Culture shock

I guess what I was feeling was culture shock.
Someone described culture shock as the disorienting feeling you get when you expect one thing to happen because that is what has always happened and you get the opposite.
It was Christmas day and the owner of a downtown Konso restaurant invited us for lunch.
As soon as we sat down to eat, there was commotion outside. People were running down the street from all directions toward the traffic circle. They were shouting and waving to each other to follow.
I thought it was a terrible car accident.
I thought it was a parade or some kind of cultural display. Whatever it was, people were excited.
Everyone in the restaurant ran to the door to watch whatever it was.
I asked.
"There's a man with a monkey face," he said.
The American with me - sure we misunderstood - laughed and said, "OK. I guess I would go see that."
We laughed at the ridiculousness of the idea.
I've never had my laughter shut off so quickly.
My heart sank and I felt sick.
A man walked by the restaurant followed by people. He had Downs Syndrome. He was mute, someone said. His attention was focused on an old cassette Walkman he was carrying. He seemed oblivious to the pointing, to the crowd. He was dressed in nothing but a long, torn tank top.
A man in the restaurant asked if I would take a photo.
I hated Ethiopia in that moment. Their reaction was so naked and childish and cruel and unembarrassed.
I had to get away from them, to be alone. I barely touched my Christmas lunch.

*****
Fortunately, I could not hide from Ethiopia forever because I had plans to eat Christmas dinner with a neighbor.
Even though the neighbor is Muslim and even though it isn't a holiday in Ethiopia, he wanted us to have something special.
The neighbor is a farmer and the owner of shops in town. Unlike the mud and straw homes of so many others, his home was made of concrete with many rooms, electricity, a TV and cushioned chairs to receive guests.
The people he invited to dinner were a veritable Konso Rotary Club, the town's movers and shakers - a doctor, a teacher, business owners.
They spoke perfect English and wanted to talk about politics, health care and the state of the world. And it was a chance to ask about all the cultural things we had witnessed but not understood.
They served a soup made of sesame harvested from the farm and local honey. Delicious.

We learned:
* The Konso people have elaborate rituals surrounding death. When someone dies - someone important to the tribe or the family - a statue is carved out of wood in their likeness and erected on their grave or inside the family compound.
Great care and ritual is taken to pass life and power from one generation to the next.
Within a family compound, you can tell how many generations have lived there by the tall stone markers encircling the home.

We learned:
* That in the Konso culture, the women do most of the farm work.
Many time during my stay here, Konso man pointed to the women and said, "See how hard they work. See how much they carry." They seemed proud of it.
And I would see the old women stooped and walking slowly up the hill with loads of firewood or bags of potatoes on their backs.
* Until recently girls were not allowed to go to school.
"The family sees that the girl will grow up and marry and join her husband's tribe. So there is no reason to invest in her."

The sun went down and the electricity went out and we sat in the dark by candlelight.
The teacher decided to tell us a folk tale from the Konso culture - a story parents tell their children.
The moral of the story was that everything has a purpose, even if it isn't obvious at the time - waste nothing, be grateful for everything.
The story was long and detailed and the telling of it lasted almost an hour.
And my mind wandered in and out of the story as I watched the shape of the man's shadow on the empty wall behind him - moving and flickering with the candlelight.

Christmas in Ethiopia

Christmas morning. Woke up early and used my pocket knife to chop down four banana leaves to make four Christmas packages for the other Western farm workers.
In Ethiopia - where the calendar is 13 months and they just celebrated the millennium - Christmas isn't until Jan. 7.
I walked to town the day before Christmas and bought the things I could find for presents - candles, a box of matches, a bracelet made of melted bullet casings and a package of biscuits. Wrapped it all in banana leaves and set it under the mango tree.
Waiting for me under the tree: A mango, a tea bag, a pen, a photo of an old car taken in Hungary by one of the other farm workers, and a half full bottle of Nepalese brandy. No wrapping paper to throw away.

Another day on the farm

I woke up this morning, my first full day on the farm to the sound of the muezzin call to prayer and the sound of a hundred roosters echoing across the valley in answer.
And the sound of a rooster right outside my door.
Through the window, the leaves of a banana tree.

*****
... Is this what I imagined when I pictured myself in Ethiopia?
There I was standing at the top of a mountain of cow dung holding open a burlap bag while Bahrdin shoveled in manure.
That morning, we climbed into the back of a pickup truck and drove to the home of a nearby farmer.
As we filled bag after bag with manure for the garden, a crowd slowly gathered to watch me work.
I could only laugh.
As I walked onto the street with a huge bag of manure on my back, a man asked as casually as if I was sitting in a cafe, "What do you think of Ethiopian culture?"
"It's great," I said. "The best."
What else could I say?

*****
Another first today - used my first machete.
Even though my mind kept picturing myself accidentally chopping off my foot, it was fun to wield that much blade over my head, crashing down onto a fallen papaya tree.

*****
Learned: to burn cow and goat bones in the fire, then crush them while still hot into bone meal for the garden.
Learned: to grind corn and wheat with a mortar and pestle for the chickens. The Ethiopians use a hollowed out log and a yard-long stick to crush the corn - the same way they crush the roasted coffee before they brew it.
I watched one woman pounding corn into a fine meal and the other women stood around her clapping the rhythm as she pounded.

*****
Since I've just been traveling from place to place, I haven't gotten into the day-to-day rhythm of the Ethiopian life. But here at the farm, I am working six days a week like everyone else. Sundays off.
So Saturday night, I felt the excitement - like everyone else.
We finished work and everyone gathered outside the kitchen.
They passed around a plastic bottle of homemade "chugga" - a fermented sorghum drink.
It tasted familiar but I couldn't place it - like a thick, bubbly yeast and bath water smoothie. I pretended to like it.
Then someone shouted and everyone started clapping in a rhythm and the dancing began.
No instruments. Just voices repeating the same phrases over and over.
Unlike the dancing in the north - which is all shoulder movements - the Konso dancers use their whole body.
The neck moves forward and back. Stomping the feet and shaking from the mid-section.
They run toward each other and stomp in the center, then run back to their places.
The kitchen staff pulled me into the dance and a woman smiled, "This is Konso!"
Then the best part ... an old man - a man who goes out of his way to greet me in the morning and who sits quietly next to me in the shade during breaks - danced into the circle. He was holding a machete in one hand. He held it in the air as he danced, stomping and shaking the machete and smiling a smile so huge that I couldn't help but laugh out loud and smile back.

*****
Village life. All day as I work in the garden, I can hear people singing or spontaneously break into a rhythm - clapping their hands and one woman shouting. When I stopped to listen, someone said, "The farmers in Konso do everything together."

They all say, "I want to come to America." But I wonder if they would like it. I think they would be lonely.

Once a week, they have village work days and if you are a member of the tribe you are required to participate. If you don't show up, there is a fine. If you don't pay the fine, you are ostracized.
Being cast out - it's the worst thing that can happen. If you are caught stealing, one man said, you are sent away from the village, forever. You can go to another village, but they will know that you are an outcast and life will never be the same for you.

*****
Spent hours pulling cotton seeds from freshly picked cotton.
Sat with two Konso women who were doing the same task.
They taught me some Konso words and we would sing the words to each other so I could remember them.
Since those were the only words we had in common, when the silence dragged on for too long - we would smile and sing each other's names.

Arriving on the farm

At 5:30 a.m., the bus station in Arba Minch was pitch black except for a few sets of minibus headlights.
I said, "Konso, Konso" to no one in particular and two men pointed toward a blue minibus in the corner of the lot.
30 birr (about $2.50) and a three-hour drive.
As the sun came up, I saw a landscape completely different from the rest of Ethiopia.
This place is lush, green, tropical.
A huge lake in the foreground - the water is red. And towering mountains in the background.
Even the mountains are different. Instead of the granite fists of the north, these are walls of mountains - ranges, linked peak to peak.
A protective wall of mountains on the horizon is a comforting feeling to someone from the Rockies.
I arrived in Konso and vaguely knew that the place I was headed - an organic farm / permaculture training center - is about two miles out of town in the direction of Arba Minch.
Everyone stared but, as always, with an Amharic phrase or two the ice is broken and everyone smiles and tries to help.
Students were walking to school - children in maroon uniforms and high school students in blue.
About a mile out of town, I saw three old men.
"Abet," I said, and reached out my hand. They were excited to shake my hand, making sure each took his turn. I asked if I was headed in the right direction and they pointed just to keep walking. And shook my hand again.
*****

I got a tour of Strawberry Fields from an American guy from Fort Collins who gave off an Alexander Supertramp kind of vibe. He had given himself completely over to his experience at the farm - barefoot, his shoulder-length hair was matted into something like dreadlocks, his uneven beard, the tent he lived in at the top of the hill. Only his wire-rim glasses hinted that he was a recent a fresh college grad from Colorado. When I met him, he was eating a breakfast of lettuce leaves, papaya and beans he harvested from the garden.

The place is a permaculture training center. I got lucky with my timing - a dairy farmer with land near Addis and a farmer from Colombia were there and had a lot to teach.
Permaculture - which is new to me - is based on everything in the garden or on the farm working together as a system. Vegetables are planted in "guilds" or families instead of planting one variety per bed or row. One plant will feed nitrogen to the soil, one will be a ground cover to retain moisture, one will fight pests.
At first, the garden looked like chaos to me. Beds filled with different plants, one on top of the other, mulched with straw. It took an entire day of working in the garden before the light went on and I started to see the order of it.
They build their raised beds with a layer of cardboard on the bottom, then a layer of green material, a layer of compost and a layer of straw. Repeated like a lasagna. The green and the straw decompose to feed the plants and retain water.
Beyond the garden is a seed saving shed. The seeds are saved from everything that is harvested if possible.

Chickens. Rabbits. A "food forest" of papaya, banana, guava and mango trees.
Cotton, beans, coffee planted on the ridge above it all.

A show of unity

Fireworks. Parades. Traditional music late into the night.
Any Ethiopian who could be in Mekele this week is here. Ethiopia is one nation made up of nine states and more than 80 tribes. And for this week, representatives from every corner of Ethiopia are here in a show of unity.
I heard about it late and every hotel in Mekele was booked. After six weeks in Ethiopia, I've made a few friends and started calling them for help. Does anyone know anyone in Mekele?
After a few tries, yes, someone knew someone who knew everyone in Mekele and she found me a room, a pass to the festival (which it turned out I didn't need) and a ride to Addis if I wanted it after the closing ceremony.
That turn of events made me feel at home.

Early morning, I stopped at a nearby restaurant for a coffee and spiced injera before heading to the stadium.
An Ethiopian man at the next table asked where I was from.
Turns out - he lives in Denver and is in his hometown visiting family. He owns a liquor store in Denver and said the city has a huge Ethiopian community. He said there are 70 Ethiopian-owned liquor stores in Denver. (As an aside, Charlie and I went to an Ethiopian restaurant in Denver on our first date.)
The man gave me a ride to the stadium and along the way showed me how his hometown had changed in the 20 years since he moved to the U.S. It has grown from 20,000 people to 300,000, he said.
A river used to flow here, he said.
And this two story hotel in the center of these glass buildings used to be the highest thing in town.

I thanked him for the ride.
"It's not a big deal," he said. "Well, in Ethiopia it's not a big deal. In Denver, you can't just give someone a ride."

The stadium was packed with people standing in the wooden scaffolding that surrounded the bleachers.
I  met an Italian friend who was in town for the celebration and we enjoyed the strange celebrity that comes with being the only white people in a crowd of thousands. People wanted to take our photos, to pose with us. Teenagers snapped pictures with camera phones.
In the center of the field, there was a marching band. They were dressed exactly like an American high school band - tubas, trumpets, batons.
In the stands were children holding up painted cards and as a group, the cards spelled messages in Amharic. Someone would give a signal and the cards would change - different colors to represent the different regions.
Then the cards changed again to form a field of green and in the center was the face of Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi who spoke that morning.

On stage, dignitaries were making speeches, the crowd was cheering and my phone kept ringing. My Ethiopian friends were so excited I was there. They were watching it on TV.
I held my my phone so they could hear.

The mountains of Tigray

Come for the churches, stay for the views.
The Tigray region of Ethiopia - north of Lalibela and just west of the desert - is the home of churches carved out of rock inside caves. What makes them even more special is the journey to get there.
The best churches are hidden at the top of mountains and the only way to reach them is to scramble over boulders, climb sandstone and walk under wind-carved arches.
The red stone pinnacles look so much like the Superstition Mountains in Arizona that I could have fooled myself into believing I was just on a dayhike outside Phoenix. The illusion was broken by a yellow robed nun sitting on the top of the mountain.
An old woman with a shaved head, she lives up there with her elderly brother - a priest - in a home that is half cave, half stacked stone walls. Together they care for the small cave church. They have a cow up there - for milk and they dry the dung and use it for fuel for the fire - and some goats and chickens.

I was traveling with my favorite travel partner so far - a 66-year-old woman from Berlin, a retired architect who was also traveling through Ethiopia on her own. She and I hiked for days in these mountains enjoying the scenery, the people, the quiet and each others' company.
We rented a car and hired a driver in Axum to reach the more remote areas. It took four hours of beer drinking and friendly arguing with the car owner to get a good price, but that was part of the fun.

I saw:
* Farmers threshing grains by driving two oxen in circles over it.
* In Axum, I saw cyclists in spandex and bike helmets training for a race. The sport is catching on slowly but surely here.
* In Axum, I tried to see the church that the Ethiopians believe houses the Ark of the Covenant but as a woman I couldn't get very close. Children gathered rocks and piled them so I could see over the wall.
* Pilgrims in white were still camped on the grounds of the church after a festival celebrating the Ark.
* After days of hiking in the mountains, my travel companion took the rented car back to Axum and I headed for the bus station to catch a ride to a cultural festival in Mekele.
As I waited for the minibus to fill up so we could go, an old woman climbed in. I patted the seat next to me for her to sit down. She sat and handed me two branches heavy with beans.
We sat in silence and ate the beans and waited.

The issue of begging

If your heart doesn't break every day in Ethiopia, you are traveling with your eyes closed.
There is the natural beauty. There is the deep cultural heritage and history. But under it all is this constant buzz of need.

There is an entire generation of Ethiopians in the rural areas, it seems to me - those who grew up in the '80s during the famine - a segment of 20 or 30 somethings who were the recipients of those "for the price of a cup of coffee a day" efforts.
They grew up having sponsors from America and Europe, people who sent money every month.
This boost helped many to get through school and start businesses or move to Addis.
Not everyone was so lucky.
 
This is one of the poorest countries in the world.
And in every place - from the smallest village to the biggest city - there are beggars.
All day long - walking down the sidewalk, looking out the window of the stopped bus - there is someone with their hand out.
Almost every cafe with outdoor seating hires a guard with a big stick to threaten people who beg from customers. 
It's part of the reality here - morning to night - that doesn't weave itself nicely into a travel story but plays constantly in the background.
It was part of the culture shock when I first arrived.
Then, in order to stay sane, I had to shut a part of myself off.
I watch the way the Ethiopians treat the beggars. If they have coins, they give them.
A blind man comes to the open door of the bus, people give what they can. Then they help the man away from the bus before it leaves.
A friend in Addis taught me that when you cannot give, just press your hands together in a kind of blessing.

As I sat for a cup of coffee in Axum, a steady stream of people came up to me, hand out. I acknowledged every one of them as a kind of reflex with a nod and they would move on and it barely interrupted my thoughts.
When I realized it, I marveled at how the mind can adjust to anything. It integrates and accepts the unacceptable. All it takes is a little time. 

One last look at Lalibela

On my last day in Lalibela, I set my alarm for 5:30 a.m.
The priest at St. George told me to arrive early that morning for the service.
As I crested the hill above the church, the sun was coming up.
That fresh, clean, morning light hit the white roves of more than 100 pilgrims standing around the edge of the church. It was only the reflection of the sun, but they seemed to be giving off their own light.
A deacon came over to me and adjusted my head scarf to the "Ethiopian style" and smiled. Then pointed up the hill instead of down toward the church.
These days, when someone point, I go.
At the top of the hill was the sound of running water, the sounds of splashing and a woman screaming. The water poured from a pipe coming out of the side of the mountain. It poured into a cinderblock stall with a metal door that looked like a shower at the public pool.
But behind the door was priest. It was holy water, healing water.
And the woman screaming was possessed by demons someone said. And the priest was pouring water over her and yelling, "Get out! Get out!"
And she yelled, "It's gone!"
And all the people sitting quietly in line for their turn seemed completely unfazed by this. They sat holding babies to be blessed or with empty plastic bottles to take some water home.
Next to me, I could hear the clack, clack, clack of an old woman and her wooden prayer beads.

On the walk home, I found myself in the middle of a funeral for an elderly woman.
Her coffin sat at the base of a giant Sycamore tree in the center of town. Three priests stood over it, shaking rattles and chanting.
Everyone was dressed in white.

Lalibela - this Old Testament town

This is it. Lalibela. The reason people come to Ethiopia.
It's a surreal experience to see something in real life that you've seen so many time in photos. Your expectations remove you from it somehow as you compare the way you thought you would feel with the way you actually feel.
Fortunately, I decided to stay in Lalibela for four days - long enough for that feeling to wear away and to start to appreciate this Old Testament town, this holy city.
Lalibela - home of the monolithic churches carved out of stone. About 20,000 tourists come here each year, most of them on tour buses.
Because it is so "touristy", people kept telling me I would hate it here. But this has been my favorite stop so far.

Yesterday was a festival in celebration of Mary riding a donkey into Bethlehem as she searched for a place to give birth.
Before the sun rose, the streets filled with people walking downhill to Betyam Miriam - the church dedicated to Mary. The women were dressed head to toe in white - their heads and shoulders wrapped in cotton cloth and white dresses falling to their ankles. They carried handmade candles - foot-long sticks wrapped in waxy string to burn at the church.
Chanting came over a megaphone from the church and bounces off the nearby hills and down the dusty streets.

That afternoon, I walked back down to the churches - sat for a moment with the women, still dressed in white, still sitting from the morning waiting for a blessing from the priest.
The priest brought a cross, which the women kissed.

The most famous of the churches is Betyam Giorgis - dedicated to St. George, dragon slayer.
The church is shaped like a Greek cross, carved three stories down in volcanic rock.
The path to the church is a carved valley that spirals from the top to the bottom.
I was the only person there except for the priest - a stroke of luck. He sat in the doorway reading a small Bible aloud. He watched me for awhile, then finally walked over.
"Where is your book? Where is your guide? Where is your camera?"
When he saw I had none of these things, he showed me the church and then sat with me on the steps.
The language barrier was deep but we both tried hard.
Here's what I learned:
Christianity came to Ethiopia early and from what I can tell, it hasn't changed much since then.
Inside each church is a room called the Holy of Holies, separated by a curtain that hangs from the top of the ceiling to the floor. Only the priest can go inside. Behind the curtain is a small replica of the Ark of the Covenant that the priests bring out once a year.
The priests are considered true holy men - the people's connection to God.
At the Sunday service, people stand for three hours - the older people have prayer canes for this purpose.
The priests hit the drum and read the scripture on Ge'ez, the ancient language of Ethiopia.

*****
In the town - a village that grew from 12,000 to 30,000 in the past few years thanks to tourism - the people have welcoming. It took hours to cross town because I kept getting invited in for coffee. The tradition is to drink three cups of coffee. Any more hospitality and I'll have a heart attack from all the caffeine.

*****
I traveled for a day with a woman who was adopted from Ethiopia as a baby (during the famine of the '80s) by an Australian family. At 24, she came back to meet her biological family and to see Ethiopia.
People approached her everywhere we went and were surprised to realize this Ethiopian woman didn't speak Amharic. They pushed her to learn some words.
They asked, "What is your family name?"
"Murphy," she said. This frustrated them.
I can't count how many times this happened in the short time I was with her. She kept a good sense of humor about it, but I could see the identity struggle in her face. We were traveling together but we were experiencing much different countries.