Jane Kurtz: Visit to Ethiopia 2001

The first delay happened on our flight out of Maji. After three days of not washing even faces, we were panting to get back to the city of showers and flushing toilets, but Ethiopian Airlines was conducting emergency exercises at Bole Airport, so we had to wait in Jimma. A second delay (Nairobi to Mombassa) was the result of trouble -- or was it excessive celebration? -- in Zanzibar -- or was it Zimbabwe? The worst delay was in Mombassa where the hotel bus didn't leave enough time for a slow ferry and we missed our 1:00 flight. I suppose it could have been even more dire: some of got on the flight to Nairobi at 5:00, some at 6:00, and some at 7:15.

Jonathan and Katherine in Mombassa

And the luggage! Starting out, we were lugging camping supplies. Going home, we had our collective obsessions: Jan, silver crosses and scholarly books; Katherine, ear picks; Jonathan, masks and drums and large carved animals; me, amber -- and so on. When we ultimately left Nairobi for the trip home, we walked out on the tarmac and saw all the luggage for Flight ET 800 lined up. Each passenger had to point to his or her luggage. No match? Presumably the bag stayed on the tarmac. Our hearts were swollen with relief to see the mound of suitcases go finally lumbering on a cart toward the jet -- oh joy -- gone. Gone. Or -- so we thought until a moment in Bole Airport, after a six-hour layover, when we were shown to a room where all our bags whirled lazily on a conveyer belt. Once again we had to drag them onto carts and head for the x-ray machines. You have not tasted security until you attempt to board a flight from Ethiopia to Newark.

But back to Mombassa, a place I had planned to savor, a place it took me about forty years -- after I first heard my parents' tantalizing descriptions of it--to reach. Indeed, the Indian Ocean was postcard perfect: azure water and white, white sand, thanks, we were told, to millions of years and the digestive systems of parrot fish. Some of our group windsurfed. Some snorkeled. I did neither, being too lazy for the first and too glasses-geeky for the second, but I spent every afternoon in the ocean when the tide was coming in and loved paddling in a place so warm that even when I stepped out of the water, I only needed to shiver for a few seconds. We'd had a fairly mild winter in North Dakota before Rebekah and I left, so much so that I heard one man say, "If this is global warming, bring it on." I wouldn't go that far but, one hundred degrees in Mombassa? Bring THAT on any January.

Starfish in Mombassa

When Henry Beston was thirty-six years old, he decided to follow the Transcendentalists into solitude on Cape Cod. In The Outermost House, he writes of bird tracks etched in sand dunes and other "poetic and mysterious" sights. Cousineau says, "Epiphanies sometimes flash and flare for pilgrims, but there are also flickering moments of discovery on your journey, seen out of the corner of your eye." On this day in late January, a day where the high will be five degrees below 0 with a powdered sugar dusting of snow on the ground, as I sift through the memories of my own pilgrimage, the light catches on flickerings and epiphanies, small puddles of extra brightness and warmth.

--A mystery: Many an ancient pilgrims was catapulted onto the journey in search for healing of maladies, twists, and ailments, so it's probably fitting that I start my trip anxious about a toothache that popped up that weekend, loaded with Tylenol and Ambesol. It gets worse. Cathy has Melalucca oil that she says Australian soldiers carried with them for toothaches, so we decide to perform what Rebekah calls "voodoo" and rub it on my gum for three-four days. Presto chango. No more toothache.

--A moment of poetry: We ride mules to a cave church in Lalibela and sit in the cool, fragrant interior, our feet resting on straw, the sound of holy water dripping in the background. Dad asks the priest if he will read the 23rd Psalm in Ge-ez, the ancient (now only written) ancestor language of Amharic. I listen to the old, old words knowing that other people sitting in the semi-circle are remembering, with me, standing in a cemetery in Addis Ababa, looking down at the small gravestone of a brother, a son, the psalmists words curling on it: "And I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever."

--The horror, the horror -- and a gasp of salvation: If I said it once, I said it a hundred times: get your yellow fever inoculation. Jonathan did -- he just didn't manage to do it in time to get the yellow health card with the official stamp. The public health print-out said, "Ethiopia does not list this inoculation as required but the U.S. Embassy reports that airport officials sometimes do insist." For us, they don't. But an official in Nairobi -- where the inoculation is listed as recommended but not required -- does. For a few throat-squeezing moments, I think weíll be leaving Jonathan in the Nairobi airport. "What did I tell you?" blossoms in my mouth. I quell it. I show the official the printed health department document that I happen to have in my bag. She frowns. She argues. She finally says, "I will let it go this time," and lets him through. (Just to put this gasp in perspective, apparently Jacob almost went over the cliff near the bat cave. I, the Exploration Queen of Maji who often made my own mother gasp, am glad I didn't have to witness that moment.)

--Shards of challenge: How do people who are swimming in Too Much Stuff spend time with people who struggle to have enough? We suffer, quail and talk at each stop about how we can respond with kindness and care. People aren't shy about offering their suggestions for ways we might help. Occasionally, we are asked for candy or money but the most common requests are for other things we all have in abundance: shoes, books, pens. Everywhere we go -- from Lalibela to Maji to Mombassa -- we are asked for pens. Since this happened in 1997 as well, we took 300 pens with us, but we still run out.

Children of Lalibela

--Shards of hope: In Bali, pilgrims leave gifts of flowers and fruit. In Tibet, yak butter. I'd hoped to carry with me the first Ethiopian picture book to leave in people's hands, but it's been a year of discouragement of trying to get permission from the Ethiopian government for Yohannes to establish the Ethiopian Books for Children and Educational Foundation. In Ethiopia, I hear more discouraging stories as I poke around, asking questions -- but I also hear stories of inspiration. Two people in Addis Ababa tell me about Sister Jember, born into an aristocratic family, once the wife of the mayor of Addis Ababa, jailed (with her husband) under the communist government of the Dergue. Now she is a community organizer with the poor of the city -- she organizes people into communities where they have decent housing, medical care. We are invited to supper one night at the house of Dr. Taye, a man we knew when he was a public health worker in Maji and who went on to become a doctor. His wife, a nurse, now works with Sister Jember. I write down the contact information and walk away hopeful again.

--A minor miracle: I suspected that traveling with seven young people -- mostly teenagers -- was going to end up under the category of Major Trial. The youngest (Chris's son Jacob) turned 11 on Maji mountain. The oldest (my son Jonathan) turned 20 in Mombassa. Amazingly, the whole lot of them--young and old, male and female, prickly and good-natured--patiently give up their make-up, their showers and flush toilets, their precious privacy. They never once say, "We're going to do WHAT??" They keep whining and eye-rolling to an absolute minimum. They play Rook with each other and turn small notebooks into Amharic dictionaries. I return home filing each one of them under Major and Oh-Most-Startling Blessing.

Jonathan with backpacking guitar.

On the last weary leg of the journey, the last jet, Rebekah and I added up our flights and figured out we'd been on fourteen planes in three weeks:

GFK to Minnesota (blissfully uneventful)
Minnesota to Newark (ditto)
Newark to Addis Ababa (exhausting, but not as bad as I thought it would be)
Addis Ababa to Lalibela (interesting)
Lalibela to Addis Ababa (ditto)
Addis Ababa to Tum (travel karma gets shaky...)
Tum to Addis Ababa (...and turns bad)
Addis Ababa to Nairobi
Nairobi to Mombassa (...and continues to wobble)
Mombassa to Nairobi (...and hits bottom)
Nairobi to Addis Ababa
Addis Ababa to Newark (wherein we learn to spell "security")
Newark to Minneapolis (involves a last minute will-we-won't we get on scare?)
Minneapolis to GFK. (aaaaah)

Lalibela was solemn reds and browns, a dusty soccer field and a Lion King-like savanna that seemed to stretch out to forever as I leaned over the balcony of the Jerusalem Guest House.

Maji was dark orange flowers with black hearts, deep green wet plants, colobus monkeys swooshing through a thick stand of trees that looked, when we were above them, like broccoli heads stacked side by side.

Addis Ababa that last day was pink star flowers on a bush, lacy purple flowers, fluffy pink and orange flowers bubbling over walls, lacy fences, an acacia tree glimpsed in a compound.

Now we fly over the Minnesota border, and I look down on North Dakota. It's elegantly stark, a black-and-white photograph of trees and flat fields.

"Welcome to Grand Forks," the flight attendant said. "The local time is 12:30."