Betam konjo
After the funeral, we’re walking over to see the big kids. I have my Indian scarf over my head, and as I am walking down the hill to AHOPE, a little boy walks up to me and says “KONJO!” FINALLY! I AM BEAUTIFUL! I smile at him and say thank you, and then poke T in the ribs, saying, “Did you hear that? I am konjoooooooooooo!”
The next day, T and I are sitting in a restaurant in an attempt to get out of the pouring rain outside. We’re using the free (and fast) wireless, and I check my email. I get the following email from Leather Cap:
Hi there,
Allie how are you doing and your husband (the lucky one) coz you are beautiful.
How is M and your other friend would you pls pass my greeting.
Hope I will see you all befor they leave Ethiopia.
All the best.
DID YOU READ THAT? I AM BEAUTIFUL! I pass the message along to T, who rolls his eyes and grunts something about people who wear leather caps having no idea about what’s attractive. Then, the waitress comes over with my Coca, and when I smile at her, she too tells me I am konjo.
I am on fire, baby! I am irresistable to men, women and children alike! I am adored by millions!
And then, we go to see the big kids. We tramp through the rain and mud, and when we get to the gate, one of the kids opens the door and points at us. Koshasha! Dirty! No, kid. BEE-YOO-TI-FUL. Get me?
Then I am sitting with the girls on the stairs as they braid my hair. “Ooooooh,” they say. “You have MANY grey hairs!” My heart stops beating. How many do I have? They start to count. “One…two….three!” I contemplate breaking their legs for giving me a near heart attack, but decide against it because I am so relieved that many = 3.
Then, I am invited into the girls’ room. Finally, I am allowed into the inner sanctum! I sit in a wooden chair for hours as they pull and tug and twist my hair. Boys reach in through the window, yanking my hair out to braid it. The girls do innumerable braids, but virtually every time when I hopefully ask, “konjo?”, they wrinkle their little noses and take it all out to do again.
Ah, well. 24 hours of being beautiful isn’t bad, right?
Goodbye, Sweet Girl
In the morning, just after Genet tells us the story about her rabies treatment, the phone rings. We’re actually in good spirits, knowing that we can take M to the Swedish clinic to get the damned shot. I answer it, and it’s Gelila from the office. I say hi and ask how she is. She’s fine, she says, but she has some bad news. There’s a catch in my throat as I wait for it. Sweet Girl died last night, she says. Shit. I listen to her explain how she died in the night and there’s a funeral in the afternoon and would we go? I tell her yes and hang up the phone.
And then my knees give out.
I don’t remember how long I cry. I’m sobbing–big, heaving, snot-filled sobs that suck all the air out of me and I just can’t stop. M is in the other room, and I can hear her crying from across the house. Genet is wailing in the kitchen, and T is breathing deeply beside me. I don’t know when I have last cried like this. I am devastated and horrified and so, so angry. What kind of a world is this where an 8-year-old girl can die like this? What kind of a world is this where an 8-year-old girl can die?
And oh God, it’s Sweet Girl. My little friend who would sneak up behind me and hold my hand, who would pose for sassy pictures, who would whisper that she loved me, who had the most beautiful crooked little smile I have ever seen. I can’t breathe and I don’t want to. I have lost control of myself completely and I cry until I am so drained that I can do nothing but sit and stare at the wall.
Eventually, we go to little AHOPE to prepare for the funeral. The atmosphere is dulled, with the nannies walking around with tear-stained faces, and the office staff stonefaced. Mama Genet just cries. I hug Tigist and tell her I am so sorry. She was a beautiful girl. Tigist is sorry too.
The funeral is unlike Baby S’s. Sweet Girl had no family left. She was living with her mother until she died, and then her neighbors cared for her until they brought her to AHOPE. The neighbors come to the funeral, but there is none of the keening that went on before. Unlike the other funeral, the staff is crying openly. Everyone loved Sweet Girl, and she will be missed.
Afterwards, we go back to AHOPE for a coffee ceremony. We sit quietly as the neighbors talk to each other and the kids try to peek in the room. Gelila tells me that they know something’s up and that one of them said Sweet Girl was stabbed with scissors. I look around, wondering what happens to the memory of a girl like this. Her family is dead. The staff and the neighbors will remember her, but will she eventually be forgotten completely?
I hope not. I try to believe that a girl who brought so much light into the world will be remembered.
Goodbye, Tsion. I love you.
Bite the badonk
On Friday, as I am lying in my house of pain, M and T leave to go to work. They leave the house chatting to each other and I hear them say goodbye to the guard. Five minutes later, I hear them come back. Then I hear them saying something about a dog to Mifta, and they come in the house. M goes straight to the bathroom, calling behind her, “I need you to look at my butt.” I wonder if I’m delirious, but then they explain that on the way to work, on the same path where T pushed M in front of a “raging bull” the day before, a dog ran out into the road and bit her in the bum.
T makes the offer to check her out, but suggests I might be a better choice. I dutifully go to the bathroom and look at the wound. Sure enough, the dog broke the skin. I make one crack about this being the logical punishment for her always sticking her ass out, and then I put on some clothes to go to the clinic with her. T goes to the office to tell them what happened.
We’re in the clinic waiting room when T calls. He went to the dog’s house with Tigist, the nurse. He didn’t understand the whole conversation, but he heard a whole lot of the word “ferenge”. As far as he can tell, Tigist told the woman that her dog bit Tigist’s white girl, and the woman has to take care of it. The doctor checks M out and asks some questions. Was it a street dog or someone’s pet? A pet. Was it older than 10? Who knows? Has it had its rabies shot? The owner says yes. M will probably be fine, if the dog is a pet and has had a rabies shot. Buuuuuuut, if it’s an old dog, the rabies shot might not work and M could die of rabies. Thank you, and goodbye!
So then we go to the woman’s house. It’s a nice house, behind a gate like our own, and the woman has two dogs. We slink past them into her house, where she waits for us with her baby. She is so sorry about this, the dog escaped from the yard, yadda yadda. She then pulls out a certificate for the younger dog (the one that bit M is 11 years old, of course) that says it was vaccinated for rabies the week before. She can’t find the one for the biter, but she swears that it was also vaccinated, because she has children and she doesn’t want her dogs to bite her children or their friends! (Only ferenge!)
We go home so M can call her parents. It’s something like 4am in New Hampshire and they are a little confused by the call. M explains that she needs to get the rabies shot, but we don’t know where to get it in Addis. The rabies treatment is one shot in the wound, and then five shots over a number of days and weeks. She says she and T will go out and find the shot, and then she’ll be fine.
Ha. Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. She and T leave at about noon and are gone forever. I watch Oprah and all kinds of other shows and the news and I read my book and take a nap and they still aren’t home. They roll in at about 7pm. They have been all over the city looking for the shot, and they can’t find it anywhere. They went to a hospital that had the treatment, but they didn’t recommend it for foreigners, who don’t generally like 17 shots to the abdomen. They went to a rabies clinic, where they saw all kinds of pretty pictures of different varieties of dogs, but got no shot. They went to the UN, who said they couldn’t give it to her. They went to the FRIGGING AMERICAN EMBASSY, who told her that they only carry the shot for their employees (but they asked if she was carrying any guns before they let her in, which is a reasonable question given that I’m sure lots of scary terrorists admit to carrying firearms before attacking an embassy). GOD BLESS AMERICA! The only place in Addis to get the shot is the mythical Swedish clinic, which everyone recommended but no one could place on a map.
By the time they get back, they are understandably exhausted and M is a mess. Her parents want her to come home and her doctor in New Hampshire (who never suggested she get a rabies shot in advance) says she should come home for good to get the treatment. Even I am gripped with terror at the thought of her having to leave three months early. The whole situation is awful, and she is completely wrecked.
The next morning at breakfast, Genet tells us about how she was bitten by a dog and she “cry cry cry” during the treatment. I bet, dude. 17 shots?! Then M’s parents call. They managed to locate the Swedish doctor in the middle of the night, and he has the shot. Thank you, Sweden! First Swedish fish, then Ikea, now the rabies shot! That’s the good news. M calls the doctor and he doesn’t have the first shot to go in the wound. That’s the bad news. M’s parents call her health insurance company and they say they will fly M to Israel or London for treatment. M chooses London. She will leave that night.
We go to the clinic and get her the shot. It is a lovely little clinic in a leafy compound, but we’re all too sad to appreciate the fact that we finally found it. We go to see the kids and tell them what happened. They look at us in horror at the story, and suddenly we realize why all the kids are afraid of dogs (if I was facing 17 shots to the abdomen or certain death if one bit me, I’d be scared as hell too).
We are all sad. M is leaving us. We go back to the house so she can get her stuff, and then we take a interminable ride to the airport. It’s really hard to say goodbye to her when we know we are going to miss her so much. She is the mini-me I never knew, and T’s second wife. She is the best friend we have made in a while, and we love her like a sister. Addis is not the same without her.
So let this be a lesson to you: no matter how good it makes you look in pictures, don’t make it a habit to walk around with your badonkadonk out, or a dog will surely chomp it.
Pus is not your friend
The morning we leave Lalibela, I wake up with a disturbingly sore throat. It’s worse than the other days, when I have just popped a couple Advil and gone on my way. This morning, it feels like I’ve been drinking razor blades. We get in the bus to go to the airport, and drive past St George’s church where there is a long line of Ethiopians wearing white, snaking around the hill.
When we get to the airport, Leather Cap stops to talk to me. How long are we in Ethiopia, he wants to know. I tell him we’ve been living there, but that T and I are about to leave. He is taking the tour to Aksum, so he’s not going back to Addis. He wants my phone number anyway, so I give him M’s mobile number. Then I run over to T to tell him how much Ethiopian men lurrrrrrrve me.
On the flight, things go rapidly downhill and I start to feel really nasty. I get really cold and start to shake and end up spending most of the flight with my head in T’s lap because I am too weak to sit up (not really, but this is what husbands are for). By the time we get to Addis, I need him to help me walk off the plane so I don’t keel over and die. At the airport, we had planned on going to the Emirates office to change our flight to Uganda, but they are closed. Why are they closed on a weekday in the middle of the day? It is obviously to spite me and make me feel even closer to death.
We make it back to the guest house, despite me almost having a fist fight with the taxi driver who tried to scam us (fortunately, I was too weak to show him the full extent of my wrath), and I take a nap. M and T go to see the kids and they come back with the news that the kids have measles, that most of them seem better, but that Sweet Girl has now been infected and is really sick.
T takes me to the clinic around the corner so I can see a doctor. We both go into the doctor’s office, and he opens my mouth to look at my throat. “Ooooooh,” he says. “Come look at this.” T walks over, and looks down my throat as I am sitting there like a baby bird waiting for a worm. “Look at all that pus. We don’t like pus!” he says to T. Really? Because I am pretty sure pus is my favorite thing ever. Now let me close my frigging mouth!
T can’t see anything, but agrees with the doctor because he sees me gagging and choking away. The doctor says I have a throat infection. Did I finish the course of antibiotics the first doctor gave me when I had food poisoning and my throat was red? Of course not! That would have been sensible, and would have spared me this glorious trip to see you now, doctor!
He gives me a prescription for antibiotics and T goes to fill it for me, and then he and M take off to see the other kids while I take a long, beautiful nap. Just me and my pus.
Loving Lalibela
The night before we left Gondar, we checked with the guys at the hostel about when we needed to leave to get to the airport on time. An hour before the flight, they said. Sure, we asked? Yes, they said, authoritatively. But in the morning, when we are all half-dressed and bathed, we suddenly hear banging on our doors. TIME TO GO! the guys yell. GO NOW, OR YOU WILL BE LATE! It turns out that the guys at the hotel are big liars, and we are all muttering about this when we get in the taxi and they pat the back of the car as we drive away.
Despite being hustled into the car earlier than we expected and listening to the hostel guys yell as us like cattle, we find that our flight to Lalibela is ON TIME. And we are allowed on! So on we get, with the Chinese tour group who are now smiling at us like old friends. The flight to Lalibela is surprisingly smooth, and I spend most of the time looking out the window at the flat, cracked, ochre-colored earth below.
As riveting as I find the world from the plane, I find it even more spectacular when we get in the van to the hotel. The area around Lalibela is like another planet. The red earth spreads far into the distance, where the horizon is lined by jagged mountains. We climb higher and higher into the desert; all four of us staring out the window at the bleak landscape outside. It is harsh and barren and completely stunning. I have never seen anyplace like it.
The hotel is even better than the one in Gondar. It is new and clean and the rooms are big enough to leave on the floor and still walk around. We have hot showers ALL THE TIME, and the beds are clean and big enough for two whole people. M and Kate even get a room with twin beds. There is a little store and a small restaurant, and a view over the valley below. The only downside is that it is at the exact opposite end of town from the churches.
We decide to walk up toward the churches, so we start up the hill, which seems neverending. As usual, as we walk through, we are accosted by a big group of boys. They are young and endearing, and one tells M he is collecting foreign money as a competition for school. He has the biggest collection! M dutifully gives him all her foreign change and he runs away, only to come back a few minutes later with a necklace for her. His name means Happiness, the same as her favorite kid at AHOPE, and she is smitten. (Later on, we discover that the kids all ask for money this way, and that they then try to sell it to trade it to foreigners for birr, but at least M got a necklace out of the deal.)
Of course, the churches are closed by the time we get there, so we end up looking for a place to eat. We wander through town and stop to have coffee at a restaurant perched on the edge of a big cliff, overlooking the churches and the valley. I am crabby from low blood sugar, and the other three laugh at me as I hate everything and drink my coffee. They are evil and must be destroyed.
On the way down, we’re surrounded by a bunch of kids. There is one little girl who attaches herself to Kate, and walks through town with her, clutching her hand. Her name is the same as our Princess at AHOPE, and she is about four years old. We turn the corner on our way back to the hotel, and Kate gives her a whistle when she says goodbye. The little girl runs off down the road, and we can hear the whistle squeaking even after we can’t see her anymore.
We get back to the hotel and decide to have dinner at the hotel across the street. Kate and M and T have some beer (I can’t, because I am a big allergic loser) and eventually, Kate gets very tipsy. The tipsiness coincides with the arrival of the Chinese tour group, complete with Ethiopian tour guide. Kate, M and I have been commenting on the tour guide’s cuteness for days, and think him cute even with his leather newsboy cap. T disagrees and mocks us all. The more beer Kate has, the more she loves the tour guide, but she is convinced that he has a crush on me, which makes me think she has had way too much to drink. When I go to the bathroom, I run into him outside, and he introduces himself and asks about my husband. Suddenly, I think Kate might be right and I am oddly pleased by the thought that young Ethiopian men clad in leather hats find me attractive. T is less pleased, as it means he will be hearing about how hot I am for months to come (which is an appropriate punishment for making me listen to years of how gay men find him attractive).
We manage to stagger out of the restaurant and into bed and the next morning, the girls and T are not feeling pretty. We all drink coffee and eat pastries and wander around looking for an artist’s shop. We find it in a tukul which we would never have looked at twice, were it not for Lonely Planet. The artist has sold his works to many famous people, including Princess Anne, with whom he has a photo. We each buy a painting, despite the fact that T is loudly complaining about buying more stuff that he will have to carry (I artfully tune him out).
And then we head back up the hill to buy our tickets and find a tour guide. We pass the same man who told us the churches were closed the day before, and are alarmed when it looks like he’s taking off his pants for T. Unfortunately, he is not trying to exchange guiding services for sexual favors; he is merely showing T his £20 note from the Bank of Scotland, which is in his jeans which are under his guide uniform. How disappointing.
It starts to rain as we begin our tour of the churches, but even the rain can’t diminish them. The churches are carved out of the earth, which means they lie below ground, surrounded by rock and stone and dirt. There are 13 churches, mostly built during the 12th and 13th centuries, by lots of people over a long time (check out that historical accuracy). They’re fascinating in a way that European cathedrals aren’t. Instead of being enormous and ornate and gloriously beautiful, they’re simple and mostly plain, but the work that has gone into them has to be equal to the work on the European churches. They are carved out of the ground, for God’s sake! (No pun intended there.)
We walked through some, and T got to go into a special man church (Ethiopia seems to have a lot of churches banning girls), but he took pictures so we could see what it looks like. In one, we ask the priest if we can take his picture, and he nods, putting on a pair of sunglasses as he swings his incense from side to side. We all try not to giggle as he does this. At St George’s Church, they are preparing for St George’s Day the following day, and the whole area is full of somber chanting and singing, which makes the whole experience that much more ethereal.
Our tour guide asks if his family can join us for the latter part of the tour, and we say yes. Soon, we are joined by a family with two little boys, who are completely hilarious. They are mostly disinterested in the tour, and as time goes on, increasingly interested in performing for us. After we walk through the tunnel called hell (where I take a tourist shot of Kate, M and T pretending to be in Hades), we arrive at the last church and the boys are about to explode with energy. I take a picture of them, which ends up being appropriately blurry because they can’t sit still.
At the end of the tour, our guide sends us up a back way through town, and we walk down quiet paths and tukuls overlooking the valley. When we get close to our restaurant, a gang of kids comes up to us and wants to speak to us. Of course, I end up taking their picture, and they ask for my email address, which is the MO of most of the kids in town. Wherever we go in Lalibela, we are accosted by children asking for our email addresses so that we can send them books for school.
We have dinner at a restaurant that has a sign saying “recommended by ferenge” outside. We walk inside the restaurant, which looks like someone’s living room. The locals clear out so we can have a table, and they bring us some pizza for dinner. I’m not sure whether it’s comforting or disturbing to be served pizza in a restaurant in northern Ethiopia, but we eat it anyway, listening to the rain fall on the roof and ruing the fact that we have to leave.
Lunacy in Gondar
So we get up bright and early to go to the airport (we had debated about driving to Gondar, since it was only a few hours, but it ended up being even more expensive than flying all four legs, which made no sense but there you go), and Yilnikal is there to take us. He will come meet us in Gondar, he promises. Kate, he will see you again! He still hasn’t given up hope on winning her love (or at least a night of hot lust) and he keeps telling us how he will see us in Gondar. Sure, dude.
We get to the airport, where we run into the same Chinese tour group that was on our flight to Bahir Dar. They are smiley and nice, and they have an Ethiopian tour guide. We’re sitting in the airport lounge, waiting for our flight to arrive, but nothing happens. And still nothing happens. And still nothing happens. And finally, there is an announcement that everyone on the flight to Gondar should go to the coffee shop, because the flight is delayed. How long? No one knows.
So we sit in the coffee shop, drinking our free drinks and eventually the Chinese tour guide (the actual Chinese one, not the Ethiopian one) tells us when the flight is going to arrive. We calculate the time delay and realize that it would have been faster to drive to Gondar, because the wait for the 20-minute flight to arrive is longer than the drive between the two cities. Ah, Ethiopian travel.
Eventually, the flight arrives, after the four of us have started playing a bastardized version of Articulate in the airport lounge. We team up and make lists of topics (world cities, movie titles, TV characters) and then our partner has to guess them, based on our ridiculous clues. The game results in a lot of loud laughter in the quiet lounge, the occasional cursing and threatening and accusations of cheating, and a whole lot of terrified looks from the poor Chinese people.
We get to Gondar, only to find that the airport is about 93285923874592387 miles from the city center and it will take approximately 100 years to reach our hostel. We can’t do anything about it, so we sit back in the taxi and watch as we drive to town, veering around kids and cows and bikes and dogs and other obstacles.
By the time we get to our hostel, which is infinitely nicer than the Bahir Dar Hotel (with clean sheets, en suite bathrooms and occasional water!!), we are starving. Our guidebook recommends a few places to eat, so we wander into town. We find nothing for ages and are starting to snap at each other and snarl in unattractive ways when we go into a hotel we think was suggested by the book. We go upstairs and order food. There are about three things on the menu. Kate and I order hamburgers, thinking they’re fairly safe. Ha. We could not have been more wrong. I’ve eaten a lot of disgusting things in my day (the fingernail milkshake in Cambodia on our honeymoon, the suspiciously dog-flavored sweet and sour pork in Sydney), but I think this hamburger might take the cake. I’m pretty sure it was made of rotten human flesh. ROTTEN HUMAN FLESH, PEOPLE. There isn’t enough Coca in the world to wash it all down, and I spend all afternoon screaming out ROTTEN HUMAN FLESH! to anyone who would listen (which, after the first few times, excludes T, M and Kate).
After we feast on flesh, we wander over to the castle. Gondar was the capital of Ethiopia for about 200 years and has a castle that was probably really lovely until the mean old Brits bombed the crap out of it in WWII. The four of us go up to the castle and wander around until it starts to rain. Once the rain really gets going, we’re stuck in a partly-ruined tower, where we start to lose our minds just a little bit. We end up hiding out in the tower for the duration of the showers, where we take pictures of T and his wives. M and Kate stand next to him seductively, and I take pictures, and then we trade off. Needless to say, T loves this game, and yes, we are 12 years old. M is the best at the seductive wife photography, and sticks her bum out in every picture. Eventually, the Chinese tour group passes through, as we are convulsing in hysterical laughter, and they are even more terrified than they had been in the airport. After the heavy rain stops, we continue on through the rest of the castle grounds, and M jumps in the lion cage and roars like a lion for the camera, unaware that there are two locals sitting behind her, laughing at the deranged ferenge. Just as we’re leaving, Yilnikal calls Kate to tell her he can’t come to Gondar after all, because he found another unsuspecting tour group. Too bad.
After the castle, it ’s time to go to the Debre Berhan Selassie Church, on the other side of town. We get a taxi to take us up up up the hill to the church, which is famous for the dozens of angel heads painted on the ceiling. We get there just before a giant German tour bus, and we end up sneaking into the church while they were all taking pictures, surreptitiously photographing the ceiling. On the way out, there are no taxis to be found, so we walk down the hill back into town. We walk with a bunch of boys following us, asking for money for a while, and then the four of us continue alone, after we tell them quite sternly that we have no money for them. There are kids all over the streets, and houses built so close to the road that we can see right into them.
When we get back to town, we stop for some macchiatos at a ferengey-looking restaurant. Once we finally wake up, we decide to get some dinner. We leave the restaurant and are immediately surrounded by a gang of teenage boys who want mostly to talk to Kate. They are led by a short little guy with one milky eye, who is especially interested in her, and swears that he was 21 (though he looked to be closer to 12). The boys follow us up the street, circling around Kate, who talks to them all in her charming, midwestern way as I whisper to T that I would never be as nice, mostly because I am a frigid Eastern WASP cow.
We have a nice dinner at the restaurant, chowing down on more shiro (shocker) and drinking some local wine. All the lights in town go off on our way to dinner, so we spend most of the meal hunched over our injera, lit only by candles. We are virtually the only people in the restaurant, and we joke about Kate’s new boyfriend, and how Yilnikal will be jealous. We wonder who would win in a fight to the death for her affections, and my money’s on Yilnikal (I bet he fights dirty). We’re all laughing about this as we stand up to leave the restaurant, and the milky eyed boy quite literally pops out from behind a plant. He has been there the entire time, lying in wait for us to finish eating so he can keep following Kate.
She lets him walk her back to the hostel, but tells him she is not interested, that she has a boyfriend in the U.S., and that we’re leaving in the morning. Fortunately, he’s not as persistent as Yilnikal, and he takes off after she tells him about five times. In the days to follow, we keep an eye out for him, wondering if and when he will pop out of a closet, or under a bed.
We go to bed ready to go to Lalibela. Thus far, we’ve been to two cities and Kate has broken two hearts. Without question, she is a ferenge goddess.
