by Glen Chilton
Mark Twain wrote that the “one thing in the world that will make a man peculiarly and insufferably self-conceited” is to have a settled stomach while those around him are vomiting. I was doing my very best not to feel self-conceited that I had remembered to drink my anti-diarrheal potion.
On my pre-breakfast walk through Jinka the next morning, I chose a small side road lined with family dwellings and an elementary school. My wanderings attracted the usual smiles and surprised looks, and also attracted Phillip. He was delighted when I greeted him by name. He must have been searching very hard to find me on a back street, and I felt rather complimented. We talked about Canada and Ethiopia, giving him a chance to practise his English and me a chance to practise talking to young people.
Our group drove east toward Key Afar. En route, I noticed that a lot of men were sporting rifles. Surely this had nothing to do with protecting livestock from wildlife, particularly since the main industry seemed to be road construction. Legese explained that different tribal groups maintained antagonistic relationships. Violent conflicts broke out over stolen cattle or goats, and over disputed territory. Lindsay asked where the guns might be acquired. “We are close to the border with Kenya,” said Legese. “Getting guns is easy.”
Key Afar is a sleepy little spot for most of the week, but on Thursday, market day, it comes alive. We walked along the main street, passing many people bringing goats, chickens, and produce to market. We took a quick look around the market plaza to see what was on offer. We found spices, ochre used in personal decoration, and sandals made of old automobile tires nailed roughly into the shape of a foot. At that point a young man made a very amateur attempt to steal my wallet. He bumped into my shoulder and then made a grab for the wallet in my front pocket. Unfortunately for him, the pocket was buttoned, and he slunk away with a disappointed look on his face.
Whatever had made Lindsay so ill overnight struck me, and I retired to a small café. Bilious waves of nausea hit me, and I was self-conceited no longer. Hoping to settle my stomach, I ordered a Fanta but received a Sprite. Feeling worse by the minute, I nursed my drink in the shade.
A lovely calm settled over me. After all, if I was going to be nauseous, where better than the shade of the verandah of a café in a small village in a remote corner of Ethiopia? I felt a prod at my leg and opened my eyes just enough to see a young man with his hand out. Behind him were three more waiting to have their turn at me. I said, “No,” shook my head, closed my eyes, and refused to open them. For one older fellow, this was not sufficient hinting. Over the drone of market day, I could hear him talking to me in one of the ten dialects of the south Omotic language, but I refused to look. Then he started tapping my leg. When that didn’t work, he shook my leg. A lot. I opened my eyes, said “No!” as emphatically as I could without being too rude. Then I mimed vomiting, but it didn’t work, so I just went back to ignoring him.
Whatever trite little self-pitying thoughts I managed to accumulate were not allowed to last long. After an hour on a dusty, rutted track, we pulled into a small village near a dry riverbed. The road ahead was choked with a throng of about 200 people, all walking the same direction we were driving. My first impression was that we had found a funeral procession. Fortunately, I am often wrong. Unfortunately, this time I wasn’t. Hassen and Legese unrolled their windows to see what they could glean from the bits of language they shared with these people. They rolled the windows back up.
“Do we know what’s going on?” I asked.
“Death,” replied Legese. As we inched through the crowd, trying to make progress without being too disrespectful, I tried to learn a little more.
“Do we know anything about the person?”
“A woman,” said Legese.
At the head of the procession was a white pickup truck laden with crying mourners and, presumably, the deceased. The truck was surrounded by a church choir in robes. My stomach problems seemed pretty small.
A few hours on, we arrived at a beautiful shady campground bordering the Kaske River, a couple of kilometres from Turmi, the traditional home of the Hamer people. The river was bone dry, awaiting the start of the rainy season. Because the rains were due to begin at any moment, smarter tourists had all gone home and we had the campground to ourselves.
My intestinal tract finally showed its full ferocity, and I dashed off to the distant toilet. “Toilet” in this case is such a generous word, since the structure consisted of a hut around a hole in the ground. Correctly anticipating an eruption, I doffed my trousers and underpants and hung them over the wall of the hut. I was surprised by how long I could squat.
Knowing that it was only a matter of time before the peace at the other end of me was shattered, I sought out a quiet corner of the compound and wandered back and forth, sipping water and spitting, waiting for the inevitable. As I waited, the rainbow I had created with crayons as a child formed across the failing African sky.
And just as I started to vomit, I found that my secluded niche was actually on the path leading from a Hamer village to the river. A man walked by. “Hello!” he called out.
“Hellouuurrggggh,” I replied.
“How are you?”
“I am blluuurggggh fine,” I said. “How are you? RAHHUUURGGGH!”
“I am fine, thank you.”
“That is good. Harruuggggh!”
I spent the rest of the day and most of the night alternating between the pit and my vomiting area, dodging baboons and civet cats. The Hamer man was probably still telling the story of the crazy faranji a month later.
THE RAINS WERE OVERDUE everywhere in Ethiopia. Trees and shrubs were doing their best to hold on to a bit of colour, but the groundcover had faded to grey. I could spot no eucalyptus. The cows and goats looked to be in for a pretty rough ride; so, too, would the pastoralists who depend absolutely on their stock. In the case of a famine, those people living closest to the road would likely get some relief from aid agencies, but those whose traditional lands were much further from roads would probably miss the aid, and many were likely to die. “Very sad,” said Legese.
We pulled into a village of the Elbore people. At first, it didn’t seem like much more than a couple of stick-and-grass huts and some goats under a shade tree. We rudely displaced the goats so that we could park our truck in their shade. Word spread quickly, and we were soon surrounded by fifty friendly villagers. Legese could speak the local language and so got a lot of attention, particularly since he had a pocketful of small bills. I had some money, but only in ridiculously large denominations that I had got at the airport. And that was fine, because I wanted to talk to the children, and they quickly accepted that I had neither cash nor candy for them. Girma, perhaps nine years old, wanted to trade watches with me. Mine read 9:07. His flashed 88:88. I think that mine was closer. His friend, Ali, perhaps six, wore a pendant made from a broken metal wristwatch strap.
I pulled out my notebook, which inexplicably caused half of the children to run away and the rest to retreat to a safe distance. I can’t imagine what they thought I was going to do. So I sat on a tree stump, ripped out a few pages, and started folding origami cranes, which has never once failed to get me the attention of young children. The cranes were well received, but it seemed that they would have been much happier if I had been handing out pens, although I cannot imagine why if paper frightens them.
Many hours later, we arrived at a Konso village above the town of Karat-Konso. A remarkably robust stone-and-wooden fence circled the compound. Inside, almost touching one another, were twelve circular huts with walls of sticks and mud a little over a metre high below soaring conical straw roofs. The compound immediately gave the impression of great age. We were given a tour by the hereditary chief, who had adopted the post when his father died at age 60. He in turn had adopted the post when his father had died at 100. I asked the chief to what his grandfather attributed his tremendous longevity. In impeccable English, the chief’s response was “Probably lineage. Other than my fat
her, all of the men in my family lived very long lives. And probably to a life dedicated to prayer and contemplation rather than hard work.”
The Konso certainly knew how to work hard, scratching a living out of the terraced hillside, growing sorghum, beans, corn, and coffee. The chief showed us huts for communal cooking and for eating meals celebrating Christian religious festivals. One hut was set aside for resolving conflicts, and another for the detention of transgressors. A particularly chilling hut was the dwelling place of the grieving widow of a chief. She is meant to reside there for nine years and nine months after the chief’s death. I love my wife, but if she predeceases me, I plan to get on with my life.
THE FOLLOWING DAY was about wildlife in overwhelming quantity and novelty. We had a very early breakfast to give us the best possible start on Nechisar National Park. If roads in Ethiopia are less about engineering and more about faith, then roads in Nechisar are more a state of paranoia and misguided optimism—narrow tracks on a steep and rocky path, with no guardrail to separate us from eternity. If it had rained any time recently, the roads would have been impassable.
The road, such as it was, rose through a forest as imagined by a child raised in inner-city Detroit. Lots of overstorey trees, not so tall as to be boastful, and not so dense as to choke out all the light for understorey vegetation. Warthogs peeked from between trees. Olive baboons dashed across the road, always trying to present their backsides to us, while duikers and velvet monkeys were pleased to stop and have a little look as we passed. Even at slow speed I couldn’t identify most of the birds that flitted past. Up and up we drove, and Hassen got big credit for not tipping us over one cliff or another.
As we descended to the Nechisar Plain, I was vigilant for the Nechisar Nightjar, an enigmatic bird known only from a single wing salvaged from the corpse of an individual found at the side of the track in 1990. We didn’t spot one. Even so, there was no shortage of other great birds, including Abyssinian Rollers, giant African Fish-eagles, Secretarybirds, Kori Bustards, Kurrichane Buttonquail, Helmeted Guineafowl, and Yellow-necked Spurfowl.
Most wildlife lovers probably come to the Nechisar Plain for the mammals. We saw Swayne’s hartebeest, Grant’s gazelles, and dozens of Burchell’s zebras, which, as long as we were on foot, allowed us to approach amazingly close. I realize that travellers to Africa are supposed to describe zebras in their millions, but as someone who had never previously seen one in the wild, “dozens” seemed pretty good.
At lunch I probably managed to re-inoculate myself with whatever bug had been making me ill for the past few days. I ordered assorted vegetables, assuming that they would arrive steaming hot. Most of them had been cooked, but not well and not recently. Lindsay joined Legese and Hassen in two rounds of injera, a sour, nutritious, pancake-shaped flatbread served with wat stew. She wanted to know what each of the bits was.
“What’s that?”
“Meat.”
“And what’s that?”
“Meat.”
“What kind of meat?”
“We don’t know. Maybe chicken.” Sometimes it is better not to ask.
ASSIGNING A EUCALYPT to a particular species requires a lot more botanical knowledge than I have. I might have some luck in deciding if a tree’s bark is smooth, scribbly, powdery, pepperminty, iron-barky, or tessellated, and I could probably distinguish between seeds that are red, brown, grey, and black. However, in distinguishing between leaves that are orbicular, lanceolate, falcate, peltate, amplexicaul, concolorous, or emarginate, or fruit that might be sessile, ribbed, urceolate, truncate-globose, obconical, or cupular, I would be at a loss.
If someone sent you to Australia to find a suggan buggan mallee tree, you might be facing a significant quest. You would know it to be a small, slender-stemmed tree found amongst the rocky hills and gorges of far-eastern Victoria around the Stradbroke Chasm. That is the easy part. Upon arrival, you would have to search for a plant with a strongly beaked operculum with scars, campanulate fruit with a flared rim, flattened-ellipsoidal lacunose seeds, unbranched inflorescences, smooth sessile buds appearing in threes, glaucous juvenile leaves, and a crown consisting of lanceolate or falcate leaves with large island oil glands.
If I couldn’t figure out exactly which eucalyptus tree I was seeing in Ethiopia, I wasn’t going to be too fussed. Back on the main road, eucalyptus trees started to regain their abundance as we travelled north. In contrast to my loathing of rhododendrons, I was becoming very fond of eucalypts, with their long, dagger-shaped leaves and tall, straight trunks.
As eucalypts flashed by, I told Lindsay about some of the demographics I had looked up before coming to Ethiopia. I had learned that the country’s per capita gross domestic product was just $780 per annum, which didn’t compare favourably with that of, say, Iceland, at $29,750. Indeed, Ethiopia is credited with being one of the poorest nations in the world. While everyone in Iceland has access to safe drinking water, the same can be said of just 23 percent of Ethiopians. For every 100 girls of secondary school age in Iceland, 113 actually go to school. I’m not sure how that works, but it sounds pretty good. In Ethiopia, the number is just 22 per 100 girls. Infant mortality is nineteen times higher in Ethiopia than in Iceland. A woman in Iceland has a 90.7 percent chance of living to reach sixty-five years of age; only one-third of women do so in Ethiopia. All in all, the numbers suggest that Ethiopia can be a pretty rough place to live.
And to prove it, just south of Sodo we came upon another funeral procession. This one had only twelve mourners and no choir. For the sake of the family, I hoped that the gathering would pick up steam as it moved along. North of Sodo, we came across another. This time, hundreds of people were in attendance, and the closer we got to the truck with the deceased, the more grief-stricken the mourners looked. I probably wouldn’t cross paths with three funerals in three years at home.
In the fading light of late afternoon, we pulled into Wondo Genet, whose wooded hills are among the last of the original Ethiopian forests, dominated by podocarp trees. Perhaps this was why there was a forestry college and a centre for biodiversity nearby. We checked into a government-operated hotel, part of which dates to the rule of Emperor Haile Selassie. My guidebook described the hotel in less than glowing terms, claiming that it makes “an elegant case for the introduction of architectural crimes against humanity as a hanging offence.” Well, rubbish. The dated architecture might inspire a sound thrashing at best. The hotel had cockroaches but no bedbugs, at least not in our room, and I’ll take cockroaches over bedbugs any day.
When Lindsay heard that the town had a hot-springs pool, she immediately decided to have a go. I was torn between a hot soak in a hot country and sitting quietly in the shade to catch up on my notes. While Lindsay shaved her legs in the windowless bathroom by the light of her Petzl headlamp, I lay on the bed to decide what to do. Then I spied her small floral bikini.
At the pool, the pre-soak shower issued from pipes coming out of a rock face, and pummeled my body with glorious scalding water. In contrast, the water in the pool was tepid, and the pool walls were algae-covered, but I hadn’t brought my swimming gear all the way to Ethiopia to let it sit in my backpack. And there was, of course, the bikini, which was considerably less modest than the bathing costumes of the several other women in the pool, all locals. The men wore bathing suits straight out of 1983, in contrast to my knee-length trunks. My body was the oldest one in the pool by nineteen years. Lindsay’s was second oldest.
ON OUR WAY OUT of Wondo Genet, we came across yet another road-blocking congregation. Surely not another funeral … As we approached the gathering, it seemed even more ominous, and police lights flashed on a pickup truck approaching from our right. When Hassen tooted the horn to get by, as he had with previous funeral processions, we got some very hostile looks, and I feared that we might be immersing ourselves in one of the things I dread most in a foreign country—an illegal political protest.
Reality was far worse. From what we could gather from the
throng, a child had been stoned to death by another child, and at that moment I simply could not imagine anything more dreadful. One young life was gone and another lay in tatters. Far more than just a funeral procession, we were watching the outpouring of a community in deep, deep grief and anguish.
As on previous days, we started climbing and climbing, and it occurred to me that I was having trouble remembering many descents to match the ascents. Perhaps we would eventually find ourselves at the top of the world. East out of Wondo Genet along Highway 40 until it turned into Highway 8; it should have been a piece of cake. Our planned route was only the length of my index finger on my highway map. Poor Hassen—every bit of the road was under construction.
As Hassen struggled, the rest of us watched the scenery, which included some patches of big and stately podocarp trees. I spied tremendous eucalyptus trees, monsters every one. In places, they made the landscape appear as something out of a Turner oil painting. The higher we got, the more the terrain looked like the Russian steppe, or what I suspect the Russian steppe looks like. Horses became more and more common, and the riders sat comfortably in the saddle. Legese explained that the Bale region was among the wealthiest in Ethiopia. Wheat farming is really big here, and Legese said that farmers can afford to use tractors and combine harvesters to farm the vast fields. This may be, but all of the plowing I saw was being done with single-blade plows pulled by pairs of oxen.
At the road’s peak, after Hassen had battled construction trucks and endless buses hour upon hour, we pulled over for a quiet lunch. It was only quiet for a few minutes until word got out to the children of the dispersed community that faranji and their minders had arrived. They appeared out of nowhere. I really wanted to munch on my boiled potato and egg in a bit of windy peace while trying to identify a few birds, but it wasn’t to be. “Hello-how-are-you-I-am-fine” was getting a bit tiresome, but the twelve-year-old who shadowed me had picked up a little more English.