"You won't do that, of course," Charlie said.
"Of course not, honey. That would be crazy."
And yet, I found myself standing there last night - in the dark, holding a strip of camel meat, surrounded by a pack of hyenas.
"This is crazy."
I'd been sitting there for almost an hour at the base of a giant fig tree. The roots of the tree rolled over the exposed stone coffin of an ancient holy man - an Islamic scholar. A shrine.
And my mind went back and forth between admiration for the incredible tree, for the clear night sky and the flash of hyena eyes as they jumped for another piece of meat from the mouth of the hyena man.
Finally, the man came over to me and said, "It is nothing to watch. You should feed them."
When I politely declined, he picked up his bucket of camel meat and sat right next to me.
The hyenas gathered around us.
He said - each hyena has a name.
He said - his father before him was a hyena man and he has known the hyenas since he was a child.
He said the people of Harar have a spiritual connection to the hyenas. That they carved holes into their walled city so the animals could come through. And after he finished feeding them, they would go into the city and eat whatever they could find. The hyenas would eat whatever trash the herds of goats, stray dogs and circling hawks didn't eat during the day.
He said - Harar has a festival once a year when residents each put a bowl of porridge by their door for the hyenas. And if the hyenas eat your porridge, it means good luck for the rest of the year.
And somehow, the talking lulled me and the hyenas being so close made me brave enough to feed them myself.
Up close, they seem like oversized, malformed dogs. Soft spotted fur. Thick necks. Hunched shoulders and eager eyes.
He wrapped a strip of camel meat on a stick about as long as a pencil.
I held it high in the air and a hyena jumped. I felt his teeth clamp down on the stick, inches from my fingers, and I felt the teeth slide the meat off the stick.
Then, another and another.
And when I was done, I felt the now-familiar, warm rush of catharsis after another fear faced.
*****
Harar is a traveler's dream. A walled city with 82 mosques and more than 300 winding cobblestone alleys. It feels like something out of storybook Arabia.
For centuries, it has been a crossroads - a huge market for goods from the Arab world, India and East Africa.
All those influences are still here. On one street, you'll hear people speaking Somali, Harari, Oromo, Amharic, Arabic and English.
I saw:
* A street of tailors. Men working heavy steel sewing machines powered manually with two feet by a large pedal.
* Spices, incense, tea in open burlap sacks on every corner.
* A man sitting next to a camel head, carving camel meat off the bone.
*****
I couldn't find anyone to come to Harar with me - so I got on a bus and came by myself.
But the thing about Ethiopia is that you are never alone.
It's the thing that makes traveling here so fun but exhausting on the days when you need some good old-fashioned American privacy.
Examples:
* The bus stopped in a village on the way to Harar and I sat by the side of the road next to a woman selling bananas. A boy in a skull cap with a dusty face stood in front of me and stared. When I would look at him and smile, he would beam for a second and then look away. And soon there were children all around me, standing quietly, and two women who brought stools to sit nearby. And no one really looking at me - just encircling me quietly.
* And only minutes after my arrival in Hara, I stopped at a stall to buy some toothpaste and one of the other customers heard my Amharic (attempts) and invited me to sit for an avocado juice and samosas. We sat at a sidewalk cafe and he introduced me to everyone who walked by.
So - alone in Ethiopia, but never alone.
Never alone. Bring it back with you. Maybe not the hyenas though it was great to read about your encounter.
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