Visitor #1. Also, Why I Fought That Priest (and other stories)

Playing Pictionary at Operation Rescue; Tasha looks on

Well, I'm finally posting this blog three days late.  Internet woes and then my data plan running out meant more and more things happened that I couldn't report to this blog.  And now my head contains a deep funk of events and info, all of which is jostling for priority space in this blog, and very little of which can fit nicely into a single theme.  Thus the strange title.  But I caught your interest, right?

To begin with, I didn't actually fight a priest.  But more on that later.  First, Natasha Woodward came all the way to Mekele just to see us!  She was our first visitor, and her visit was all too brief.  She's already in Cairo, hopefully not too sick from the cold she was destined to get from us; there has never been a time when she's left our home healthy.  Indeed, on her last day, she was sucking down that airborne like her life depended on it.

While Tasha was here, we climbed and climbed in the Gheralta Mountains and poked our heads through small doors that opened into cliffside churches.  These churches have seen hundreds of years come and go.  It was humbling.  I'm sure I've written about the wonder of being in the presence of ancient Ethiopian Christian art.  But I find it nearly impossible to describe how fitting it is to visit these paintings in the cave churches nestled into the sides of the Gheralta Mountains, and then step out onto a ledge to literally feel what the builders of these places felt - closer to God.  These places are magical for other reasons, too. Up there on the cliff sides, the views may remind you of Arizona, or Northern California, or Switzerland.  But you're looking down from dizzying heights onto fields of teff (the grain from which injera is made) and sorghum and wheat.  And behind you are paintings of ancient saints that look like...you, if you're Ethiopian.  I've visited countless cathedrals across Europe, been to any number of museums.  Unless the paintings depict slaves or servants, no one in them looks like me.  Except in Ethiopia.  So yeah, I connected.

Except, except, except...I then had to go and fight the priest.  Which really makes only this painting truly reflect who I am.

Ah, yes.  That's a very sheepish looking devil painted on a pillar in Gebremichael Church which was probably carved out of the cliff sometime in the 14th century.  Let me explain why I identify so strongly with him.

I've explained how Ethiopia is a country of contradictions before; how people with such a grand history can be so easily amazed at having a mixed race family walk through a village and all of that.  Well, it all came to a head on our hike up to see Gebremichael church.  Let me back up a bit and add also that living in Ethiopia provides daily opportunities to put aside any pretense that you are actually in control of your circumstances.  You might think you're baking banana bread today, for example, until you realize that all the sugar distribution shops in your neighborhood no longer have sugar and that the sugar permits have now been given to another neighborhood and you now need your ID to go buy some.  Or perhaps you were going to take a shower today, but the power has gone out not for one hour, but for the last two days, and the pump that sends water to the tank above your house doesn't work, so you can't allow it to go dry by doing something as trivial as bathing.  So no banana bread, no shower.  You can almost get used to that sort of thing.  Almost.

What you might find it difficult to get used to - as I mentioned before - is the staring, the commentary, and the general intrusions into your life even when you are in a remote place and seeking out a history that you hope you can peacefully and privately claim as your own.  It's just the way things go here.  First, guides and church visits aren't exactly cheap.  I know, right?  How dare I put a price on such grand history, etc.  But when you and your beloved have taken a year off work, those dollars add up, yo!  Second, people around these sites are poor.  Subsistence farming is just that;  it allows a family to subsist.  A lot of young men and boys are looking to earn a little something.  So up we're trekking on this mountain on our way to see Gebremichael Church.  One boy joins us.  Then another boy joins us.  Then we get to the top and a whole host of folks are up there, ready to show us around.  So we have a good look-see, and our guide gives us the history of the place.  I snap some nice shots (again, see facebook).  And then we begin to descend.  We now have at least five pairs of helping hands supporting us as we step down from boulder to boulder and it quickly becomes beyond irritating.  I freeze about mid-way down and roar at some poor village kid who's helping Micah as if he's an invalid, "Leave him alone!  He can do it himself!"  We carry on, and before too long, I hear a surprised yelp from Tasha who, while negotiating a tricky little descent, feels an unexpected hand grab her arm from behind.  The deacon of the church wants to help her out, bless him.  But I lose it!  I stand there and yell at the whole assembled cast of characters in the best Amharic I can summon:

"We climb mountains all the time!  We don't need any help, for God's sake!  We go up and we go down mountains with 50kg on our backs (I'm really bad at math, I meant 20kg, but that's how mad I was).  And if we fall down, guess what?  We'll just get back up and keep moving.  Now let us go down by ourselves, will you?!"

Mark suggested gently that I cool it.  But I couldn't.  All I could see was another intrusion, another little game we'd play at the bottom where we'd have to shell out more cash for all the help we didn't need.  And sure enough, at the bottom, there happened to be a council meeting under a sycamore tree - a scene that was almost Biblical all by itself.  The meeting was about many things totally unrelated to us, but one of the elders caught our guide while we tried to slink by.  So we stood by and heard this side discussion which I chose to stay out of about how we should have paid for our two youngest (which really, we should have; they take up more space than me at this point).  Our guide argued valiantly that they were children and should not pay.  We were released and began to walk back to the car.  Our five extra "helpers" tagged along.

But wait!  They weren't done with us!  An earnest young man followed us with the priest of the ancient church in tow.  Well that was it.  If I was wearing long sleeves, I would have been pulling them up and crouching.  I don't know what hit me; maybe it was the month of being stared at, struggling with language, with the unexpected, with having very little control over anything, with not really feeling like this family adventure was as hunky-dory as it should have been one month in.  I don't know.  But we went head to head, that young man and I, with the priest crouching on a little rise near us and my family behind me.  The young man did what I've heard Ethiopians do my whole life - use language as an art form, a tapestry that dazzles you and draws you in and makes you feel important and respected and vital.  But it all boiled down to, "How dare you come to our church and not pay a donation?" I tell you, I blocked his words like Wonderwoman with her wristbands and then held my finger up.

"Now let me tell you something..." I began, and out came a torrent of words that actually even amazed me in their fluency.  I wanted to tell him that I was tired of being harassed, that if a church charges a large entrance fee, then why should I pay a donation of any kind? That I was now obliged to pay a number of assistants whose assistance was useless and intrusive.  That the tourism industry in Ethiopia, perhaps the country in Africa most deserving of a phenomenal tourist industry, gives me an everlasting headache.  Instead, I said that my husband and I left our home and our jobs to bring our family to Ethiopia to learn the language and the culture and that we were not earning one cent the entire year.  We paid the entrance fee as required, and didn't appreciate being chased down by village officials and the priest so that we could "voluntarily" provide a "donation."  The priest looked on, amazed.

Yes.  Read these words and weep.  I have fallen low, my friends.  I realized it immediately, and asked Mark for some money in the moment when that voice in my head said, "You will live to regret these words, you fool." But as I tried to stuff the bill into the village official's hand (as he was hugging me goodbye, by the way!), he turned it away and said he would absolutely not take it.

Ok, so I didn't actually fight a priest, in case you were looking for a Kung Fu sort of situation.  But I did feel like I was fighting him, fighting everything, really.  Oh my gosh.  This magnificent country is exhausting.

I've thought about it a bit.  If you're standing on the cliff's ledge with these ancient paintings at your back and fields of teff, stone huts with thatched roofs and livestock hundreds of feet below you, you realize that the thing about Ethiopia is that history never really leaves you alone.  It's everywhere. It's just everywhere.  We went to Axum after the Gheralta Mountains, and admired pre-Christian Stelae not just in the carefully fenced off historic district of Axum, but in the very fields of teff that farmers still plow by ox-drawn plows and which young children harvest with scythes.  Yes, these ancient monoliths from the 4th century jut out of fields where children play.  In Axum, young men were splashing in and lounging around an ancient bath where legend has it that the Queen of Sheba once bathed.  On our drive back to Mekele, we saw countless villagers carrying chickens and produce, driving sheep, goats, cattle for miles on foot to the Saturday market, a ritual that probably hasn't changed since the Axumite kings, and all the kings stretching back for millennia.  I'm smiling now when I juxtapose these villagers walking for hours to the market with the lunch we had in a cafe in Axum.  I have taught myself (again) to read in Amharic/Tigrinya, but my pace is painfully slow.  So the waitress is standing there as I read the five different types of burgers on the menu to the family, one burger at a time.  It took like five minutes.  And then we all look up at the waitress and she says, "We don't have any burgers today."  I can hardly believe it on two fronts; what kind of cafe with five burgers on the menu has no burgers to serve us, and why do waitresses here always wait until you've discussed a dish in detail before telling you it's not available? My first instinct is to add it to the growing list of reasons Ethiopia always seems to be playing catch up in my mind, perpetually immersed in its own history.  Call it the Burger On The Menu vs. Burger Availability Discrepancy, an economic principle that exists only in my shallow mind.  But then I'm forced to ask the question again and again after such experiences, and especially after that incident with the priest: Who am I to bring my modern, messed up, Western, Ethiopian/Eritrean wannabe sensibilities to bear in this place?

     When, oh when will I learn to let go and just yield to the grip of this country?  Sigh.  Sigh, sigh, sigh.

     Well, maybe it's already happened a little bit.  I can report to you that today in church, we sat behind three rows of visiting Swiss short-term missionaries.  I sat there and thought about them; these fine specimens of their country; these downhill-skiing, excellent cheese-eating, schedule-respecting young people.  And I had stared at them for like fifteen minutes straight before I realized that I was staring shamelessly at these ferenjis.  Yeah, they looked different, they stood out, and that invited me to speculate about who they were and make some extremely stereotypical judgements about them.  Not because I looked down on them, or despised them or anything.  Just because!  Might I have learned a lesson here about the difference between curiosity and intrusiveness?

   I don't know.  Let's see how I feel at the end of this coming week.  We have finally started our volunteer work at Operation Rescue Ethiopia (http://operationrescue.ch/?lang=en), and it feels nice to be among children, sort of in teaching mode again.  Children - when you let them get close to you - bring all your guards down and have a way of forcing you to pay attention to the moment instead of wrapping all your frustrations up into a messy ball and doing something bad (like hurling it at a simple priest who's only asking for your help in protecting what you claim as your history).  So I leave you with this picture of Mark, who swears that he'll learn Tigrinya fastest by just hanging out with these kids and letting them guide him.  He's got the right idea.

P.S.  I feel it would be wrong to end without updating you on my favorite Turkish soap.  I can report that Hazal suffered no long-lasting effects from being pinned under that car for many hours but that she still is a very bad person and I wish she'd at least had one leg amputated or something.  She's bad news.