Next month, I leave for Korea.
I don’t particularly enjoy being stuck in between two continents. I began this year in Africa and will end it in Asia, but the meantime is spent twiddling thumbs in North America. Normally, I would not find this a problem, but I struggle with not settling. Like silt on the bottom of a river, the current keeps me from finding rest and I keep shifting to find my place. I have savored every moment, but the future is always so uncertain and I shift between the present and the past.
Yesterday, I attended a wedding shower for a close high school friend. I smiled as she beamed and glowed, content to talk to those I recognized. Some asked about Ethiopia, others asked about Korea – but all listened as I rambled about my limited knowledge of each. While I was talking, I realized that it has been four years since I graduated from high school. Four years since I gave my speech about trusting in God to lead us where He will.
As I was sharing about my memories and hopes, it felt as if my life is not my own. The opportunities and experiences I have had cannot have truly happened, and I am afraid I may wake up to find the everything was a dream. The knowledge that I couldn’t have planned something so amazing lets me know its real.
Many of the pictures I posted from Ethiopia were taken my first week in Addis during the festival of Timkat. A video my friend Zoe made showed me standing in the midst of swirling colours, giggling at the sheer amazement of it all. My mind couldn’t process it, and it still can’t quite. It still seems like a story I read while curled up in my bed on a cold January night.
Another friend from Ethiopia, Jayne, chose to watch Timkat from the SIM headquarters in the center of Addis so she wouldn’t be overwhelmed in the flooding crowds. As I was lost in the dazzling sights around me, she was able to capture it from above. Before she left, she handed me a disk of all the pictures she had taken and passed me a new perspective on my experiences. These are two short video clips from the festival of Timkat that I wanted to upload several months ago, but the Ethiopian internet services simply couldn’t handle it.
I had forgotten until now, but perhaps you may be able to glimpse the colors, the sounds, and imagine for a moment that you are standing in the midst.If I close my eyes and listen, it is almost like I am there.
I was cuddled up on our big chair, plunking away at my friend’s senior seminar paper when I heard it.
“And this is the amazing Danakil Depression.”
I sat up and looked at the ridiculously boring “Planet Earth” episode I had been so intently ignoring. My eyes widened and I shouted, “That’s in Ethiopia!” My dad peeked his head into the room and looked at the programme he was recording. “The Danakil Depression! That is in Ethiopia!” I continued to shout. “That’s up north! That’s where the people from the British Embassy in Addis were headed when the Eritrian military kidnapped them!”
It was then that my dad first learned that this was occurring while I was living in Ethiopia.
Ooops. Did I forget to mention the European hostages? From Addis? Silly me.
I suppose I don’t think about these things as I should. Tanks with snippers during shopping trips in Kosovo? Convoy of British nationals from Addis yanked into Eritrea by military forces? You would be surprised, it doesn’t come up that often in conversation. I wouldn’t say I was intentionally withholding information, but if it is on CNN, I consider it public knowledge.
When my mom arrived home, my dad proceeded to tell the events – adding tortures and various other atrocities to make my mother gradually more and more appalled. I kept interjecting “Not true! Lies! Ok, maybe not that part, but everything else!” throughout the entire conversation. Then, my mother turned wide-eyed to thrash me within an inch of my life.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I looked at her, white with shock, and felt rather pitiful.
“I thought you knew…” I weakly replied. “It was on the news.”
She did not look pleased, but she turned to clean something to distract herself. I took a deep breath, feeling as if I had narrowly dodged the bullet.
“You should hear what is going on in South Korea right now!” My father shouted from his perch in front of the computer.
“There is nothing! Nothing at all going on in South Korea! Stop with all the lies!” His manical laughter echoed throughout the room.
After very little thought and deliberation, I believe revenge would be very sweet in this instance. Any suggestions or methods of mental aggrevation would be much appreciated.
Last weekend, I took a short term couple shopping. I was the experienced missionary, so I used my limited Amharic to negotiate the price with the sellers. I smiled and refused to pay their price, feigning appallment at the outrageous prices and eventually dickering it down as far as I could. The shop ladies laughed at me as I eagerly bartered for brightly patterned fabrics and reached out their hands to shake mine with a great big smile of amusement, “Ishi, ok.”
I wandered back on my own, toting my fabrics with me and stopping to play a jump roping game with some children. They held my bags while I attempted to gracefully leap over waist high rope, ultimately tripping and landing on my face. Look children! Uncoordinated white person!
On Wednesday, I got a taxi all on my own from one side of the city to the other. Although it seems like a small feat, I was quite proud of my bravery in taking a taxi all on my own across town with my little Amharic skills. My driver knew a little English and proceeded to invite me out for drinks that afternoon. Flattered as I was, I regrettably turned him down.
I leave Ethiopia tomorrow with an extra bag of gifts for people at home and a ticket bound for London. Little pieces of Ethiopia to take away in an attempt to share a small taste of what it was like. After tomorrow, all I can take away is a few pictures and a few knick-knacks to show how I have spent the past few months of my life.
Although my disorienting fear in January proved to be unwarranted, I am attempting to prepare myself to do it all over again in August. I am moving to Seoul, South Korea to teach for the next two years. Asia is my next adventure, but Africa will hold a deep and earthy piece of my heart that I may never gain back.
I think my school is much like an episode of Cheers. Well, without the drinking. It is just kind of unsettling how many random construction workers, kitchen workers, and students who know who I am when I haven’t the faintest notion who they may be. I find myself happily walking between classes in the bright sunshine, waving at random people who shout my name, and humming the Cheers theme song.
Thursday was the kindergarten field trip to Debre Zeit (cinder cone country). This kindergarten class is a little more unique than other kindergarten classes – meaning that not all speak English fluently and that their parents feed them candy before they blissfully send them off to school
I was feeling adventurous, so I abandoned first grade for the day and headed off for an hour and a half long bus ride with twenty sugar high five year olds. To keep them entertained, we sang an endless amount of bus songs and counted donkeys. Unfortunately, they can not count as high as needed and we kept starting over. Some children were teaching me Dutch and I learned the word for donkey because that was pretty much the only thing to see.
The thing about traveling in Ethiopia is that you cannot foresee exactly what obstacles you will come up against, only that they will find you. In our case it was getting a bus full of bored kindergarteners with full bladders stuck behind a herd of cattle.
The little boy next to me kept crossing his legs and mumbling in Dutch, praying that we would soon arrive. The cattle frankly didn’t quite care and seemed to wander even slower. The little Ethiopian boy driving the cattle seemed to get pleasure from goading the cows even further in front of our bus so that we were even more stuck than before.
Thankfully for us, cattle like to find grass. They wandered back onto the side off of the dirt road and we were eventually back on our way.
We parked at the SIM retreat of Babaguya and tried to corral the kids running off in every direction, desperate to stretch their legs. The entire purpose of the field trip was to introduce the students to farming, so we divided into groups and headed down the paths I had walked a month earlier.
The students loved pulling the primitive plows and yanking onions out of the ground. The farmer was relatively good natured and kindly explained everything slowly for our teacher’s aide to translate.
After many comments about dying from the heat and wanting to be done, we walked back to the retreat toting several kilos of tomatoes behind us. Part of the afternoon was spent splashing in a wading pool, reading books by the lake, and hunting for bugs among the foliage. We had to hurry back to Bingham for parent-teacher conferences, so the rest of the afternoon involved hauling the children out of the wading pool sobbing as if their lives depended on it.
They were not the only ones who were not eager to spend another hour and a half on the bus.
One thing that I wish about Ethiopia is that we didn’t lose the water every single weekend. Once, just once, I would like to be showered for church.
A few weeks ago, I went to watch several fellow ex pats in a performance of Macbeth on Mount Entoto at King Menelik’s palace. I piled in the car with a couple from Ohio and a Californian named James and we all puttered off in the Suzuki van up Mount Entoto. We knew that it was a fair drive up Entoto from the Kolfe district we lived in, but we simply had no concept of exactly how long it would take.
Traveling through Addis in a car is a rather daunting experience. People leap in front of moving cars, men feel compelled to urinate in the streets in full view, hundreds of donkeys and sheep being herded into traffic, and children crowd around cars to beg for money. It still amazes me how many deformities are put on display throughout the beggars to try to garner sympathy. On several occasions, I have looked up to find a man with seven and a half fingers at my window. Most handicapped people cannot afford wheelchairs, so they drag themselves along the sidewalks, sticking the hands through the window and spitting on your car if you give them nothing. Traffic lights are a joke and driving is pretty much a free for all. It was in this atmosphere that we tried to guess which way it was to Mount Entoto.
After about forty minutes of this, we were starting to question our ability to find the mountain at all. Addis Ababa is already quite high above sea level, but as we were slowing moving up the city, we could feel our ears begin to pop. Crowds started to thin and we saw more and more women carrying wooden bundles down the slope.
Apparently we had forgotten that Mount Entoto was a mountain. We started chugging up the steep incline in our little van, praying that it wouldn’t roll all the way back down. Women sat on the side of the road tying their bundles and laughing at us as we inched past them slowly. We were wondering if we would soon have to get out and push the vehicle up the rest of the way. The road wound up, doubling back upon itself, allowing us breathtaking views of the city. Without guardrails, though, it was mostly breathtaking because we were worried about tumbling over the side. It took us twenty minutes to chug slowly up the mountain, eventually stopping at a church/museum that looked vaguely promising. We pulled into an enormous entryway with a herd of people standing around a Mary statue and received numerous appalled glares as we intruded upon the holy spot. Apparently this wasn’t the parking lot.
We backed around and parked next to another van. A herd of middle-aged white people piled out of the van and we finally knew we must be in the right place. We walked around the enormous church and through several inhabited mud huts – wondering all the while where the mystical palace of Menelik’s had disappeared. The children shouted at us and I ruefully quipped, “They must be saying: ‘idiots, thats where the bathroom is!’”
Eventually we reached a guarded ramshackle fence and were permitted inside. We walked gratefully into the grassy knoll around Menelik’s palace. Upon reaching our seats, I looked up at Menelik’s palace and sat admiring its uniqueness. Obviously, Menelik was King because his mud hut was only slightly larger than everyone else’s mud hut. It was fairly impressive. (Ignore the blurryness of the picture, it “technically” wasn’t allowed to be photographed…)
I very much enjoyed the performance as a whole. There is something to be said about Macbeth actually being British and Banquo having a Scottish accent. It adds a tone of reality as opposed to the random Scandinavian who no one could quite understand. The best part was the cat who wandered onto the stage, proceeded to loll at the feet of Macbeth, and moaned painfully as if its life depended on it. After the dramatic monologue, it picked itself up and trotted merrily at Banquo’s heels off stage right.
After the performance, we took one of Macbeth’s hit men and headed off to dinner. We teased him that now he wasn’t allowed to teach at Bingham anymore because he killed MacDuff’s children. Not usually grounds to keep your position teaching young children. The entire way down the mountain, we didn’t turn the engine on as we rolled down the mountain, speeding past the laughing women again in the dark. We encouraged the driver to keep his foot on the break and his eyes on the road because we didn’t want to plunge to our deaths. Instead it became a competition to see how long we could go without turning on the car.
I suppose it was just a normal weekend here in Ethiopia.
