The Stoning Begins Now

I've been a bit backlogged on my posts and placing the blame on the exorbitant cost of Lalibela's Internet cafes and a nasty case of the flu. I've been trying to fill in the lacunae chronologically, but last night I had an experience that begs relation while freshly plowed in my mind.

I can say, even conservatively, that I have never been so thoroughly in the cross-hairs of danger; nor have I ever been party to so bloody a fracas.

So fast-forward: I'm convalescing in Gondar, the site of a 17th century castle complex and one of the most atmospheric cities in Ethiopia. For a week now, I've been tagging along with a professional photographer by the name of Josh Cogan, a fast friend and willing tutor. Yesterday I began lusting for a bit of adventure as most of my time has been spent catching up on sleep--a scarce commodity in Lalibela--and hacking my way to a clean pair of lungs. So I suggested to Josh that we scale the nameless mountain of the ritzy Goha hotel and suss out the scene.

We walked a couple of kilometers, forging our way through the hassle heaped on faranjis, when we spied a horse-drawn cart, a gari, led by an erratic young colt. It zoomed past us, only to double back, the colt capering wildly and bucking about. It was too good an opportunity to pass up. We settled on a price of 5 birr to convey us to the mountaintop, but bailed out about halfway once the horse began zigzagging on the switchbacks with scant regard for the margins of the road. After half an hour, we walked through the gates of the Goha and into a wedding.

Having been wedding guests a week before (entry forthcoming), we were versed in the chants, songs and antics of an Ethiopian wedding and comported ourselves magnificently. Before long, we were as much a part of it as anyone else. The body heat rose, the singing climbed the decibel ladder, the beer flowed in cascades and everyone had a right good time. As the night wore on and we realized that all the town's taxis had been commissioned by the wedding, Josh and I wondered how we were to get back to the Circle Hotel. The answer came in the form of a flatbed truck loaded with 30 drunk Ethiopians.

Josh had success earlier that day hitching a ride with a similar vehicle and bounded into truck bed without reservation. I followed suit. The truck itself was in poor repair, composed of a closed cab and an uncovered cargo hold bisected by a shoulder height pole. The bed, as mentioned above, was bustling with some 30 rowdy Ethiopians between the ages of 12 and 20, all despicably inebriated.

"Where you go?" asked one of the ruffians.
"Circle Hotel."
"Ah, Circle Hotel."
"Ou." Yes.
"Chigger yellum." No problem.

Our destination settled, we proceeded to get down. Nothing, not even the sordid spectacle that followed, can undermine how hard we partied with this crew of Habashawoch. The call-and-response patterns peculiar to Ethiopia were trotted out with unusual gusto. Our facility with them enlivened our Ethiopian friends, who swung heartily from the pole, danced in a rapturous flurry of limbs, and yelped with appreciation. Josh executed his Thriller-era Michael Jackson moves and roused everyone into a screaming rendition of "I Like to Move It, Move It." I answered by emceeing a vicious version of "Who Let the Dogs Out," complete with a schizophrenic proto-breakdance. As our truck lumbered down the mountain with the rest of the wedding caravan, our party wailed and barked like a portable junkyard.

The party rose to one pitch and then another, the cultural bounds of the passengers less appreciable by the minute. It was a supremely beautiful moment, the kind vaguely imagined when one undertakes a long stint of travel. But it was too labile to last. It turned ugly in an instant, and the joy came crashing down like a wall of fine china.

"Okay," Josh screamed. "Where is it? Where's my camera?"
The barking doghouse fell silent, and the writhing dancers froze.
"This isn't funny!" he yelled. "My camera is my life, my livelihood!"

With that, he tore into the crowd, laying hands on every benighted article he could, ransacking his way to the pilfered camera and flash. He quickly recovered them but kept scouring for a missing camera battery. It happened so quickly that I turned to my own camera bag a bit late. I rummaged through it to find the front pocket unzipped and my little notebook missing. I frisked myself and felt my passport and wallet in my shirt pocket. Josh returned to the front and double-checked his belongings. We exchanged a few words; I had recovered his notebook and handed it back to him. Satisfied that I had made off pretty well, I turned to the scene at the back of the truck.

A menagerie of bodies and shadows converged on the two thieves caught in flagrante delicto, one with a flash in his hand, the other with a camera. Emboldened by drink and enraged at the fact of our special fraternity blasphemed by wanton treachery, our Ethiopian friends commenced the most spirited beating I have ever seen. With the truck still chugging down the mountain road, I saw one thief, clad in a crisp red shirt, get his face pummeled into a pulp. One of the more lusty Ethiopians, whom I had exchanged a number of back slaps with, held him by the neck, hissed imprecations into his ear, and repeatedly slammed his face into the guardrail. His teeth spilled out like beads from a broken necklace. At one point, the avenger pushed his head as far over the rail as his could, trying to mash it against the cliff face as the truck scraped by. The thief, delirious from the beating, fell to the ground, and everyone uninvolved in restraining his counterpart began stomping him furiously. It was a total beat down.

Josh, meanwhile, had rushed back into the melée, trying to find his camera battery. The truck stopped abruptly at a perilous mountain switchback. I followed him in, trying to have his back in one way or another. As he berated the bleeding, sobbing remains the thief, I felt a little kid tug on my sleeve. I shook it off, taking it for misdirection. He tugged again. I swung around and hissed,

"What?"
"Dallas, get down!" he quavered.
"Why?" I demanded.
"The stoning begins now!"

Sure enough, a volley of stones arrived, crashing into the truck bed. I ducked down and covered my head. Apparently more than just two thieves were in on the scam; they had escaped unnoticed and started hurling rocks at us, aiming to free their co-conspirators. I crawled into one of the corners and turned back to see Josh obliviously shaking down one of the thieves.

"Josh, get the fuck down! They're stoning us!"
He turned to me, his glasses atilt, and yelled "What?"
"Get down! They're throwing stones!"

He clambered up to the front and took cover with me. The rocks fell like hailstones and sent everybody scrambling. The bloodied, half-dead thief leaped over the side of the truck and ran to the front. I looked through the back window of the cab to see him holding a stone in each hand, crying hysterically. With gore surging from his nostrils and oozing from his toothless mouth with every pathetic whimper, he wound up, aiming a rock at the windshield through his imbalance. Just as he pitched to throw, he staggered into the road and right into the path of an overtaking minibus from the wedding party. A rock whizzed over my head, and I fell to the ground hearing a dull thud and what sounded to be a skidding body.

"Holy shit!" Josh exclaimed. "The thief just got hit by a minibus!"
"Is he dead?"
"I don't know...No, he got up. Man, he got totally plowed! He flew like ten feet!"
Josh stood up to get a better look just as another fusillade of rocks landed in the truck. One hit him square in the small of the back.
"I'm hit!"

And so our ride back to the hotel turned into a hard-fought battle between good and evil will full air support. I remained covering my head in the shadows; one of the stones lightly grazed my shoulder. Again, I was exceedingly lucky. The small boy next to me, the one who had warned me of the barrage in the first place, was clutching his stomach and crying. Josh and I lifted his shirt and attended to him; there was no bleeding or contusion of any sort. In all likelihood, he was more scared than anything else. As the truck raced down the mountain, we asked whether there was a clinic or hosptital nearby. The good Ethiopians sloughed off the suggestion.

"He okay. We are fine."

The truck stopped in the Piazza, and our companions admonished us to get off. They still had one of the thieves detained; he too was bloody, swollen and crying like a baby. A fight broke out between a contingent that wanted to beat him further and another that felt he had had enough. Josh and I took the stance of the latter. After all, we had most of our possessions (Josh lacking only a camera battery, as I reminded him), one of the guilty parties had been run over by a bus, the remaining hostage was sufficiently smothered in blood, and everyone was drunk enough that a fatal lynching was a real possibility. Vigilante justice had been served, a bit illiberally perhaps.

We hopped off the truck, thanking our friends and protectors. Back at the hotel, I flushed Josh's wound with providone-iodine, and that was that. In retrospect, hopping on a flatbed truck with over two dozen soused strangers intent on having a rowdy freakout down a darkling mountain road was probably not the best idea. But that's how you acquire experience; you have to risk it to learn a bit. Increasingly in Ethiopia, I'm finding that those risks pay off in my best and worst experiences ever traveling, with very little in between. And sometimes, like last night, studded as it was with minor heroes and petty thieves, the best and the worst arrive in tandem.

 

The Pilgrim Bus to Lalibela

We awoke at 4:30 am and traipsed over to Debre Birhan's bus station, intent on advancing as far as Dessie. The bus stop was surprisingly astir with activity for so early in the morning. Ethiopia's buses embark at ungodly hours; I came to view them with weariness, being the vampire that I am. Hassan, my traveling companion, went in search of water while I attempted to load my backpack on the roof. A disturbed-looking man clutched my arm and began babbling about the astronomical price such an novelty would incur. He was resolute in his quote of 30 birr, repeatedly shoving his open hand at me in demand of payment. Everyone else projected a variance of opinion. As it turned out, he was wholly unconnected with the administration of the bus and not even a passenger. My backpack was shoved in a lower compartment, I wedged myself into the front of the bus, and threw a couple pills of Immodium down the hatch. Soon we were off.

A heavy mist hung over the mountains that morning, a condition completely unacknowledged by the bus driver. Given the high fatality statistics of road travel in Ethiopia (the highest in Africa I'm told), he didn't inspire me with confidence. Now overtaking a truck on a blind mountain pass, now arranging his purple towel of a headdress in the rear view mirror, now craning his neck to carry on with his friend in the back of the bus, the rheumy-eyed driver seemed unprofessionally distracted from the zero-visibility of the road.

By far the biggest distraction was the tape deck. In a country where technology tends to be sadly outdated, the tape deck of the Pilgrim Bus was the saddest of all. The entrance of a tape effected a hideous, earsplitting screech . This did not prevent the driver from focusing all of his attention on it. As we jolted over a road like an exploded mine field, he boxed the tape deck repeatedly, rewound the tapes by hand with a ballpoint pen, inserted them into the tape deck, punched it, ejected them, bashed them against the dashboard, and inserted them again. Finally, between the screeching, I could make out a thunderous, reverb-drenched voice ranting about Haile Selassie, Jesus Christ, and God. I rightly took it to be fire-and-brimstone preaching.

I comforted myself with the lack of cataclysmic car accidents in the papers. In Kenya, at least, you can't open up a newspaper without reading about a matatu plunging 1,000 feet off a sheer cliff and bellyflopping its payload of 40 passengers below. Then again, the press in Ethiopia doesn't exactly enjoy freedom, and the government is pretty touchy about anything that could damage its reputation abroad. The likelihood of an English-language report on one of the four buses we saw capsized between Debre Birhan and Dessie was decidedly low.

So far the only vehicular carnage I saw was one exceptional instance of minibus violence. Three days prior, Hassan and I were heading back to Hannah Maryam by bus. The metropolitan buses of Addis are ramshackle affairs with mouldering seats and aisles pregnant with blowing trash. They have a kind of ghost town quality to them, only they are full of bitter-looking people. We got off at the major intersection between Saris and Meskel Square called 'Baghdad' by the locals--a place where the settlements have been torn to the ground by the government for reasons as of yet unrevealed. We got on a minibus, and I took my seat on the wheel well. At the next stop, a crush of people slammed against the door and tried to gain entry. One person disembarked; twelve tried to get on. Their efforts seemed unusually desperate. Then I noticed a maniacal barefoot man around my age tormenting everybody.

He reached in and grabbed the minibus tout and started strangling him. It was an uneven match, as the boy was all of thirteen. The maniac pulled the boy out of the van and began barking at him, his hands tightening around his neck. I took it to be a dispute of some longevity between the two parties. After all, one doesn't gad about indiscriminately strangling minibus touts. But when I looked to the back of the bus, I realized there was more to the altercation: I could see Hassan's eyes aflame with rage.

Hassan got out of the minibus and began yelling at the maniac. Two men of the crowd inserted themselves and freed the tout. They pushed the maniac to the ground. I saw a man flash through the air as if he had leaped from the top rope of a wrestling ring and land a punch full on the face of the lunatic. His head landed heavily against the concrete and bounced up. The blow would have knocked a lesser madman unconscious; as it stood, it only knocked out his front teeth. He now used his bloody spit to keep the crowd at bay while he persisted in throttling the tout.

Hassan had finally had enough. He grabbed the tout, placed him in the minibus, and confronted the aggressor with his superior frame. Faced with so colossal a foe, he backed off. Everyone got back in the minibus and it seemed that the conflict had ended. The tout thanked Hassan and proceeded to close the door. Just before it clicked shut, the maniac jumped in, pulled out the tout, and started strangling him again. Hassan and I decided to get out. A couple of parries later, we decided to leave. The maniac was knocked to the ground once again; the minibus took off, but not before a well-aimed rock shattered the window. A shower of glass fell onto the street amid horrified screams.

I asked Hassan what the point of contestation had been between the tout and the angry young man. Apparently, the maniac was despicably drunk and in need of more drink. Having spent all his money, he held up our minibus and tried to extort it. He aimed his efforts at our hapless tout as he was the treasurer. Finding it all strange, I found it particularly so that the driver had completely absented himself from the tout's defense; he had just as much to lose. Hassan, for his part, was ashamed that a minibus full of his countrymen had responded so apathetically to the threat. And that's the grand tale of Minibus Violence.

Meanwhile, the sun rose on the Pilgrim Bus--and that's when I realized what it was. About forty people in spotless white raiment sat behind me, some in checkered head wraps, others holding walking sticks surmounted with silver crosses. I asked around; the bus was headed to Lalibela for Ghena, the Ethiopian Christmas. So too was I, a happy coincidence.

After the heights of Debre Sina (Mount Sinai), the thick mists lifted a bit. It would be difficult to overstate the natural beauty of the scene before me. In the foreground, elephantine grasses sprung out of the roadside between cactii that looked like crockeries of giant ping pong paddles. Behind lay fields of golden-hued teff and emerald green patches of sorghum riven by jagged riverbeds; these cut deep into surface like open wounds in the red earth. The enormity of space was interspersed with huts of mud and grass called tukuls, with woodsmoke curling out of their kitchens. A background of fleecy clouds nesting on peculiarly rounded mountains completed the picture.

The mountain ranges of Ethiopia are ancient, predating the formation of the Rift Valley. Millenia of erosion have stripped the peaks of their sharpness, but left their slopes nearly vertical. On the road to Lalibela, they appear to be the bellies of sleeping giants or shoals of humpbacked whales. Ambas, flat-topped mountains, abound--some peopled with minuscule settlements . Amid such drastic scenery, it is difficult to imagine the survival of any meagre notion; Ethiopia is truly a land of kings.

From Debre Sina, a good asphalt road makes a straight shot for Dessie. Enjoying the unfolding panorama, I had no recollection of packing my travel wallet. It wasn't in my carry-on bag; perhaps it was tucked somewhere in my backpack or sitting temptingly on my bed in the Akalu Hotel. I mentioned this casually to Hassan who immediately stopped the bus. A dozen people got out with me in a frenzy of concern. I removed my backpack from stowage, and twenty-six hands rifled through it. Sure enough, there it was at the very bottom. The discovery set off an explosion of joy among the lost-and-found posse, with everybody smiling and slapping each others' backs.

I was a bit sheepish about stopping the bus in the first place and climbed back in with a bit of trepidation. Instead of leering at me, the passengers clapped and seemed genuinely pleased I had found my lost article, no one more so than Hassan. He let out a sigh of relief.

"Now," he said, "we do not have to worry."
"I wasn't that worried," I countered. "I was reasonably sure it was in my backpack."
"But what if it wasn't?" he moaned. "What if you left it at the hotel? That would be shame for the country of Ethiopia!"
"Shame for Ethiopia that I'm an idiot?" I asked.
He shook his head as if I couldn't understand.

We decided to continue with the friendly bus all the way to Lalibela. After stopping in the drizzly town of Dessie for lunch, I brought out my camera and showed everyone in the back some of my photos. The bus tout was the most impressed.

"You make beautiful picture!" he said gleefully.
"Thank you."
"And you show to us!"
"Of course."
"Because you love the people! You are different faranj!"
It was one of the nicest compliment I'd ever received.

As our thirteen hour bus ride continued along occasions of road between potholes, I grew more and more impressed by the passengers around me. Most were older, many of them elderly ladies wrapped in shawls of white. I tried to picture a bus load of American soccer moms taking a twenty hour ride to Church on a road slamming their heads against the ceiling. Probability: zero. The hardship was taken with good cheer, joy even. I received oranges and Pepsi with a nod of the head from people far up front. I passed my iPod full of photos around. Many remarked on the beauty of my estranged girlfriend: "Enchi konjo no!"

Ten hours into the bus ride, one of the women brought out an Arabic calendar. It was a book full of hand-written hymns. The entire bus began clapping and singing; the tout stood up and shouted out the verses; both women and men ululated; and the bus filled with the strains of voices praising Maryam, Mother Mary. While the transformation of a dingy, rattling bus into a choir was moving, the most miraculous transformation took place in the person of a small boy sitting next to me. He'd had a haunted, harrowed aspect to him thus far. His brow furrowed with concern and his eyes lush with anguish, he'd spent most of the time anxiously looking around the bus, waiting for some great calamity to strike. But with the opening of the hymns, the angst melted from his face and he sang like an angel. He was possessed of the finest voice on the bus, that of a prepubescent boy absolute in his devotion, unencumbered by the doubts of adolescence.

But as the bus rode on, I realized that even the awkward looking youths with thin, fuzzy mustaches and pimply countenances were singing with equal conviction. A blind old lady in front stood swaying in the aisle raising her hands and giving thanks to God. The bus tout ran around leap-frogging over seats and clapping giddily. Everyone was in a state of spiritual ecstasy on the way to Ethiopia's Holy Land. Not one person wore a trace of sanctimoniousness. There was none of the competition for visibility I see so often in the dress of church-going Westerners: everyone wore the same humble cloth. My overall impression was that of a mild-mannered, solemn and deeply devout people on an ineffable journey to the heart of their faith. For the first time in many years, I felt a connection to Christianity and the power of God. Still, I couldn't locate it outside the people and doubt I ever will.

As the bus pressed into its thirteenth hour on the road, twilight fell on the landscape, now an amphitheater of mountains, each a huge hulk of wrinkled flesh. A blushing horizon heaved pink streaks into the purple clouds above as they scudded over the range. Row upon row of serrated mountaintops, like clusters of shark teeth, extended into mere suggestion. Suddenly, a maniac boarded the bus and began strangling the angelically singing boy.

Just kidding.

 

Debre Birhan

En route to Lalibela from Addis Abeba, Hassan and I stopped in the languid mountain town of Debre Birhan. It was quite a relief from Addis, particularly in terms of hassle. The children failed to agglutinate into faranji-screaming swarms; beggars didn't cross the street to importune me; prices didn't skyrocket the moment I set foot in a cafe. But there's always something; in this case it was my stomach.

I'd spent the better part of the week contending with an alien life form gurgling away in my belly. It was in Debre Birhan--'Mountain of Light'--that it completed its infiltration of planet Earth. I woke up on the morning of the 3rd to an angry rumbling that I promptly ignored. Hassan and I went to the City Top Cafe where I ordered a macchiato. As they were steaming the milk, I couldn't tell whether the swooshing sound was coming from the kitchen or my gut. By my third sip, I knew it to be the latter. Coffee, milk, and sugar--was I trying to defy the gods?

Within seconds, I became aware of an angry mob crowding around the one physiological exit. It was perhaps one kilometer to the hotel. With veins sprouting from my forehead and a sheet of sweat oozing from my pores, I stood up and declared, "Gotta go." Hassan looked up from his Sudanese breakfast a bit baffled; before he could inquire, I was gone.

I proceeded to walk the longest kilometer of my life. It was a masterpiece of adaptation. Because I knew that any release of pressure meant failure and humiliation, I kept my buttocks firmly clenched. This, however, was not conducive to forward movement. The only real option was to pivot on one foot, swing to the other, and then repeat. In this way, I made my way to the hotel swinging like a revolving door.

I also adopted the adage of "When in Ethiopia, do as the Ethiopians do." Because the country and its people attribute everything, whether victory or failure, to the whims of God, I abandoned the fate of my mission to the monarch of the skies. Not, of course, without what must surely be one of the strangest prayers on record:

"Dear Mighty God, maker of Heaven and Earth, please grant this unworthy sinner the sphincter control required to reach the Akalu Hotel without releasing a riotous torrent of shit. Thou art great; please use thine omnipotence to stymie the flow of fetid sewage from the buttocks of your humble subject. And if thou Lord-all-powerful see fit for this miserable wretch to spill his bowels in public and thereby ensure his everlasting shame, please locate the site of ignominy somewhere inconspicuous, like an abandoned alleyway, or perhaps a deep ditch with limited visibility from the horizon."

As God would have it, I was destined to reach my hotel room door where I frantically stabbed the keyhole. I quaked on the commode for the better part of the day. Two factors conspired to enhance the humor: for one, the toilet seat was mysteriously unattached to the toilet bowl. Secondly, the toilet, as is the case in most hotel bathrooms in Ethiopia, was right next to a curtain-less shower. I had taken a shower earlier that morning; the effect was not unlike a really disgusting Chucky Cheese challenge, a kind of slip n' slide propelled by explosive diarrhea.

We didn't make it Debre Sina as intended. In fact, we were moored in Debre Birhan, or at least that's where I dropped anchor. The matronly owner of the Akalu Hotel boiled me some potatoes, Hassan dashed about cornering the town's supply of toilet paper, and I bounced through an eight hour series of contractions. After a dose of Cipro and Immodium, Hassan and I walked around the plains south of town. A full moon rose between mountain peaks while pink ribbons of light streamed out of the west. And thus a morning of fear and trembling gave way to a night of peace and sleep--well, peaceful but for the troop of fleas I picked up.

 

Mercato Madness!

Flash Slideshow

Yes, my friends, your valiant photojournalist wannabe sallied forth into the Mercato armed only with a camera and came back with these illuminating photographs. Enjoy!