"Exciting" Is A Relative Term

Their next album drops soon

If coming back from Asia and Kenya to Ethiopia had a sound effect, it would be like the sound of screeching tires.  Our first stop was to our bed and breakfast in Addis which - through no fault of its own - had no power.  No power means no water, since water pumps are electronically operated.  So we spent our first cold night in Addis without electricity or running water.  We laughed (just a little) and agreed that it was a good way to readjust to life in Mekele.  We landed in Mekele to find that our rooftop water tank had run dry and there was no running water in our house, either.  Azeb, who helps us in the house, had been drawing water up from the underground tank with a pail tied to some long cable.  Like a pioneer woman.  Ridiculous.  But hey, we ordered a tanker of water and the problem was fixed in no time.   Also, there is no 3G in Mekele, which means no mobile internet.  It makes checking e-mail regularly impossible.  Never mind blogging.

So I convinced myself that blogging regularly wasn't all that important, because really, nothing truly exciting was happening anyway.  But I looked over the pictures as I downloaded them from my phone and I placed myself back in freezing Silver Spring, Maryland.  In just six months, I'll be back there, and living a comfortable life with plenty of internet, water, and electricity.  Hot showers for days and days!  But I won't be able to hang out with hundreds of kids on Christmas day, slaughter a sheep, or climb the most treacherous trails ever conceived. So yeah, some exciting stuff has been going on, and I guess I should chronicle it while I'm in internet land, if only for myself.  And by internet land, I mean Addis Ababa, where I've come by myself for a few days of paper work.

Full disclosure, there is a gruesome picture of a sheep's head further down, so if you're squeamish or against the killing of animals to make delicious food items, you have been warned.

Let me begin with our return to Operation Rescue Ethiopia, where our time is marked by daily contact with the kids.  We teach them in class for an hour and then we play for another two hours.  If you ever visit ORE you will quickly discover that there are no strangers there.  The kids will come to you, put their arms on your shoulders, lean into you and look you straight in the eye from very close.  They hug you, hold your hand, demand that you play with them, draw with them, dance with them, sing with them, whatever.  In other words, it's the friendliest place ever.  Yes, those kids fight like crazed ninjas, but we've learned that if you give the rascals a few minutes, some kind of primal justice will prevail and they'll be arm in arm like siblings moments later.  Anyway, all this to say, there's a LOT of intimacy at ORE.  And if you're like me, it's sometimes hard to have that much physical contact and connection; you need a break.  So the return to ORE was something I admit I had to gear up for.  Also, I wondered if the kids would resent us for taking off for so long and just swanning back in as if nothing had changed.  So as we approached ORE's gate, I was a bit nervous.

Let me tell you, when they realized we'd come back, a whole mass of those kids dropped what they were doing and ran to us, arms outstretched, calling our names!  Can you imagine a welcome like that?  Scores of little arms around our waists, little hands pulling our faces down for kisses, questions, questions, questions.  I mean, it was absolutely magical, and erased completely that screeching tires sound.  We felt so unworthy and yet so welcome; it melted our hearts.  And my dad learned immediately that if you sit down and start to talk to one kid, you'll have an audience in no time, and you will feel like a hero for singing even the most simple song.  He absolutely killed with a song he learned from a female climber on Kilimanjaro a few years ago:

Tabitha, Tabitha, make me some porridge

First you stir it with your right arm

Then you stir it with your left arm

Then you stir it with your right foot

Then you stir it with your left foot

THEN YOU STIR IT WITH YOUR BUM BUM!

You can imagine the kids watching my dad do the actions and collapsing in laughter.

Dad gets acquainted

Anyways, just two days later, I celebrated my 46th birthday in grand Gebremedhin style.  This is the image my eyes confronted at the break of dawn:

I think a 46 year old should be allowed to sleep in, but it's all good

Later that morning, at a more sane hour, we all went to ORE where a grand Ethiopian Christmas (which is on January 7) was organized for the kids.  The staff had gone all out, organizing some really funny games for the kids and awarding some truly trailblazing prizes.

These crazy kids volunteered to eat four bananas and down one bottle of water.
Filimon, the kid on the right won.

This team includes some of my most interesting students.  Anyone who knows
what a 15/16 year old girl is like will understand what I mean.

Kybra is the winner in a catch the rooster competition

Among the prizes awarded were kilos of tomatoes, onions, flour, and live chickens.
We should try that at school competitions in the US.  Oh wait, there are no winners
anymore.  Everyone is a winner.  That's way too much produce to award.  We'll stick
to those ribbons, I guess.

After the festivities, our family went to buy a sheep.  It was as simple as I'm making it sound.  We crossed the street, accompanied by Getachew - director of ORE - walked for a few minutes, chose a sheep, hired a man to slaughter it, brought it back and had it slaughtered at ORE where the facilities are better for this sort of undertaking.  Our house wasn't built with a little canal for blood, or a place to hang a sheep upside down to butcher.  On our way, we had to wait for a small lead group and peloton of racers to pass.  Bike racing is big in this part of Ethiopia.

We chose a really cooperative sheep who never complained about a thing all the way to his quick death.  Our butcher is a man who, like many others, carries a knife and little else with him, offering his services at these markets.  He can do the work of three men in a fraction of the time.  He takes the skin, washes the entrails (you need these to make dulet, a delicacy that is not to be missed), and you take your freshly butchered meat and make delicious beg wat (spicy mutton stew).  Azeb, our intrepid helper, cooked it and it was amazing and tender.  We now have a freezer full of mutton, and I even had to take a container of dulet to a friend's house to freeze while I was gone.  Something told me that the rest of my family did not consider a dish made of sheep entrails, liver, kidney, stomach, and a bit of bile a dish "not to be missed" while I was gone.  Actually, the dulet was probably not missed by them.  Shame.  They're not Habesha yet.

This was not the sheep we took home

This was the sheep we took home

Look at these handsome guys!  These uniforms and fifteen beautiful
soccer balls were donated to ORE by my wonderful Aunt Naomi and Uncle
Bruce, and sent from the states via my dad.

So Ethiopian Christmas was celebrated in high style; we watched soccer practice on Christmas Eve  and we even squeezed in a dinner and movie night at our friends', the Spencers on Christmas Day.  We reunited with some of the folks who I wrote about in one of my first blogs, entitled "Community".  We meet every Sunday for house worship, but every once in a while, Greg and EJ (and now their new baby Rowena), host a movie night by projecting a beautiful, shiny, clear movie on their living room wall.

How can anyone play cards when Ratatouille is showing?

Right after Ethiopian Christmas, our family set off to Gheralta where there are nearly forty cliff-hewn churches to explore.  I think I've written about Gheralta before (recall the priest-fighting saga), so I won't go into too much detail here.  But I do want to say the one hike I've been terrified of doing since we first went loomed large on this hike.  So terrified of this hike was I, that I saw it in my dreams, and could imagine my children tumbling down the side of the mountain, my screams following them all the way down.  The hike takes you up to Abuna Yemata church.  I've been assured that only one person has died up there, a university student who had vertigo.  And Mark and Eli - who had gone there on their own a few months back - assured me that it was safe.  They indicated the width of the ledge leading into the church with ever-widening hands.  Their hands were just never wide enough apart.

So I decided to take my 83 year old dad up there.  And my very nervous son, Micah.  I'm telling you, I've never been so frightened of a physical circumstance.  We got up there and I literally muttered under my breath each time we passed a dangerous point - a steep scramble, a climb over a boulder that had sheer 200 meter drops on either side of it, the navigation of that ledge which was narrow enough to be foolhardy - "Please God don't let him trip, Please God."

No one tripped.  I closed my eyes as my dad made his way into the church.  I yelled at Micah "You WILL do this!" and then closed my eyes as he was led in.  (Mark told me later that Micah's legs had literally been shaking the whole time).  And then I went in, leaning into the wall with my whole heart, refusing to turn around and look at the drop behind me, and the view of the valleys and ridges beyond.  And then inside the cave, I bawled like a baby.  You have to understand, I wouldn't even let my kids stand against the railing of a slightly elevated platform overlooking a duckpond at Brookside Gardens in Silver Spring.  I couldn't watch them stand on the glass platform in the Willis Tower in Chicago.  I have a projected terror of heights, certain that gravity will suck my loved ones down, down, down.

Dad is watched carefully by Kinfu, our trusty guide, as
he makes his way along the ledge.  I did not take this picture as I couldn't watch.

Inside the church, a painting of Abuna Yemata (Father Yemata, an early Egyptian saint) on horseback.  

To check out how thrilling this place is, you can skim this article in the Daily Mail:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/travel_news/article-2823326/Abuna-Yemata-Guh-church-sky-Ethiopia-world-s-inaccessible-place-worship.html

This article suggests that Abuna Yemata Guh is the most inaccessible place of worship on earth.  Well guess what, Daily Mail, we accessed it.  But oh, so did these people:

These ladies had gone up, no ropes (some of us used ropes), for a baptism.
The lady with gray hair peeking between two ladies is 80 years old.  Kind of
puts our heroism into perspective.

When we came down off the mountain, I was relieved as heck.  Our guide Kinfu - the same guide we always use in Gheralta - is from the area.  He calls the ladies above his aunties, and the men below his uncles.  He insisted that we go and greet these men, and no sooner had my dad doffed his cap to greet them than we were forced to sit down, drink tela (a local brew) and eat some injera.  Kinfu announced to them that we'd made it to the top and they looked at us like, "And...?" But they were very kind and reminded us of what traditional Ethiopian hospitality looks like.

Dad approaches the men.  The bowing begins.

Dad, Eli, Daniel, Kinfu, Mark, and Micah eat injera.  We were offered tela,
the traditional brew.  I love tela but was fearful of drinking it in such a remote place; I
was worried about contamination.  Dad later said that tela was the one thing you could
safely drink in such circumstances, and that the missionaries of old were permitted this
one indulgence if invited to partake, because it was safer than drinking water.

We had a marvelous time in Gheralta, including on this hike up to Mariam Korkor church.  I've written about this church as well, in the past, but it is one of our favorite hikes.

Descending from Mariam Korkor.  It's not as bad
as it looks.

And here's a picture of our exciting crew, taken with the expertise of a true mountain guide:

To top off all this excitement, I got to fly back to Addis with my dad and send him on his way to Nairobi, and then back to the chilly US of A.  Meanwhile, I've spent the last few days here in Addis doing some paperwork and catching up with friends and family:

My Uncle Hiruy took me out to dinner at a fancy French
restaurant called the Louvre in Addis.

Poppy and Sym Holben and Cleo the dog

with Zeb and his daughter Hannah

And to come full circle, I came back to stay at the guest house that greeted us a few weeks ago with darkness and a pail of water with a pitcher in it for bathing.  But this time my room is bathed in light, and water flows freely from the taps.  I've enjoyed staying here in my little room with the comfy bed, and my young Swedish neighbors whose days start as mine is ending (I literally saw them head out across the street as I was coming back in tonight after a day in the city).  It all feels good right now; sitting here and writing of the happenings of the last few weeks.  That screeching brakes sound is gone and I'm surrounded by silence.  I'll be back in Mekele tomorrow where internet woes will continue to plague us all.  But every once in a while, I think about what else is on offer here - the things we do when we're forced to disconnect.  I think about the views from Mariam Korkor, or the rush from climbing Abuna Yemata and I wonder, "Who needs water, electricity, and internet?"

Me.  I won't lie.  I need those things.  But it does make for a somewhat more exciting life, I guess.

PS, yes, I am back in Turkish soap opera land, but Hazal's non-biological mom, Gulseren, died of a bullet wound meant for her soon to be step-son (Hazal's biological brother), on her wedding day to Hazal's biological dad.  If you didn't follow any of that, know that one of the most intriguing characters of the show was killed off, and Hazal continues to be a terrible person.  So I don't care if I miss an episode every now and then.

Also, if you couldn't tell before, you should tell from that PS that this was Marta, and not Daniel writing, this blog.