Harar and the Leprosy Hospital

I took a bus to Harar in the east. I didn’t really know what was there, I had just looked at the map of Ethiopia, figured I’d go north to see the Historic Circle and South to see the tribes at some stage, but was waiting for the American guy Elie to go South with me and trying to find someone to go north with me, so figured a few days east would help things fall into place.

The bus drove through mountainous rural areas which were not really rural at all. The sides of the mountains were totally deforested and in its place were squares of dirt littered with tiny shacks. I could imagine how beautiful it once was, but now it reeked of the struggle for land, farming and ultimately food.

Two men on the bus asked if I was Chinese. I asked them if they had ever seen a Chinese person before and they said ‘yes Chinese people are everywhere!’

When the bus pulled over for lunch I decided to take a walk instead of eating – the winding roads weren’t doing my appetite any favours. The whole way up the street and the whole way back I was followed by a group of twenty boys shouting “Money. Dollar. Money”.

I was so fed up with them that I went back to the bus and hid beneath it waiting until it was time to go. But two men found me there and asked me for money. I said no and instead of leaving they just stood right in front of me and stared at me. I kept waiting for them to leave or at least say something but they just stood there and stared me down. The three of us stayed there, in silence, for over ten minutes. Finally the bus was ready to leave, I pushed passed them and drove away.

As soon as the bus arrived in Harar I was hounded by the usual touts trying to grab my bag and asking me where I was going. I had tried to take my bag off the bus but the bus staff told me not to, I had to wait on the footpath, that I was not allowed to get it myself. Then they told me I had to pay them 5 birr for them getting it off the bus for me. It was hard to do much with a tight crowd of twenty or so men around me touching, grabbing and shouting at me.

I eventually said yes to getting in a tuk-tuk with one guy who was really persistent, but seemed harmless enough. His name was Ramadan and he took me to a hotel, checked me into a room and carried my bag even though I tried to do it myself. I agreed to let him take me on a half day tour of Harar the next day.

When he finally left I took myself to the Lonely Planet’s ‘best pic’ restaurant, which definitely would never have been one of my ‘best pic’s’.

Exhausted after my long day and my hang-over I went back to my hotel room to read my book in peace.

Minutes later there was a knock at the door and I opened it half dressed. It was Ramadan asking if he could take me out to dinner. I politely said no and told him I would see him at 9am tomorrow.

The phone kept ringing… it was Tom.

He sent me messages asking if I am safe, if I am happy and saying ‘I miss you baby’.

The next morning at 9am Ramadan picked me up for the tour of Harar.  

Harar is a visually fascinating place, very much existing in a time from long, long ago. It seemed heavily Muslim/Arabic influenced, with bright colours, crowded market places, strange smells, hard working donkeys, crammed little lane ways overflowing with shuffling bodies and a constant hum of talking and shouting, only ever broken by the ringing of church bells and the reverberating mumble of the Muslim Call to Prayer.

Ramadan showed me the ancient gates to the city, now a skeleton of their old glory. He showed me Rimbaud’s house, the old palace, crooked buildings over slivers of red dusty streets and mosques I was not allowed to enter.

I told him that I wanted to see a hospital. I wanted to compare it to the hospitals I saw in Namibia and Ghana, and I was beginning to think that you can learn a lot about a country by the state of their hospitals.

He tried to take me to the public hospital but a surly guard stopped us at the entrance and said that no tourists were allowed in.

Then he suggested we try the leprosy hospital.

Of course I wanted to see it! 

The name of the leprosy hospital was Gendafaro (that is what Ramadan told me, I haven’t been able to find it on the internet since then). It was at once so depressing it looked and felt like a prison, and yet simultaneously it had the energy of a peaceful sanctuary.

Through the gate we stepped into a small courtyard in the centre of a U shaped building comprised of small dark cell-like rooms, cold and bare except for a single mattress.

People with missing fingers and toes were lying in their doorways, bathing in the sun. No body seemed to have much to do, and nobody was talking to each other. They seemed mildly interested in my presence but not bothered by it. I only saw one woman there amongst mostly middle-aged men.

I was interested in the only man not lying down doing nothing. He was sitting on his haunches in the doorway of his room making coffee in a pot over a small flame. He had a total of two half-sized fingers, one on each hand, and making coffee seemed to me to be a little too great a task. However he must have been very experienced, he didn’t get frustrated by it and slowly, patiently and carefully, with the palm of his hands and the stubs of two fingers he managed to brew, pour and finally sip his coffee.

I wanted to know more about the hospital, like where were the doctors and nurses, were the patients permitted to come and go as they pleased, but Ramadan didn’t have any of the answers I was dying to know.

We crossed the road to the cemetery, a fitting place to be parked opposite a leprosy hospital, and Ramadan jumped the wall to open the locked steel gates. One of the permanent residents of the cemetery, that is one of those who are alive, jumped up from his slumber to show us around. We followed him as he pointed out the obvious and repeated time and time again “This is the Italian section. There is the Italian section. Over there… that is the Italian section.”

The cemetery was green and overgrown, except for the Italian section, and I found it peaceful.

We found one woman talking to her self and shouting at no one. As we got closer to her she glared at me and snarled, a shiver of fear danced inside me. “She is crazy” Ramadan told me. “She lives here and is dangerous so stay away”. I assumed it was either schizophrenia or PTSD… or both. And I was reminded again how hard life is for some people, especially here in Ethiopia.

On the way out I slipped our self appointed cemetery guide 20 birr.

Ramadan asked if there is something else I wanted to see, the museum? The gallery?

“A coffee ceremony” I told him.

He phoned his sister and asked her if we could visit and she could perform a traditional coffee ceremony for me. She obliged.

On the way there we picked up chat for everyone to chew (I felt sick just thinking about it), as well as some flavoured tobacco for the hookah pipe.

When we got there his sister was cooking for a male guest and she offered us some. Ramadan and I had already stopped for fatty, bony goat meat on soup-sodden injera which I was still struggling to keep down.

Ramadam kept trying to get me to chew more and more chat. I was starting to despise chat. He would rip the leaves from their stems, scrunch them into fist size balls and press them into my hands “chew chew” he demanded over and over again.

His sister’s handsome husband arrived home with one of his sister’s female friends. We all sat on cushions in the single-room brick house painted in blue and decorated in brightly coloured material studded with gold and silver diamantes. They scrolled through my photo’s of Namibia and wanted their own photos taken. Conversation was hard but they were all lively and hospitable. We spent hours there, and I learned to accept that in Ethiopia time moves slower.

His sister’s friend was the one who ended up preparing for the coffee ceremony while she reclined on a cushion chewing chat with her handsome husband.

First incense was lit to fill the room. Then the beans were roasted over a small fire pit with glinting hot coals. The coffee was then ground and boiled with water over the coals. Small shot-sized cups were half filled with sugar, half-filled with coffee and it was strong, too sweet but tasty.

Then the hookah came out and I smoked a heap of it, even though I don’t like smoking. The chat, the caffeine, the sugar, the tobacco and the heat of the day cooked together to make my head go light and the room spin. With the subtle high I was feeling I could finally relax enough to take it all in and appreciate the fact that I found myself in a small house in the east of Ethiopia getting high with some locals I’d just met.

When we finally left his sister’s place Ramadan wanted to go for beers. We went to the Harar brewery and drank four large beers which only cost me $1.70 altogether.  Ramadan told me he wanted to live in Canada and also said he was worried that there would be gay people in Canada. I told him if he wants to live there he has to change his attitude. I told him that he can’t think like that and expect to make friends there.

By the time the sun had set I had heat stroke, a high from chat, a come down from coffee and sugar and nausea from too much beer and Ramadan still insisted that I go to the edge of town for the feeding of the hyena’s. He insisted that it was a must and something I would regret missing. I reluctantly obliged. I was also motivated by a hope of meeting tourists there who would want to travel north with me.

But when we got to the edge of town it was just me, Ramadan and a single man with a bucket of sweating animal flesh. He wrapped the flesh on a stick for me and hyena’s would creep out from the shadows and rip the meat from the stick in my hand. They were shy animals, and so cute I could not understand their savage reputation. But with every bite from the stick my body would be thrust from balance and their strength was undeniable.

Finally I insisted on going home to bed and finally Ramadan said yes. Our half day tour had turned in to a twelve hour marathon and a really good day. I paid him more than twice the amount we had agreed on and the best thing was that when he said goodbye he didn’t ask for my number but just turned around and left.

the problems of poverty

On the 18^th of May I woke up to the sound of pouring rain hammering the tin roof. I lay there wondering where all the street people went for shelter, if they had dry clothes to change in to, if the open sewage flooded their beds.

When the rain had cleared a bit I left the dry comfort of my hotel and the first person to stop me in the street was a young boy, of no more than five years old with a man I assumed was his grandfather. The boy held out his arm to me “money money money.”

Knowing full-well that he didn’t speak English I said to him:

“What should I do? You and the old man are not crippled and you don’t look sick. Do I give you money or say ‘no’ to teach you a lesson?”

He cocked his head and looked up at me confused: “Money?”

I didn’t give him money, I just kept walking.

Something hit me in the stomach. Not a physical something, but something from inside. I felt my guts knot and I almost doubled over with the sharp pains of guilt.

‘Teach him a lesson?’ I thought.

‘Teach him what? That I have money and he doesn’t. That I can eat breakfast and sleep under shelter in the rain and he can’t? Teach him that life is cruel and people un-relenting? That he is no-body and I can just walk right past his suffering and never look back?’

I didn’t know what to do anymore. At the start of the trip I was adamant that I would not give beggars money. I had the Lonely Planet on my side which stated: ‘Never give anything to children including money, pens and empty water bottles’. I had it in my mind that by giving money to beggars, tourists will always be targeted, that it reinforces the idea of the wealthy white person, that it keeps people stuck in the cycle of poverty/begging and that the best way to help people is by feeding their economy with tourism.

But I stood there frozen with uncertainty. Something had shifted in my made-up-mind. For three months I had given very little to those who demanded it from me, but in Addis Ababa, after being approached by a dirty five year old boy, in a street recovering from a storm I changed my mind.

The streets were full of hungry beggars. There seemed to be no other choice for hoards of people trapped in a city where unemployment is rising faster than its rapidly multiplying population.

1 Birr in Ethiopia is about 10 Australian cents – not even enough to buy a piece of chewing gum at home. Yet it might buy a local Ethiopian enough bread to fill their hollow stomachs for half a day.

If these people are already stuck in the un-breakable cycle of poverty/begging then what further harm could giving them money do? As a fellow human being is helping someone out, when I can, not something that I have a moral responsibility to do? As a traveller it is important not to encourage stereotypes and ideas of other travellers and countries such as the idea that we are rich and going to give them money, but I also did not want to perpetuate the idea that white people feel superior and don’t care. When a country’s government is dependent on aid from western governments who in turn encourage this aid dependency, why would their people not also be aid dependent?

I think it is dangerous to encourage locals to beg from tourists, which in turn discourages tourists from going there which results in damage to the economy from lack of tourism. But it is hard to see that big picture when a hungry 5 year old is looking you in the face and wondering why you won’t take away his pain.

I turned around and ran up the street looking for the boy and the old man to give them some birr. But I couldn’t find them anywhere.

As I walked back to my hotel my mind still raced. I thought:

‘I can’t possibly give money to everyone who asks, but I also can’t keep saying no to everyone, it just doesn’t seem right’.

With no welfare system and little opportunities I didn’t have much hope for the people of Ethiopia. I decided to give money to crippled and disabled people and women with children. I knew that it wouldn’t make their life better, but I hoped that it would help them get through that day. And it might be the ‘wrong’ thing to do, I still felt uncertain and helpless, but it was the decision I made that day.

A minute later a teenager in a wheelchair asked me for money.

I gave him some, maybe a birr or two I don’t remember, and he grabbed my hand in both of his and thanked me profusely. I even passed him again later that day and he smiled, said hello and thanked me again. And it was hard to regret the decision I made.

Finally finding my feet in Addis

Back at my hostel after the horrible evening getting grabbed, kissed and followed, I sat in the courtyard and had a beer.

A man named Fajer from Dubai sat with me, he’d just come back from the South of Ethiopia and was still high from the experience. He had flown down South, hired an unofficial guide that he’d met in the market place and two motorcycles. On the first night they got stuck in the jungle and had to sleep rough, on the second night they stayed in a Hamer village and got to see a traditional ‘jumping of the bulls’ ceremony.

He effectively got me excited again to see more of the country, but it was a bitter sort of excitement, knowing that as a woman I would have a very different experience. After the night I had just had fighting off and running away from men, I knew that I could not jump on a motorbike with a hustler, sleep in a jungle and expect to come out of that intact.

At breakfast the next morning I saw Fajer again. This time he was re-telling his southern Ethiopian experience to a young American name Elie. There was another guy with them, a Canadian named Mike. The four of us decided to head to Merkato market together, the biggest market place in all of Africa.

As we were walking out the door of the hotel I bumped straight in to Tom, I don’t know why I was surprised to see him, I should have been expecting it, I probably should have even moved hotels. Thank god I had 3 men with me.

“I need to talk to you”.

“I am going out with my friends, I can’t talk to you now”

“I am in love with you!”

He reeked of alcohol.

“You don’t love me Tom!”

“I love you. I want to marry you!”

“I am leaving Addis tomorrow. I will call you when I get back and we can go for a coffee and talk then.”

It turned out Mike lived in Addis and hung out at the backpackers to meet people, he didn’t like Addis and was counting down the days until he could leave.

The four of us walked to his house and had a beer before getting a taxi to the markets. We haggled with sellers to get better prices on clothes and we attempted to speak Amharic to waiters who didn’t know a word of English. Spending the afternoon the day before with local guys was fun, but hanging out with travellers is so much easier. We understood each others stories and jokes, frustrations and excitement. And with three men at my side hardly anyone asked for money and no men tried to hit on me.

At the market place there was an adult man sitting on a piece of carpet wearing nothing but underpants. His whole body, arms, face and hairless head was covered in huge welts and blisters the size of golf balls. I tried really hard not to stare, but I had never even heard of something like that happening to anyone. I had seen plenty of other deformities in Addis, it felt like one out of every fifth person had an ailment of some kind. Lots of people were missing limbs, or had a hunched back, were crippled or walked bent over on all-fours.

They seemed to fit into a place which was full of beggars, often very young children. At night rows of people slept along the islands that separate roads. Dotted on every street corner were long narrow boxes looking like a coffin on stilts, they weren’t much bigger than a coffin either, just big enough for a single person to get shelter and privacy at night. They were made out of corrugated iron and some had pad-locks on the door at the foot of it. I wondered if the lock was to stop people moving things out or moving themselves in.

Like West Africa the sewers were open, rivers were full of rubbish, and people, both men and women, squatted or stood to relieve themself on the footpaths and off bridges.

But Addis also had a very Middle-Eastern feel. Turkey is as close to the Middle-East as I have ever been, and Addis felt a little bit like Turkey to me. Many women and men wore long white robes and turbans or head scarves. People walked fingering prayer beads and clutching the bulky crucifix at their breast. There were plenty of mosques, as well as grand old churches and spread blankets displaying cheap religious paraphernalia. The day was broken up by the Muslim Adhan (Call to Prayer). It seemed to me that Christians and Muslims lived side-by-side in relative harmony.

Every second person stopped to greet me. Not always to ask for money. Some would just practice their English, saying hello and asking how I am today. When I returned the greeting they made this terribly endearing gasping sound which meant ‘yes’.

Ethiopians seemed better educated than other parts of Africa. I still argue that it is because schools are taught in their own language. But the Ethiopians I met knew a lot about geography, politics and history.

What is really interesting though, is that Ethiopian dates and times are different from ours. It is something like 6 hours, 9 days and 7 years behind us, which made it 2005, not 2012. I worked out that I was 21 years old in Ethiopia, though I certainly did not look or feel 21. You can turn back the calendar but you cannot turn back time… or crows feet.

In the evening after the markets Fajer and I grabbed a bite to eat together. It turned out that he ran a tourism company called ‘Escape Dubai’. It started as a small internet project he set up for friends and now he has made a very comfortable living out of it. His group of coach-bound tourists from Dubai had spent 5 days with him in Addis Ababa and left the day before he headed down South alone. I envied his confidence and the fact that he has grown rich from travelling. I nearly choked on my chicken when he told me what people pay to join him… their 5 days cost more than my entire month in Ethiopia will.

We wanted to find a bar to drink at, but it was a Monday night and the streets seemed relatively quiet. We walked for a while until we heard the sound of music from behind a gate.

I dragged him over and we peered in to see a large courtyard with two white marquees, a live band and a hundred smartly dressed people dancing. I stood back not wanting to intrude – it isn’t like we could blend in with the crowd un-noticed. But Fajer was through the gate and in amongst the crowd before I could say anything to stop him. I hesitantly followed.

One man came straight toward us, greeted us and sat us down. He brought us over beers and told us that we should dance. I promised him that after a beer I would have a dance with him.

The table was on the edge of the dance floor and we sat transfixed on the traditional Ethiopian shoulder-bouncing dance. It was mostly men on the dance floor. Sometimes the men danced together in pairs, sometimes in one large circle, but rarely would a man and a woman dance together. For such a homophobic society the men were really affectionate, with their arms wrapped around each other and pairing off to have private dances. It was also not strange for men to sit side-by-side with their hands on each others knee.

The band consisted of two traditional string instruments and a hand drum. The main dance move was the shoulder shake to the beat. When the women did it they managed to make their breasts bounce up and down in time with the music. Sometimes heads would shake as well, sometimes they would crouch to their knees, but always shoulders shook and bopped. It was very entertaining, and if you have never seen Ethiopian dancing I suggest you look it up on YouTube.

After two beers I found the courage and a dance partner and hit the floor.

Awkwardly I joined the circle of women and tried to find the beat with my shoulders and chest. Two women nominated themselves as my teachers and showed me how to keep my shoulders back and my breasts bouncing. In every country I had visited I had found myself on a dance floor being shown the local moves. And in every country the style of dance was so distinctly unique. In Ghana I had been taught the actions to ‘wash away’, in Namibia I shaken my hips and bum and in Addis I awkwardly bounced my chest.

When the power went out on the party and in the whole street, we left and found a small candle-lit bar in a tin shed. It was close to empty except for three beautiful working girls, a large woman behind the bar who I guessed was the madam of the place, a hungry Indian man watching the girls every move and a touchy-feely man I assumed they knew well. Then there was Fajer trying not to ogle, but failing miserably, and me, feeling quite out of place.

I kept watching the old woman behind the bar. I assumed that she was once a sex worker as well. She was dancing on her own in the little space in the back corner. I could tell that in her heyday she was beautiful and probably very popular with her customers, but now she danced seductively for herself, as men’s eyes were transfixed on the younger girls around her.

I invited the girls to sit with us and to my grave disappointment they did not speak a word of English. But the touchy guy they knew well did and he answered some questions for me.

As I suspected they were poor girls from nearby villages, sent to the city to earn money to send home. The villagers nominated just a few of the most beautiful girls to be the money earners for the whole village. I wanted to know how much money they made but when I asked he just kept saying “depends if the girl likes him or not” I couldn’t even get an average amount.

I had loads more questions, but the mistress came out from behind the bar and got me up to dance.

When there was only 3 hours left before I had to catch my bus to Harar, I said my goodbyes. I was pretty drunk; Fajer and I had been drinking straight scotches for a while. Johnny Walker Black cost us about $1.50 a shot, at a bar at home they cost at least $10.

It had been a good day and a good night in Addis, and I wondered if I would end up liking Ethiopia after all.