began as a pre-Christian dynasty, by the fourth century AD, Syrian missionaries had helped establish Christianity as the predominant religion in Ethiopia.  It is the faded paintings of these saints that adorn the interiors of the cave churches of Tigray, where we live.  However, Christianity - if the New Testament is to be believed - first came to Ethiopia via a high-ranking eunuch who was baptized by the apostle Philip on the side of the road.  So between that eunuch and the Syrian missionaries, by the time of the Zagwe dynasty, much of the country was already deeply Orthodox Christian (today it is 44% Orthodox, 34% Muslim, 13% Protestant, and 3% Animist/Traditionalist).  

St. George's Church, Lalibela

Bet Gebriel-Rafael Church, Lalibela

In other words, while the grand cathedrals of Rome (where visiting is indeed very pretty and very good), speak to a very old and illustrious Christian past, Ethiopia’s Christian past is not much newer.  But why does it even matter?  

On a personal level, it goes some way to explaining life here.  In Mekele - which is a very Christian part of the country - you are constantly reminded of the presence of the church and its place in people’s lives.  The priests from St. Gabriel church have been silently cursed by this very writer on many a night when their chanting reaches our house across the valley through loudspeakers, beginning at around 10 pm and continuing through six am.  These hours correspond exactly with the human body’s intention to sign off for the day.  And Christian history here also matters because you might be walking among a group of warring children who will stop their warring to make the sign of the cross in the direction of a church a few hundred meters away, only to resume their warring once the church is out of view.  It matters because your van driver might be listening to the most foul, most filthy hip-hop at a deafening volume - all bi*#hes, and n*!#as and choppas and bricks and whatnot - but will stop to give the monk with the upturned umbrella on the side of the road a few birr (coins) and slow to make the sign of the cross as he drives by a church on a distant hill. Life goes on in very human ways, but the church is never far from people’s minds.  This sort of piety calms me, for some reason.  I feel very safe in Ethiopia - at least physically.  Emotionally, it's a different story, but I'll get to that.

St. Peter's Basilica, Rome

One "small" detail of the ceiling in Santa Maria Maggiore Cathedral, Rome

You can visit old cities and churches anywhere in the world, but occasionally those churches feel like museums, or attractions.  I know that sounds offensive because a great deal of people likely worship beneath the Michelangelos and Titians in Rome and Florence.  But stepping into an ancient church in Ethiopia is like stepping into an extension of Orthodox worship as it happens anywhere else here - the street, the home, open fields…There’s nothing relic-y about the Christianity here.  I can’t say that makes it any more or less authentic than it is anywhere else; who am I to judge that?  But I can say that as far as the church is concerned, I can see a straight line connecting today’s Ethiopians to the Ethiopians of the early part of the last millennium.  If you’re visiting Ethiopia from the developed world where things move and change at breakneck speed, that’s a really grounding thing to see.

Is that a good thing?  Maybe.  But it’s not always easy for me, who just wishes Ethiopia would somehow get on with it.  But then I’m not sure of what I mean by “get on with it.”  It’s great that the church is so resilient.  But I wish there were more cold cokes in the cafes, I wish sugar wasn’t so hard to get, I wish the internet wasn’t so slow.  While these sound like petty first-world concerns, they do bear some relation to genuine problems for the country.  If coke - so widely available world-wide that no little town seems beyond its reach - is not available in the second largest town in Ethiopia (Mekele), then what the heck is going on? Is it a supply-chain issue or is it the result of the sort of complacency that is satisfied with a fridge full of sprites because none of your customers are going to complain anyway? 

But forget about cokes. Forget about menus with thirty dishes offered but only two available.  Forget about shops that advertise one hundred products only to have half that number in inventory.  It isn't quite false advertising, more...wishful thinking, perhaps.  It's irritating and baffling, but ultimately no big deal.  Here's what I really care about; in a country with such a grand past, I wish there was more exposure to the outside world so that being different doesn’t always require it being pointed out.  While Ethiopia is a very cool place to visit, maybe I selfishly wish it would be an easier place for a Western-minded person to live.

But that’s exactly the Catch-22.  If Ethiopia were just another Kenya (sorry Kenya!), with the African-tinged post-colonial mind-set, well then it would just be another Kenya.  Easy to visit, expensive as anything, English everywhere, modern conveniences - a country whose history is intricately connected to the Commonwealth.  And there’s nothing wrong with that.  Even ancient Rome was heavily influenced by ancient Greece.  But Ethiopia is not just another anything.  It’s Ethiopia.  Never colonized, molded through history primarily by its own internal struggles waged by its people against each other, and by nature against them all.  

It’s what people like Mary come to see.  At our final stop on our day long tour of Addis Ababa, she put her hand on the Emperor Haile Selassie’s tomb and could hardly stop talking about it all day.  This last emperor was a forward-thinking and outward looking, yet Afrocentric ruler, who on top of everything else, inspired an entire religious movement (Rastafarianism).  Mary had heard about him since the time she was a little girl.  And through her eyes, I saw the connections she was making.  Her enthusiasm was infectious, and in spite of myself, I spent a lot of time taking in the aura of this man, how he fought for his country’s identity and for African self-reliance. I started to make my own connections between those old churches, that ancient history, the more recent history of an empire brought low by the same things that always seem to bring empires crashing down (famine, European aspirations followed by European wars, and communism), and its resurgence as a country with one of the world’s fastest growing economies. It’s tough, even for Ethiopia-cynics, not to be impressed by the story of Ethiopia.* 

Emperor Tewodros (Theodore), who united Ethiopia
(ruled 1855-1868.  I feel especially connected to him because I shared
his hairstyle for my entire childhood)

Behind us is reputed to be Ethiopia's first Eucalyptus tree, brought
from Australia by Emperor Menelik II (reigned 1889-1913), who established Addis Ababa
from Ntoto Mountain, where Mary and I are standing.

In Emperor Haile Selassie's palace in Addis Ababa (reigned more or less from 1916-1974)

The tomb of Emperor Haile Selassie in Trinity Church, Addis Ababa

But then you leave Addis, and you are at the mercy of the people out there…in the smaller cities, towns, and villages.  Well, what can you say about these people?  

I’ll tell you what most visitors say, which is that the people are so nice!  And I confess, I always just keep my mouth shut, because which visitor wants to have that notion contradicted?  But I have to say, it was with some satisfaction that I heard someone call my dear sister-friend Mary out.  Mary, the relentlessly positive charmer that she is, had struck up a conversation with a group of Ethiopian friends at a gathering.  At some point, she provided this throwaway line about people being so nice, and a thoughtful older Ethiopian woman cleared her throat.  She said, “When people say that kind of thing, what do they mean?”  And dear old Mares said, “Well….”  She looked at me for a little help, but none was forthcoming, you see, because I honestly didn’t know how to help her out.  

Look, if I were visiting Ethiopia, as some of my friends have, and then leaving within a couple of weeks to resume my busy life wherever, I would probably feel that same way.  After all, I’ve claimed that the people of Cambodia/Vietnam/Thailand/Malaysia are just the kindest ever.  That’s a luxury you get when you’re a tourist.  I have no idea if I would be saying that about the people of Southeast Asia if I lived there.  I really don’t.  But I have lived here in Ethiopia now for nearly a year, and I can reliably say that the people of Ethiopia are just people.  There’s nothing especially nice about them.  Some of them are very nice.  Some of them are rotten and I wish I could meet them in a dark alley somewhere and practice my newfound martial arts skills on them (they’d have to be drunk or very elderly to succumb to my “skills”.  And I’m afraid Mark might not be much help - I mean this in the best sense, but he punches like a Quaker).  And generalizing is no good and one shouldn’t do it unless one is writing one’s own blog so I’ll go ahead and say that many young men of our town and many others we’ve been to tend to be quite - shall we say - cheeky.  They like to get a rise out of you.  Maybe you like that, perhaps that’s part of the tourist experience.  I do not like that.  And I’m not a tourist, so I’m stuck with it.  Poor me.

Alas, that is my problem with Ethiopia in a nutshell.  I expect there to be a direct correlation between this rich and unique history, and the behavior and development of this country and its people.  In short, to be perfectly honest, I want life - not just for me, for everyone - to be easy and comfortable.  And when it isn’t, I sort of blame the country, and wonder what happened between the Axumite kingdom and today. Were there rock-throwing youths back then?  In this kingdom that used to trade with the Roman empire, were there constant calls of “Ferenji, Ferenji?”  Wouldn’t a group of ancient Axumite young men have had better things to do than to mock the Ethiopian lady and her Oregonian husband? Would there not have been cold cokes in all the Zagwe Dynasty cafes, for heaven’s sake?  It’s not that we can’t survive without clean toilets, cold cokes, anonymity.  It’s just that you look at the accomplishments of past Ethiopians and develop a steady refrain; how hard can it be to….  As in, here’s an entire church carved out of one rock, so how hard can it be to throw some cokes in the fridge?  How hard can it be to clean the toilet?  How hard can it be to just watch us walk by with your mouth shut?

Yes, yes.  Even in the writing of this, I realize how absurd it is for me to judge an entire country based on my own expectations including how people should behave when blessed with such a rich history, how the service industry should work, how such pious and public religious practice should look in your interactions with others (as in don’t stop beating up that tiny kid just because you’re in front of a church, stop because it’s wrong to beat up that tiny kid).  Perhaps tourists don’t have those expectations.  Or maybe they never stay long enough to have those expectations disappointed.  Which is just as well. I want people to love Ethiopia.  Having lived here now, I can honestly say there are few countries in the world that deserve as thriving a tourist industry as Ethiopia does.  It’s that beautiful a country, with that delicious a food, with that rich a history.  In spite of all of its challenges, it's a remarkable place to visit.  And live.  Maybe.

Gheralta Mountains of Tigray, fields of tef in the foreground.  

Moral?  None, really.  If you ask us if we’d rather have forged a connection to Ethiopia by being tourists, rather than residents, we would say no, of course not.  Well, the boys might respond differently.  Connecting with anything - a country, your friends, your spouse, (maybe even your dog) - means living with the good and the bad.  But there is something to the idea that regardless of whether you live there or not, you should be a tourist of your own homeland sometime.  It may not fundamentally change your gut feeling about the place, but it might shift your biases ever so slightly, and remind you that you’re just one tiny part of a bigger story.  The moment you realize it’s not all about you is the moment you might be lucky enough to feel a lightening of resentment, a feeling of common humanity that allows you to participate in the story more fully, instead of holding yourself outside it, waiting for it to entertain you in some way and make your life easier.  This is as true for Americans as it is for Ethiopians, now more than ever, perhaps. 

A small story that I hope will illustrate what I’m trying to say, please excuse its black comedy nature.  Mark has had stones thrown at him once or twice when out jogging.  The boys have also had stones thrown.  It doesn’t happen often, but it’s weird that it happens at all.  The usual explanations flow from well-meaning friends; Curious kids will do stuff like that just to see your reaction.  They don’t really hate you or anything.  Great.  Anyway, last Sunday, some of the presumably Orthodox teenagers who play soccer outside our Lutheran church began throwing stones at the church, and eventually hit someone.  I assume it was an Orthodox vs. Protestant thing (long story).  In any case, the young boys were taken by the church elders to the police station and - with the blessing of their parents - have spent a few nights there so they can consider their actions.  I’m sure there’s a lesson here about how parents here brook no nonsense from their kids.  But the lesson I wanted to share with my family was this:  See?  They throw rocks at everyone, not just you!  

I’m so glad Mary’s visit allowed me to be a visitor to Ethiopia again.  Ethiopia’s tourism slogan is “Ethiopia, where it all began” (because of Lucy, the 3 million year old Australopithecus female, who was found in the Danakil depression.)  I think its slogan should be “Ethiopia, the land of contradictions.”  Either way, there’s no denying a visit here will be unlike any other you’re likely to have anywhere else in the world.  There’s just…nothing like it.  It’s like a therapy session; it will put you in touch with ALL of your feelings.  In fact... New slogan:  “Visit Ethiopia; it’s like visiting your shrink.”

The Lucy walk

PS:  Hazal is officially too boring to warrant an update.  Okay fine, that bimbo has somehow let herself fall in love with a bearded member of the Balkan Mafia.  

PPS:  In all seriousness, let me just say that if you do visit this amazing country, you will NOT be disappointed. 

* I will note that part of the story of Ethiopia includes how the Emperor Haile Selassie annexed what had been an Italian territory in1962, and included it formally within Ethiopia’s borders.  The territory was called Eritrea and the emperor’s annexation of this slip of land and its coastline (given to the Italians by the victorious Emperor Menelik II following the Battle of Adowa in 1896) precipitated a nearly forty year war for independence.  Eritrea eventually won its independence and recently celebrated its 27th anniversary.  As three of my grandparents are Eritrean, and the other was raised there, I consider myself an Eritrean/Ethiopian.