Braver Than You Think

by Maggie Downs

  Some of the street beggars have been aggressive, and twice I am pinned against a building by men demanding money. I have nothing to give.

  The unfortunate thing is that Ethiopia is one of the places I was looking forward to the most. It is a place of stunning natural beauty, from the lakes and lush grasses of the Rift Valley to the rugged Semien Mountains. The carved churches of Lalibela, the crater lakes and sulfur springs of the Danakil Depression, and the palaces of Gondar are like nothing else on this planet. Also the food is extraordinary. Most meals revolve around stews served on injera, which looks like a limp pancake made out of fermented teff flour and tastes like spongy sourdough. The food is eaten with your hands, tearing pieces of injera to sop up the sloppy beans and curries, so it engages every sense, right down to the steamy sauna of sauce sliding down your fingertips.

  There are beautiful things to be found here, I know this to be true. But I am still far gone in a pit of desolation, and every difficulty I encounter in the capital city sends me spiraling farther down.

  After about a week, I get to a point that everyday horrors barely register. I feel mechanical. Case in point: I don’t even notice the dying donkey on the sidewalk until after I step over him. Only afterward do I turn around and offer a second glance.

  I’m with Tanya, a friend I met in Rwanda, whom I had the good fortune of running into again in Ethiopia. She’s an Australian social worker, traveling the continent of Africa with her husband, Paul, in a Land Cruiser with a pop-up tent.

  Tanya stops, presses her hands against her heart, and makes sympathetic noises. This is one of the things that drew me to her from the start—her heart is almost too big for her body. She can’t tear her eyes away from the suffering animal.

  The donkey’s gray fur is matted with sweat, urine, and dirt. Chunks of skin have been torn from the length of his legs, leaving behind a red rawness, something more akin to animal flesh in the butcher shop. Pink lesions dot his trembling mouth, and his eyes weep pus and tears. He pants. His ear flicks. He appears to be about one inhale away from never breathing again.

  We walk on. There is nothing we can do.

  A few minutes later, Tanya turns around and tugs me back toward the donkey. His form is completely motionless. I shake my head and turn away. We are too late, and I don’t have the emotional capacity for more death.

  Tanya pulls a plastic grocery bag and a bottle of water from her backpack. She situates the bag underneath the donkey’s snout, careful to avoid covering his nostrils, and pours a small bit of water inside the bag. The donkey’s eyelids flutter.

  While the donkey no longer has the energy to move his head, the side of his mouth tries to slurp the water. Slowly, slowly, he licks the puddle of water dry. Again, Tanya fills the plastic bag with water and tips it enough to drain into the donkey’s mouth.

  By now a small crowd has formed around us. People who had been hurrying to catch the bus, vendors from local stalls, women with babies in their arms, taxi drivers, businessmen—they all stop. One man says the donkey has been there for three days, but this is the first time anyone has stopped and offered help.

  Tanya and I carefully hoist the donkey’s head and neck up a few inches to give him a better angle for drinking. One leg kicks. Then another.

  “Water makes donkey strong!” says a man on the street, who had paused to watch the commotion.

  Another man walks along the sidewalk and picks handfuls of grass and weeds. He brings these greens to the donkey and lays them beside the animal’s head. Two more men lift the donkey a few inches off the ground, then position him a few feet away on flatter, less rocky ground.

  “It’s better,” one man says, nodding his head to the donkey. “More comfort.”

  By this time, the donkey has guzzled nearly four liters of water and looks remarkably better. He doesn’t have the ability to stand on his own, but he no longer looks pained either. While I pet the donkey, Tanya looks up the number for a donkey-rescue organization—because those exist in Ethiopia—then calls and instructs them on how to find the animal.

  I don’t know how long the donkey will live. But Tanya’s compassion shows me how action snowballs into inspiration, which in turn becomes a call to action for others. Where people were moving about on the street in their daily lives, suddenly they were willing to help another creature. Where I thought there was nothing I could do for another living being, there was.

  What horrifies me most about the incident isn’t the dying donkey but my initial indifference. Who am I in this world if I can’t stoop to give water to a suffering creature? What else do we have if not each other?

  It makes me wonder what else I could have given to my mother in the years she spent dying. I remember visiting the nursing home after she had been living there for a year. She was hunched over in a wheelchair, curled forward, her head drooped against her chest. I stroked her fine gray hair back and called, “Mom?” She never looked up at me. She never met my gaze. And it didn’t make any sense, why she was still there. Why she mattered to the world.

  Tanya and I continue down the street wordlessly. She’s lost in her own thoughts. Meanwhile I struggle to figure out why my mom’s spirit stubbornly remained for so long and what purpose that served. Why the donkey was still kicking when it had every right to give up.

  DEEP IN THE OMO VALLEY, INSIDE ONE OF THE HAMAR villages near the border of Kenya, a small girl tugs on my hand. She has a scarf slung over her head and wrapped across her body, as if she is hiding behind the tattered red-and-gold fabric. While she looks up at me, a gust of wind blows the scarf away, offering me a full view of her face.

  Her left eye is big, bold, brown, framed by leafy lashes. But the other eye is red, severely infected, weepy with green pus.

  “Please,” she says. “Just one birr.” That’s the equivalent of four cents.

  The Omo Valley is populated by indigenous tribes with rich cultural traditions, like body modification, ritual scarring, body painting, and sacred rites. This is where you’ll find the Mursi tribe, where women stretch their lower lips with ornamental plates. Members of the Kara tribe decorate their bodies with elaborate designs using highly pigmented paint made from pulverized minerals mixed with water. Hamar boys are initiated into manhood by running across the backs of fifteen bulls, smeared with dung to make them slippery, at least four times; the Hamar women are voluntarily whipped to demonstrate their support and loyalty to the men.

  This area was the crossroads of humanity for thousands of years, where human migration began, and the region is an important link in human evolution, home to significant hominid fossil discoveries. But it is literally and figuratively far removed from the world I know. To get here, it took three long days in a four-wheel-drive vehicle with a guide who knows the tribes, and to pay for it I used the last of my secret stash of U.S. dollars (a stash so secret that I had forgotten about it until I tore apart my backpack looking for something else).

  Though the tribes have been established in the valley for hundreds of years, living the same way for centuries, that’s changing rapidly. A hydroelectric dam changed the fragile landscape and natural flood cycle of the river. Tribal land has been claimed by the government and leased for commercial farms. Some tribespeople have been forced into resettlement camps.

  The area has also seen an increase in tourism, which creates an unsustainable economy and an unnatural power structure between the tribes and visitors. These are dignified people who cannot live the way they have always lived, because they must parade for travelers, and they are discouraged from making progress; these communities cannot make technological advances for risk of losing the influx of tourist dollars. I cannot figure out how to be a responsible visitor here, because my mere presence feels predatory.

  I give the child with the infected eye a handful of birr, but I’m not naive enough to think it will help. My spirit is broken. I do not feel determined. I do not feel adventurous. I have traveled to the most remote place I’ve ever been, and all the
world has shown me is more pain.

  Someone in the village tells me the girl will be getting attention soon, but I worry it won’t be soon enough. Ethiopia has one of the highest rates of blindness in the world. Most of these cases are caused by infectious eye diseases, like the bacterial infection trachoma, and are preventable.

  I’m not positive this child has trachoma, but it’s so common here that I suspect that’s what she has. It spreads quickly through contact with eye discharge, so all it takes is one child wiping their eyes on a mother’s skirt or a father’s handkerchief, and then the whole village is affected. Poor hygiene facilities—or no facilities at all, which is the case in this village—contribute to the problem, leaving no opportunity to sanitize clothes, wash hands, or clean faces. When I walk away, I scrub my hands with an antibacterial wipe, one of a few I keep in a small first aid kit.

  After my encounter with the girl, I visit the local market, where people from the Hamar tribe barter and trade vegetables, livestock, and tej, honey wine. The women wear their hair in short locks styled with butter fat and stained with red clay. The men keep their hair closely cropped or their heads shaved. Both men and women have scarred skin from ceremonial cutting and ritual beatings with sticks and thorns. Some of these are beauty marks, but some of the scarification represents success in battle.

  Although I am curious about other communities and how they live, which is one of the things I love about travel, I am uncomfortable here, a tourist of people. I can’t decide if my presence exploits this culture or helps preserve it. It’s only relatively recently that currency was introduced to these tribes, but it overshadows almost all of my interactions. People ask for money in exchange for photos. If I don’t want to take photos, they throw rocks until I go away.

  The one exception is a matronly woman who approaches me at the market. She wears a skirt of goat hide and fabric, slung loose and low around her hips. She has no shirt, but heavy ropes of cowrie shells and beads swing from her neck.

  The woman smiles, takes my hand, and pulls my fingers across the bare skin just under her breasts. I nearly jump back in surprise, not from the ornamental scarring that spirals across her torso like a garland of Braille, but because it’s been a long time since I’ve touched anyone. She urges me to buy some tej, which I do, and we split a bottle. I drink too much, and soon I feel dizzy. We can barely communicate, but she is a scarred woman, and I have scars too.

  That night I go to sleep in a shelter with a tin roof and walls made of tree branches and dung. I stay there the whole next day too. There is a rattle in my chest, my head burns with fever, and my stomach is upset. I sleep on the floor and only have enough strength to use the restroom in a bowl on the other side of the room. When a storm passes through, the rain leaks through the roof and leaves sorrowful puddles around me. I cough as though there is something inside me trying to get out.

  I am miserable. I’ve heard that plants are grateful for the cold, and that some flowers only bloom in the mud. The idea is not just that harsh conditions cultivate beautiful things, but also that we have to endure suffering in order to appreciate the lack of suffering. Pain is the necessary element for growth.

  I think about the woman at the market and her beautiful, unsettling scars, formed from dozens of tiny cuts. The wounds must have been excruciating until the welts formed, and now they demonstrate how strong she is. But that’s the nature of pain, isn’t it? You can’t cure it; you can’t fix it; you only let it heal.

  Go to Your Scary Place

  OF ALL THE PLACES IN THE WORLD, INDIA IS THE ONLY place I don’t want to visit, and that’s because it sounds daunting. I am intimidated by the things I’ve seen on the news, which is all I know about India—the country’s size, the number of people, the sickness, the depth of poverty. It sounds like too much.

  Then Barbara meets up with me in Addis Ababa, where I have returned after the Omo Valley. I’m no longer running a fever, but I’m not well either.

  Barbara gives me the used-car-salesman pitch. She says that India is one of those must-see places for every backpacker. She promises it will be transformative.

  “You’re not a real backpacker unless you go to India,” she says in an effort to peer-pressure me into it.

  It works. Plus I have been spending too much time alone, and I could use the company. Besides, I was the person who talked her into coming to Ethiopia, a place she wasn’t exactly keen on seeing. So in an effort to be agreeable, I agree. We arrange visas and purchase tickets, and we will be sitting side by side as we fly into Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay. I’m nervous, but I’m relieved to be exploring a new place with someone familiar.

  The night before our flight, Barbara approaches me on the patio at our hostel and says, “Hey. Don’t be mad at me, but …” Though I don’t know exactly what she’s going to say, I already know it’s going to be bad. Nothing good ever follows that phrase.

  There’s a guy, she continues.

  “And I’ve decided to go to Berlin with him. My flight leaves in three hours.”

  It’s devastating and disappointing, but I can’t even summon the strength to argue. I wish Barbara well, even though I believe she’s making a mistake, and I stomp off. I consider veering off course and changing my flight to somewhere that sounds easier to navigate. I could learn to surf in Australia. Go on multi-day hikes in the New Zealand countryside. Explore the beaches of Bali.

  But then I wonder if there’s some other reason I am bound for India. Maybe this was meant to be. I try to remember if my mom ever said anything about India, and I can’t come up with anything. It’s possible she was intimidated by the thought of India too.

  Kaj, a Canadian journalist I’ve gotten to know at the hostel bar, sees that I’m upset and buys me a beer. After I spill the story, he writes two bits of advice on a piece of paper. One is the name of an affordable place to stay in Mumbai. The other is the name of a town he’s sure I’ll love.

  I tuck the torn blue paper into my wallet, and it feels more valuable than any of the paper money inside. Faced with a country that feels enormous and strange, having a direction is like finding a treasure map.

  I land in Mumbai at 4 a.m. Alone. Exhausted. Frightened and sick. An infection from the grit and pollution of Ethiopia has settled into my lungs, and I can hardly move without sending myself into a coughing fit. My body aches.

  I hand over my blue piece of paper to a taxi driver, and we depart in one of Mumbai’s iconic yellow-and-black Premier Padmini taxis.

  Just past the ring of high-rise hotels that encircle the airport is a sprawling neighborhood of bewildering poverty and neglect. This is Annawadi, one of India’s most famous slums, where thousands of people squat on airport property. The sewers are open and flowing. Towers of trash line the maze of roads.

  “The first thing I noticed about Bombay was the smell of the different air,” writes Gregory David Roberts in the novel Shantaram, and that’s what hits me as well. The taxi window is down, and the air that rushes into the car is thick, smoky, and bloated with humidity. It smells robust, like perfume and incense, waste and potent spices.

  We drive through the slums as dawn breaks. The homes are slim and cramped; life spills out onto the streets. There are people everywhere. Hundreds if not thousands of people beginning work for the day. They carry jugs of water, start fires, brew tea. They pack carts full of fruits and flowers. Neighbors yell to each other. Children wash their faces. Women make food. Dogs bark.

  The roads open into a cityscape of stunning architecture, shiny buildings, signs, fabric, stalls, cars, trucks, people, cows. There’s a cacophony of horns from all the vehicles that surround us. Every block reveals something beautiful and something strange, and it is everything.

  Sure, I have fallen in love with locations at first sight before. Sucre, Bolivia, was one. Another was Sedona, Arizona, during a Christmas road trip with Jason. We arrived at night and couldn’t see anything beyond our car’s headlights. When we looked out our hotel room in th
e morning, the sheer beauty of the snow-dusted red mountains felt like a wallop. And now there is Mumbai, which steals my heart immediately with its majesty and color and noise. Being here is like flipping a switch inside; I feel lit from within.

  The taxi driver drops me off at the address I requested, a building that looks like every other building in the neighborhood. A white structure grayed by soot and mildew, tangles of electrical wires stretched overhead. When I knock on the door, a grizzled old man opens it, hands me the key to a room, and then shuffles away. He doesn’t even ask for payment. I drop my backpack by the bed and head back outside. It takes effort because I’m still struggling to breathe from my lung infection, but Mumbai has already wooed me like a new lover, and I can’t imagine staying indoors.

  My hotel is within walking distance of the Gateway of India, the enormous basalt arch that proudly stands watch over the Mumbai Harbor, so I catch it in the morning light. A purple spun-sugar mist simmers over the water, and birds fill the air. It is dazzling. Equally dazzling, a man bicycles down the road with trays of eggs stacked on the back in a precarious tower that is taller than he is, a balancing act as beautiful as anything in Cirque du Soleil.

  The vendors are just setting up for the day, and I buy a fresh plate of bhel poori, puffed rice tossed with cooked onions and potatoes, drizzled with a tart tamarind sauce, and drink a small mug of chai. It is warm and creamy enough to soothe my prickly throat. Then I visit a pharmacy, where I am given pills and an inhaler for my lungs. I return to my hotel room, take the pills, and sleep for the next two days within the peach-colored walls.