Jane Kurtz: Visit to Ethiopia 2001

Surprisingly, though, the Yekir Demosey itself didn't feel like agony to me -- not the way some other parts of the journey did. After all, the path up the cliff smelled wet and green. Every step uncovered long-forgotten beauty: tiny lavender orchids and tinier daisies, the hoosh hoosh of a waterfall and of the wind, ropey vines dangling from trees. Butterflies fluttered by and, yes! Beloved water babies curled on the tips of ferns. When we came to gaps in the foliage, we could look down to the sweeping blue and yellow of the land around Tum and koro koro roofs far below. An iced breeze kept the walking cool. The climb was tough but I loved the cliff, the familiar smell of the leaves beside the path. For me, it was the six hours of drudgerous trudging before and after the cliff that became an endurance test.

The first day was the worst. We'd prepared for cold -- for the rain that even in dry season keeps Maji green -- and I'd had my ear muffs on in the Addis Ababa airport that morning, but we were taken aback by how hot it was as we left Tum. After a frantic scene at the Tum airstrip, thirty or forty men, women and children, possibly the greater part of the population of Tum, all jostling to see what the ferenjis were doing, we'd wobbled out in a rather discombobulated line. About fourteen men and boys had successfully argued their credentials with a local teacher who hired guides and carriers for us. These carriers quickly moved to the head of the line with the zippier walkers; only one -- Mittike Galabo -- stayed back with the end-of-the-line laggers: Cathy, Carolyn (Chris's wife) and me. "Tinish, tinish (a little, a little)," Mittike kept telling us as we drooped and dragged more and more, but we gradually caught on that it couldn't possibly be just a little further because he had been saying that for hours.

All our water was with the other carriers. Beside the path, we found some sour berries Mittike told us were good to eat, but once those were gone, the African sun sizzled our throats. On one of our frequent rests, I checked to see if either of the others remembered the symptoms of heat stroke. Eventually, Cathy and I did remember enough of our Amharic to tell Mittike, "Please go and get water to bring back for us." He started off, but every time he came to a curve in the path, he turned around and waited until we caught up. Luckily, we soon saw that by that time we really were only a "tinish, tinish" way from the campsite -- glorious in spite of white sugar cane spittings, a thick line of marching ants, and cows wandering among the tents.

When we'd started planning this trip, my dad had argued that we should sleep on the ground and live off the land. "That's what I always did on my treks," he said. (My mother could be heard in the background saying, "Don't forget, you took your oatmeal.") He was overruled. The fourteen of us who made the Maji climb shared three tents. Almost everyone had a pad. For sleeping bags, most of us had "bivvy sacks" that I had discovered in a catalog. They looked like soft aluminum foil and rolled up tiny -- and they didn't work. We woke up after a few hours in them that first night, drenched in our own sweat and shivering. Luckily, many of us had also bought gabis in Addis Ababa, and from then on we mostly relied on their thick cotton warmth and on huddling together. The bivvy sacks got voted the least popular of our experiments. The most wondrous of the inventions we carried was the water filter that allowed us to drink clear water until it broke and we were stuck with muddy water that had been either boiled for ten minutes or treated with Halazone tablets.

We headed up Yekir Demosey while we were fresh the next morning, and the rest of the long hike -- though weary-making -- was sweetened by glimpses of our destination far across the valley. The buildings of my childhood are now part of Maji high school. The house my dad and grandfather built, a place drenched with memories (running down the concrete hall at night toward the flickering kerosene lamp, playing with catalog paper dolls in the spider webs in the attic), is a science lab. When we finally reached the school grounds, we asked and received permission to camp right next to our old house. Most of the carriers went off to Maji town to eat and sleep. Several volunteered to stay with us and help with the cooking and water and wood gathering. Mittike, who went off, came back a bit later. Explaining that there was "no joy" in Maji, he intended to stay with us instead. That night, most of us cozied around a campfire. We sang carols and canons. Mittike and his friends sang several songs they all knew. Dad told a story from our childhood -- a lion hunt story, with actions to go with it. Chris translated into Amharic. Everyone did the actions to much hilarity.

Ultimately, talk around the fire turned to philosophical murmurings. Mittike and the others told us they thought it strange we'd come to Ethiopia when they want to go to America. They were glad for the opportunity to check out some of the things they'd heard about ferenjis. Is it true, they asked, that in your culture people weep when a new baby is born and rejoice when a person dies? Is it true that in America even a person who cleans bathrooms can buy a car? "If I came to America," Mittike asked, "would people stand around me and watch me the way the people of Tum did with you?"

Cathy and I had worried that we'd have no energy left for exploring Maji, so we were gleeful over finding the oomph to make the familiar hike down to the waterfall, an almost-daily trip when we were little kids. (Later, back at camp, I commented on the pool beneath the waterfall and how Dad would never let us swim in it because he thought there might be Italian bombs, left over from the war, at the bottom of it. "I knew there were Italian bombs at the bottom of it," he corrected me. "I was one of the people who threw them in there." Oh.) The next morning, four of us adults and three or four of the kids hired schoolboys -- one pen apiece -- to show us the way to the bat cave, a much rarer trip when we were children. Once we were out on the path, I remembered why. It was one of those places where Dad would line us up sternly before we began and say, "When I say frog, you jump." This path no more than a foot wide hugs the cliff face; one step to the left and we'd be trying to tread air. After we'd scooched along the cliff for a while, the boys stopped by a big rock and warned us that it was more dangerous to go on. They wanted another pen (each) to continue. I paused, remembering the last time I was in Maji: I'd been in my twenties by then. Cathy, who was along on that trip, too, and I had found the bat cave on our own. I remembered standing at the entrance to the cave, behind a waterfall, looking out into the valley through a curtain of water. I decided sometimes memories should suffice. The others went on, but I turned back, thus forgoing the bat cave but getting a chance to climb back to Maji on my own (clinging to the long grass on the side of the cliff, stomach swooping), just as in those years right before my family left Maji when I was twelve or thirteen and an adventurer. In one narrow spot, I passed a schoolboy on the path and got to hear a familiar phrase that had become a sort of kind mantra for me over the years: "Don't afraid."

Rebekah did not travel to the waterfall or the bat cave, because she spent the night throwing up, the first of our group to succumb to Horrid Stomach Stuff that threatens every time a traveler leaves familiar food and bacteria behind. This kind of sickness wasn't really unexpected, and she was soon full of Pepto Bismal and Immoium AD. It was the timing that hurt. Weak or not, she had no choice but to walk. Foot up. Foot down. Foot up. Foot down. It took seven hours to climb Maji mountain and five to descend. Rebekah would occasionally lie down and moan and say she couldn't go on. Someone would coax her up and on we would go. But walking -- even tortured walking -- has its own rhythms and stories. My brother (wondum in Amharic, nquoidad in Deese) hung back to help Bek, and since he could converse in Amharic with our carriers, the rest of us stragglers had a rich journey. We got to hear opinions ("Homes where only old people live? You mean the people who gave you birth?"), ask about folk medicines (rabbit fur for burns, twelve different remedies from a certain kind of snake -- not as good for some ailments as ferenji medicine, better for others), have misconceptions cleared up ("Eat monkey? They have hands!"). Long ago, my sisters and I had coaxed one of the young men working in our house to teach us how to count to five in Deeze. I had a chance to see how well I remembered...and learn five more numbers, so that I can now count up to ten. It all helped keep my mind off the pain. When we asked "How much longer?" our carriers said, "With the way these slow ones walk, we'll be there by sundown." They were right. It was getting dark as we made the last mile or so, hobbling along a bulldozed swath that will someday be a car (or at least mule) road from Tum to Maji. My feet hurt, my back hurt, my leg muscles hurt. I was limping and leaning on my borrowed walking stick like an old woman.

But in the eyes of a pilgrim, hardship is not necessarily a bad thing. As Cousineau says, our lives so often feel full of restlessness and void where there should be what Gerard Manley Hopkins calls "juice and joy." On the seven-hour trek to Maji, I was astonished by the joy in a sip of Halazone-treated water, a moment's rest on a smooth rock, even a freshly dug latrine. Every tiny grace was a gift; every gift flooded me with gratitude.

Near the end of his book, Cousineau quotes Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh: "The purpose is to be in the present moment and enjoy each step you make. Therefore you have to shake off all worries and anxieties, not thinking of the future, not thinking of the past, just enjoying the present moment." I'm such a goal-girl; such a person to want to have A Plan--better yet, a five-year, ten year, twenty-year plan. I stayed in Maji parts of two days and slept there one night, and the whole time I never tried to gaze even one step down the path but felt perfectly where I wanted to be. Maji, for me, will always be sacred ground. And for the pilgrim, as Cousineau says, "there is unabashed wonder and humbleness before the sacred. It's as if you've surprised the secret lurking at the heart of the world."

Remnants of memory -- cedar trees now old, a beloved house now shabby, descendants of the flowers my sisters and I played with.