We went into the shed where the corn is cooked.  It had an ancient foundation and a tin roof with holes in it through which sunlight streamed in beautiful beams.  We had a taste of the corn and talked with the boys about their work.  Even in these sheds we wore no shoes.

    The next shed was where they made the special injera (Ethiopian bread).  The monks only eat this kind of fermented bread and corn.  I think it is a very small measure and only once per day but I can’t remember this.  In any event this didn’t seem like a lot of food to feed 600 monks – our group must look gargantuan in size to them.  In this shed there was even more smoke with giant bathtub sized open vats where the injera batter sat for two days fermenting.  It also had large fires under circular, hill-shaped iron plates.  The smoke made our eyes burn.  Initially the monks barred the door saying that we could not enter.  Our guide seemed to explain that we were Christians visiting for devotional reasons.  The monk said that someone else had visited and made photographs and then profited from these without sending any money back to the monks.

    We ended up entering but not taking photographs.  Anyway although the photos are inadequate they are a better depiction of monastic life than these words.

    We ate a very late box lunch of cheeseburgers in a kind of extra large modern hut with panoramic glass windows all around it looking out at a kind of Ethiopian grand canyon.  We kept thinking we were going to leave and then not going anywhere.  People bought little bread baskets, stone crosses, etc.  Then we walked down the other ridge behind us to a very old limestone bridge.  We loved this place.  It was a much longer stop than we all expected but the children loved seeing the pet monkey outside the hut.  We have worked hard trying to convince them not to touch any animals in Africa because of rabies.

    It was so late by the time we returned to Addis Ababa that we took the children right home rather than eat supper with everyone at their hotel.  Although staying at Yemi’s apartment means that we’re in the car for an extra hour every day (and probably keeps us from coming back to our room any time during the day), we are all together as a family.  This also means that we have had the opportunity to get to know Yemi better.  She really is an extraordinary woman.  She told us about her education as a secretary major, her work for the government, then her father’s death in a car accident which left her as the sole provider for her family.  Because of this she moved to Egypt to be a nanny.  When she returned to Ethiopia she met Steve Kellog, her American business partner and began her current work as a tour guide and an Ethiopian art dealer.  This account of her is so inaccurate.  The most important thing to know about her is that she has the biggest heart of almost anyone we’ve met.  At every stop she is giving food, water bottles and money to children and the elderly poor.  She has taken young men and women and basically adopted them as members of her family.  She has an amazing piety, a deep faith evident in almost everything she does.  We are blessed to see her and to know her.  She fasts, goes on regular retreats, makes pilgrimages to holy places.  And yet this still isn’t enough.  She is beautiful and fashionable and cool and great with the kids and a good friend to us.  Yemi’s brother has epilepsy which has caused two serious falls in recent days – she has been spending a lot of time visiting her brother and mother late at night.  We slept well Monday night for the first time in a while….

    Yesterday morning we prepared for another long drive.  Going north yesterday we went over the mountains and to a giant plain which looks like California during the dry season.  The clusters of huts that we see are so beautiful and well-proportioned.  I would love to make a photograph that does justice to them.  Yesterday morning we saw many men driving yoked cattle over the grains to break up the kernels, then they pitch the mixture into the air to separate the grain from the chaff.  So much of what we see here is biblical, from the herds of sheep and goats around even the capital to these small villages and the surprising number of people far out in the countryside to the agricultural/pastoral setting outside of the city.

    We traveled south yesterday through a landscape shaped by volcanic forces.  We saw huge extinct volcanoes, one that looked like Haleakala and giant fields of boulders that may have been shot out of an exploding mountain.  The first place we stopped was Mekla Kumtura, a series of archeological sites with museum huts to teach us about geology, anthropology, etc.  The discoveries that anthropologists have made in the last fifteen years are extraordinary.  They remind me how quickly our knowledge can go out of date.  Whole new forms of hominids have been discovered.  I imagined what the first homo sapiens who lived here 200,000 years ago may have been like, the branches of hominids like the Neanderthals that are lost to us now.  It is so impossible to fathom time streteched so deep over periods so vast that the mountains have changed.  There is a kind of holiness we experienced here contemplating the overwhelming extent of God’s creation, all that we have and all that has been lost to everything but the mind of God, the ages of quiet before the creatures which make music had come into being.

    This place was once a beach, a place where people met and hippopotami slaughtered.  These ancient ancestors chipped flakes off obsidian and made a variety of cutting tools.  The Neanderthals were the first hominids to bury their dead, or at least their’s are the oldest graves so far discovered.  I was amazed by how short of a time span homo sapiens made art.  Maybe our art work is just too ephemeral.  Although our 2,500 year old scriptures seem young in this context, I do feel that they connect us to this more ancient world.

    Next we went to Adadi Mariam, a church buried deep in the ground and carved entirely out of a single massive piece of limestone.  We’ll see more churches like this in Lalibela.  We walked around it a few times and prayed inside the octagonal church in front of the curtained altar.  Ellen Schell said that the place really needed a woman’s touch.  Even a man like me would have replaced the dirty worn carpets inside or done a better job of concealing the electrical wires that hang everywhere and are ultimately connected to car batteries up above ground underneath a worn tent.  Still, I find over and over, that we have a difficult time as Americans fully appreciating how poor people here really are.  So much of what we see is that way because people cannot afford to have it be in any other way.  We all prayed a lot, received the blessing of the resident priest.  We were pilgrims, not tourists there.

    I already wrote a little about lunch in Lemen and the funeral procession seen from the tented roof of the restaurant in the middle of this town along the paved road.  Yesterday we also saw Hailie Gebreselassie, the internationally famous marathoner running on the gravel roadbed of the highway they are constructing in front of Yemi’s guest house.  I also shouldn’t neglect one of my favorite moments of the day – Micah and Melia leading us in singing “Seek Ye First the Kingdom of God,” etc. in the van.  We sang with such enthusiasm and joy.  This was another part of the trip that wouldn’t have happened without them.  They bless us all so deeply with their observations, the way they make the top of our little community’s life together light.  They soften us all up and the people of Africa welcome us so much more warmly with their smiles that greet the children everywhere.  These kids bless us with extraordinary patience in finding themselves totally and at every minute of the day immersed in the adult world.  Adults would be less likely to put up with all that we’ve asked of them.

    Tiya Stele are in a field on a little plateau surrounded by valleys and villages.  The stelae are between 400 and 1200 years old with carvings of false bananas and swords which indicate the rank of the warriors and hunters buried there.  Brian gave out American pennies to some children outside the gate.  This caused a small scale riot among the kids.  Giving things out only works for Yemi who spends most of that time clarifying boundaries and rules before giving out bread, etc.

    The bodies buried at the base of these head stones were initially in the fetal position.  When Christians came they started burying them straightened out.  It was hard to think about death in this place as the threshers beat out the grain and the farmers worked in the fields beyond and we gathered behind the barged wire and rusty gate setting apart this historical landmark.  I have felt this sense so many times in Africa – although we see signs of death, AIDS, poverty and disease in so many places, the amount and exuberance of life completely overwhelms death.  People describe African piety in terms of their concern for the afterlife or spirit world.  For me the faith of the people here, and for that matter my faith visiting, arises out of a respect for life and a feeling of joy that God creates us and brings us into this often beautiful and surprising world.

 

 

Night has come, the children are asleep and Heidi is bathing and the herbal tea is steeping and I finally have the chance to reflect on the events of this day.  Our fellow travelers all visited our apartment and descended like vultures on the metal crosses and icons that Yemi just received back from her travels in London.  It doesn’t bring out the best in human nature, even when all of the objects are for religious purposes.  Heidi and I wonder what Yemi and her various assistants really think of us.  As a group we’re pretty high maintenance.  Someone is always wandering off or having some kind of special request or need.  It must be such a relief for her when all the Americans go home.

But maybe I’m not completely right about this.  There was one very important benefit of being with us today.  We began the morning with coffee at the Axum Hotel.  Walter didn’t bring the $100 bills that we’d been instructed to bring, so we had to go to the Sheraton Hotel’s Teller Machine.  Part of the building is still under construction.  It is an odd place and completely fails to match the place that it is in.  Although in this case maybe it isn’t such a bad thing.  There is such an incongruity between the lavish opulence of the hotel and the stark poverty all around.  The hotel’s luxury didn’t appeal to me, but I was very glad that Micah and Melia could play on the jungle gym there for about five minutes.  Every part of this experience is for adults and the children have been absolutely amazing about this.  They have been such a pleasure for everyone to be with despite long car trips, multiple museum visits and interviews with local religious leaders.  As I have said repeatedly they are an extraordinary blessing.

After more coffee at the fancy Sheraton Hotel and ice cream for the children, we went to the National Museum.  Lucy’s bones (Australopithecus Afarensis) reside there in the basement.  It reminded me how old hominids are.  Lucy is 3.2 million years old and 3 1/2 feet high).  I was so struck by how small the hominids were and how much bigger all the animals of that time were (the wild boar for instance was huge (although the hippopotamus was smaller)).  The wild bulls and sabertooth tigers and elephants, etc. made life risky for those ancients.  Some of the other bones that we have from Lucy’s species came from a cave where scientists thought wild animals had dragged the people in order to devour them.  How fragile life is and uncertain.  Although humans have over run the planet they could have been completely wiped out at so many points in our history.

We saw a video on the latest hominid and modern art objects and statutes from 400 years before Christ and the rest of the Tiya Stele and crosses and icons and a communist painting.  One thing I love about Ethiopian culture is that it is not stuck in a time warp.  Sometimes in other places I feel like one era is so emphasized that one is tempted to forget that a people’s cultural, etc. projects continue on today.  We have seen architecture and art from every period.  We see that new works are right now being created.