An exorcism and a curse!

At 9am Daniel showed up at my hotel room for our day touring the monasteries of Lake Tana.

“Mattias is very unhappy” he told me.

“You spoke to him?” I asked

“He stayed with me at my house last night”

So Daniel wasn’t at his girlfriends after all. I wanted the money I gave him back.

“He is in love with you” Daniel told me.

“I am not in love with him. I have a boyfriend anyway, who I am in love with and will marry one day”.

“I am jealous of your boyfriend” Daniel said.

“Not you too!!” I cried exasperated. We walked to the edge of the lake and boarded a boat in silence.

The boat out to the monasteries was peaceful. It was just Daniel, myself and the driver. We stopped to watch two hippos wrestle in the waters.

The monasteries were not so exciting. Only one was open for women to see, the rest was secret men’s business.

‘What crap!’ I thought. ‘This is what I hate about religion’.

I wandered around the small circular monatery, it was dark and dusty but covered in brightly painted quirky cartoon depictions of angels and snakes and men in long robes.

“Do exorcisms ever happen around here” I finally asked Daniel.

He looked at me concerned.

“Yes, why do you ask?”

I got a flutter of excitement.

“I would like to go to one… can you take me?”

“You are Orthodox?” he asked me

“Yes! Of course!” I lied.

He pointed to the green Punamu (Maori word for green stone) I was wearing around my neck. I had bought it from New Zealand the year before, it was in the shape of an anchor and is meant to keep travellers safe which is why I wore it.

“Ah!” he said, light bulbs going off everywhere. “This is your orthodox cross!”

“Um… sure” I said baffled as it looks nothing like a cross. But whatever will get me into an exorcism I was willing to lie about.

“Tourists cannot go, only Orthodox people”

“Of course!” I said, trying to clear my face of any trace of a lie.

“You need an exorcism? What is wrong?” he asked

“Um… I just… well… it’s kind of private… um…. You see… I have this feeling… in my heart… and um… it is bad…. And um… I need it to go” I told him, searching for words, searching for some reasons, wondering if I should tell him I was gay and needed it fixed ‘or would that get me into more trouble?’ I wondered. I kept babbling, trying to make out that I could feel a bad spirit in me and wanted it cleansed. He looked deeply concerned.

We took the boat back to land and boarded a bus that shortly after spat and sputtered its way out of town. I was excited like a child. An exorcism! And found so easily! I marvelled. But what do I do? What do I say? How will I make my head spin in circles like that movie?

The bus ride seemed to take forever.

It dropped us off in the middle of no where. Loads of people swarming in the one area but barely a building in site.

I could tell tourists never came here from the way people stopped and stared at me, looked me over curiously or of course, held their hand out for money.

Daniel led me through the people, up and over a small hill and onto the stoop of a round wood and brick building. Before we got anywhere near the building I had to take my shoes off.

I watched the people loitering around. There were an enormous number of crippled people, ten times more than in Addis where even there I had felt like I was in some twisted sci-fi thriller film about a mass human experiment.

Here more people than not were blind or limbless or walking on all-fours.

“This is the Holy Lake” Daniel told me. “The water here heals people”

I looked around, I couldn’t actually see a lake or any evidence that people here were being healed, but I could feel the reverence, the hope in the place, more than I could feel the desperation.

Daniel was talking to the people as I was looking around trying to absorb it all.

“We are too late” he interrupted my thoughts “it is over, we must come back tomorrow morning”.

My heart sank.

Daniel left me and trotted up to a priest, an old skinny man with shaking hands and a long, dirty white robe. He must have told the old man that I needed help because the old man walked up to me, took out a pouch full of ash and rubbed some on my forehead.

Dozens of desperate people climbed over each other to get to me. They were grabbing desperately at this mans pouch as he fought their clutching hands from him. With one hand he was swatting the crowd away like flies and with the other he rubbed the ash on me, muttering prayers underneath his stale breath.

He pushed the pouch of remaining ash into the palm of my hand and grabbed a heavy gold cross from a man waiting patiently behind him.

“Kiss it” Daniel whispered in my ear.

I leant forward and felt the hot metal scold my lips. The cross had obviously been sitting in the sun for a long time.

The old man motioned for me to lower my head. He pressed the cross into the back of my skull and then motioned for me to kiss it again.

We repeated this action a few more times, I would bend over, he would press the cross into my back I would stretch back up, kiss the cross and bend over again. All the while the crowd around us kept one watchful eye on me, the other on the pouch in my hand and all the while the priest muttered.

On my last bow toward him I expected to feel the pressure of the cross gently way on my head as it had a half dozen times before, but this time I felt a thwack! on my back. It was quick but it was painful. He had forcefully struck the top of my back with the cross and I bolted upright in shock and pain.

He tapped the cross against my forehead, each side of my cheek and then made me kiss it one last time.

I bowed to thank him but kept my eyes on the cross just in case he took another swing and I had to duck away this time.

Daniel and I made to leave when I heard a woman shrieking.

“We must go and see!” I told Daniel and ran off in the direction of the blood-curdling cries.

A small crowd had gathered to watch but to my surprise most people were not fazed in the slightest by the spectacle.

In the centre of the circle a woman dressed in off-white, perhaps in her late thirties or early forties and disturbingly skinny, was rolling around on her back crying out in either pain or terror. Her screams had been so loud her voice was already scratching, her eyes were fluttering between open and closed. A priest, almost identical to the one who had rubbed ash on my face, was bent over her and had a large metal cross raised in one hand. The woman was writhing on the ground and convulsing. She started to babble what I assumed was gibberish but Daniel leant in and translated what she was crying “it is burning! It is burning!”. The arm and the cross came down suddenly and heavily and landed square between the woman’s eyes. I winced in pain on her behalf but she didn’t even flinch. In fact she screamed louder and convulsed more frequently. The man lowered the cross again and again it her between the eyes, and still no one else around me reacted in the slightest. He started talking to her, again Daniel translated for me.

“Where did you find her?”

“By the river” She replied somewhere in amongst her gurgles and cries.

“Leave her” the priest kept repeating… or so my translator said.

The man stayed bent over her and kept hitting her between the eyes with cross, not as hard, but over and over on the same spot where a large purple welt was already forming.

In one swift move the woman leapt up onto her knees. Her eyes were wide and angry and she started bucking like a horse. The spectacle got that much weirder for me that I started to back away without even knowing it. She was shaking her head and crying out, saliva bubbling from her mouth and then she pounced forward and fell at my feet. I jumped back alarmed, her face was planted in the sand but her arms were swinging in my direction trying to get my ankles. I almost ran, but then she started to roll.

She rolled away from the crowd and fell in a silent slump in the dirt. She was quiet and the whole performance was over. In a heap in the dirt she was like a sack of rags. I held my breath, waiting for her to scream or buck like a horse again, but she just lay there, her face hidden and her body breathing heavily.

“Your turn now?” Daniel said to me, casually as if nothing had happened. He was indicating to a clear path from the spot where the woman had rolled from and the priest was waiting patiently for his next possessed body.

“No! No! No!” I begged Daniel. “Not now! Tomorrow! Not now!”

I was horrified. Partly at the image of that welt soon to be between my eyes but more on the fact that there was no way on this earth I could act the way that woman just did!

“No you must do it now. Don’t wait until tomorrow!”

“I am not ready. Tomorrow” I promised him. I was already making for a quick exit and thankfully Daniel followed me.

As we were leaving Daniel told me how precious and powerful the healing ash in my hands was. That I must rub it on my face morning and night until there is nothing left.

As we neared the bus we passed a woman slumped asleep under a tree with a baby in her arms and I swiftly dropped the pouch of ash next to her: ‘hopefully she’ll appreciate it when she wakes up’ I thought to myself.

That evening I told Daniel and Mattias that I could not see either of them, I told them I needed to get ready for my exorcism the next day. They seemed to respect that.

At about 3 in the morning I woke up from the most stomach wrenching pains I had ever felt. I had an ensuite which is where I mostly spent the next 8 hours.

I had gastro so bad that my vomit turned fluoro yellow and even when there was nothing left inside of me my body still shook and shuddered and stabbed with pain.

I admit it, I thought that I had been cursed. I prayed even though I don’t believe in any god. I called my mum, I called my girlfriend, I had never felt so sick.

I texted Daniel and told him not to pick me up, but he appeared at my door anyway. I told him to go away. I couldn’t let him in, I was exploding at both ends. He did bring me water though, and I mixed it with Hydrolite but I couldn’t keep it down.

For the rest of that day I sat beside the toilet that didn’t flush and I cried and prayed and waited for it to go away.

For the rest of that day I could hear the voices of Daniel, Mattias and a few of their other friends sitting outside my door. They texted me regularly inviting me out to lunch and for drinks and I wondered what part of this situation they weren’t understanding. I felt like a prisoner trapped. Trapped by my stomach pains and my gross bodily functions, trapped by the posse of men sitting by my door. Trapped by the fact I was isolated and alone in the north of Ethiopia and trapped by the seemingly real potential that I had a very angry, recently exorcised, spirit inside of me.

A night on the town in Bahir Dar

On a bus again the next day!

This time it was an 11 hour bus trip and I was so over long days cramped on stinking buses that I had made my mind up to spend the ridiculous amount of money on domestic flights, even though I struggled to justify a $200 flight when all around me people were starving. But those bus trips dragged on and on and on.

On that trip north to Bahir Dar I was sitting beside a guy named Sami who talked non-stop. He also did that thing that I hate that many Ethiopians seem to do: revel in pointing out the obvious; “Look it is flat here! No mountains!”, “Look cattle!”, “See? A village!”

At lunch he told me to eat with him, he didn’t ask, he told me, which actually worked out well because Ethiopian food is designed to share, always too big for one person. Throughout the meal he threw typical Ethiopian commands at me: “Eat!” he would say when I stopped for a breath. “Finish your coffee!” he would say only a minute after it was brought out. “Wash your hands!” he told me before I had even had a chance to stand up. And at the end of the meal he insisted on paying which was a really nice change!

After lunch when it was hard to continue to act interested and amused I pretended to fall asleep. Twice he shook me and asked “Kai! Everything ok?” I would tell him that I was fine and just sleeping, and then I would again go through the dramatic performance of pretending that I could not keep my eyes open any longer.

At one time he asked if he could borrow my phone. I didn’t mind but then he used it to call his own phone so that he would have my number – so sneaky!

Bahir Dar was very different to Addis, the streets were wide and lined with palm trees, it was still too crowded but had a sense of order that Addis sorely lacked.

I had heard of some attractions there in Bahir Dar, the Lake Tana with its ancient isolated island monasteries and the Blue Nile which apparently was once grand but thanks to damming it is now a trickle of its former glory. For me Bahir Dar served mainly as a stop before Lalibela’s legendary churches carved out of cliffs and hidden underground and also a potential spot for watching an exorcism. I had read an article in Sydney’s The Sun Herald before leaving home which claimed that exorcisms still existed in the north of Ethiopia, and I sure as hell wanted to watch one!

At the bus stop as usual I was accosted by swarms of men begging for my business, promising to show me the best spots, the secret spots, divulge worlds of information and show me a good time.

Again I may as well have been blindfolded when I chose my tour guide, there isn’t really a way to tell who knows something and who knows nothing, who will hit on me aggressively and who knows when to back off.

The guide I chose was a guy in his early twenty’s named Daniel. He took me to a hotel where we arranged for him to pick me up at 9am the next morning to take me on a boat ride around Lake Tana and to the monasteries left over from the fourteenth century.  He wanted to take me out to dinner but I brushed him off pretending I had other plans. Mostly I didn’t think I could afford to keep buying two meals.

Walking down the palm lined streets, with the expansive lake on my left it felt like I was no longer in Ethiopia, but instead in the Sunshine Coast or some similar water side holiday town.

Two guys, also in their early twenties, stopped me, and I wish I remembered what it was they said that actually made me stop, because by that time I was practiced enough to be able to glide down the street pushing away the advancements of men like I was Moses parting the Red Sea.

But I let them walk with me and they made me laugh. They tried to get me to have dinner with them, and I lied, saying that I had plans with another man that night.

The boys departed company and one of them, Mattias, asked if I knew how to get back to my hotel. I said I knew but he tested me and it turned out I had no idea where I was or where I had to go. So he offered to walk me back. When we got to the hotel courtyard Daniel was sitting outside my room waiting for me. What is worse was that the two boys knew each other! I was mortified, caught in the act of lying to both of them!

So I decided to suck it up, accept their offer and spend a night out on the town with them both.

First we went to a little tin shed which was a woman’s home in a dark alley of a block of similar scruffy looking shacks. We sat on bricks and she fed us her home made tej which is a very thick syrupy and highly potent honey wine. I could only stomach a glass of it.

Apart from us there was one old drunk man, the woman of the house and her two adorable children and a young guy playing a make-shift instrument which was a single-stringed, square-shaped fiddle, made of crooked wood. He half sang and half spoke improvised words, in Amahric, yet it was pretty obvious he was singing about me. The small audience in the dimly lit shack clapped along to the rhythm and laughed and cheered in sync. I asked Mattias what he was singing about and he said that his words were ‘this white girl is beautiful. She has a black boyfriend and they make a very good couple’, referring to Mattias and I that is.

We left that bar and the boys took me to another one, much bigger this time, over crowded and overheated. We squeezed in to the slightest space at the back of the room and shared a crate to sit on.  The room was lively and cheerful and the energy infectious. In the empty circle in the centre of the room a man appeared playing the same instrument as the man in the bar. An Azmari I later found out he was called. He carried the same tune as the last man had and he too improvised his verses, like a stand-up comedian he would hone-in on someone and sing about them in the same high-pitched tone that was half talking and half singing. The crowd would erupt with laughter at the end of each verse, I didn’t understand a word but Mattias regularly translated for me. I knew that it would soon be my turn to be sung about, as the only foreigner in the room I was hard to miss. And sure enough it only took minutes for him to ask in English where I was from. He strung up that same rhythm and began to draw out his high pitched Amharic verse. It didn’t take long for him to say something funny because the whole crowd clutched their bellies in theatrical laughter, but it wasn’t cruel laughter. Mattias had his arm slung around my shoulders and laughed along with everyone else.

When the Azmari retreated back stage more music began and some professional dancers filled the circle. Again they performed the traditional Ethiopian dance of shoulder and chest bouncing and head shaking. The man in the centre reached through the crowd and dragged me in.

In front of a hundred clapping, cheering people I tried to mimic the Ethiopian way of dancing. I bobbed my shoulders and shook my breasts and wished the song would end.

When the heat and the energy got too much I told the boys I was ready to leave. I had a really good night and I was grateful to them for showing me a good time. But they weren’t ready to go home, and that meant that wouldn’t take me home either.

They insisted we go to the local nightclub, they insisted it was the best place to party in all of Ethiopia. I reluctantly agreed.

The club was actually pretty tragic, it was playing western music and no body danced the traditional Ethiopian dance, instead it looked like a trashy high school disco.

Mattias tried to kiss me. I pushed him away.

He apologised profusely and I forgave him.

But moments later he started again.

He put his hand on my knee and decalred: “I want to take you to meet my family. I will dress you in nice Ethiopian dress and we can have brown babies” he pleaded.

I excused myself and left.

He chased me down the stairs, out the door and up the street.

In the street he kissed me again and I pushed him as hard as I could.

“Fuck off!” I yelled and for the first time he stopped in his tracks. With his mouth and eyes wide open he had a look of horror on his face… “You said a bad thing!” he uttered in disbelief.

Not realising swearing was quite that offensive I apologised: “I am sorry to offend you, it was a bad word and I won’t say it again.”

And then he did it again, he lunged forward and planted his face into mine.

“Oh get fucked!” I yelled.

I stormed off, leaving him standing alone in the street in utter horror. I figured that if he could keep pouncing on me, I could keep swearing at him.

I was in my room for about 5 minutes before he knocked on my door.

“Go away!” I yelled.

“Kai! Kai! I missed the last bus home, I have no where to sleep”

He knocked and knocked and finally I opened the door.

“You can’t sleep here!” I told him.

But I have no where else to go, I live far out of town, I cannot sleep on the streets”.

“What about Daniel? Sleep at his house!”

“He is sleeping at his girlfriends tonight.”

“Stay with his girlfriend then.”

“I cannot. It is one room, no room for me.”

“Don’t you have friends here?”

“No”

“Well you can’t sleep with me.”

“I promise not to try and kiss you again”

“I don’t believe you!”

“I promise, we sleep with clothes on.”

“No way are we going to share a bed. Not tonight. Not ever.”

“I cannot sleep on the streets!”

“Fine! You know what, take this money and get a hotel room”.

“There will be no hotel room at this time of night!”

I told him I would try and find one for him.

We went to each of the 6 or so hotels in the area and each one was fully booked. ‘How?’ I wondered, ‘when I haven’t seen another tourist this whole time’!

I gave up, handed him money, twice as much as what I paid for my hotel room, and left: “you’ll have to just keep looking until you find one!”

I was annoyed and exhausted and I was angry at myself for actually feeling guilty that Mattias might be spending a night on the streets. I had to tell myself that with the money I gave him he could get a hotel room or a taxi home, but anyway, no way could he not have a friend in town that would let him stay there.

I couldn’t open the window because it backed onto the courtyard and there was no screen and no bars and I didn’t want Mattias climbing on in. It was hot and airless. There were at least 8 mosquitos buzzing around the room and the bed was full of fleas. My phone rang and rang and rang that night. I didn’t answer it, I just put it on silent and eventually fell asleep to the sound of it vibrating on the floor beside my bed.

That night is how I remember Ethiopia still to this day.

More men!

I had to get up at 4am the next morning to catch the bus back to Addis.

The footpath was crammed with sleeping bodies, one after the other in neat straight rows. I decided that they needed this order because there were so many people trying to fit in, like a sardine can or a supermarket shelf. I had to walk in the middle of the road as there wasn’t even room for my feet amongst the tightly packed rows of people.

It was a winding road back around the mountain sides. The woman in front of me started to vomit, which set off the woman behind me. The humid air in the bus filled with a pungent waft of bile and I was sure I would be next.

The driver did not stop for the sick women, he just handed them both, and myself, a plastic bag. When their bags were full the women pegged them out the window to splatter on the road beside shanty houses and working donkeys.

At our lunch stop the driver sat with me and offered me some of his grizzly goat meat and bitter injera. I gagged at the thought. It looked not unlike the vomit that I had watched fly through the air and spill on the road. He bought me a coffee and asked me if I had a boyfriend.

When we boarded the bus he told me to sit up the front beside him. I pretended I didn’t understand and took my old seat in the second row from the back. For the rest of the trip he stared at me in the rear-vision mirror and tried to catch my eye. On the few occasions that he did he raised his eyebrows suggestively and I thought that now I was sure to need that sick-bag.

Even though the driver would not stop for the sick women he would stop to get off the bus to make calls and buy chat. His private breaks, along with the fifty police checks made the trip back to Addis take about three hours longer than it needed to.

The next day back in Addis I walked to Meskal Square to buy a bus ticket north, and who should I bump in to – John! The annoying guy from the first day who followed me around and would not let me go. He was sitting 50 meters ahead of me on a fence as though he knew I was coming all along. But there was no where I could turn and I had to eventually pass him. How, I wondered, in a city of over 4 million people, did I manage to bump into him on my first, and only, day back in Addis?

He looked me up and down hungrily and I cringed from his creepiness.

He insisted on walking me home, I tried to say no but he followed me anyway. I was quite rude to him. He kept telling me that I was beautiful and very fashionable (ha!) I would reply to his compliments with “oh yeah”. As we walked he would point out the obvious, one of my pet hates is being told the obvious, “this is a river! This is a supermarket!” I wanted to poke him in the eye with my index finger. He told me that he was going to get bats tattooed on his arm just like mine.

After half an hour of his nattering and my cold, rude replies he stopped and said to me:

“Don’t judge a book by its cover. I want to be your friend. I don’t want money or anything from you, just to be your friend”.

My heart sank with guilt and I softened, determined to at least be polite to the poor guy. Though it wasn’t his appearance that turned me off him (the fact he only had five teeth for example), I was rude because he was too persistent and I assumed that he wanted sex.

But when the conversation turned to sex I became certain that my first instinct was right – he did just want sex.

“Do you like sex?” he asked me.

“errrr… Sure… I guess… depends who with… with my boyfriend yes…. Actually, I have only ever had sex with my boyfriend”.

I added, trying to sound pure and give the impression that his chance of having sex with me was less than 0!

“Sex is what I like. Food – no! Food is just to shit. Sex is what I live for!”

“Not me… I like food” I said in retort.

“Sex with white women is different” he continued.

I rolled my eyes, the number of men I’d met in Africa who’d started conversations like this.

“Ten years ago I slept with a German woman” He went on “She told me what to do, and I did it… like slave. Now I am good at pleasing women”.

He topped that off with:

“You like to tell men what to do!”

“More out of bed than in bed” I said to amuse myself more than him.

He looked at me, waiting for my acceptance of his offer.

“I only have sex with my boyfriend… no other men!” I told him straight.

By this time we had reached the internet café I had planned to go into so that he wouldn’t know which hotel I was in, though it was close enough to my hotel for him to probably be able to figure it out.

“Goodbye” I said to him and began to walk away.

“I want to have sex with a white woman!” he called after me.

“Good luck finding one, I hope you do” I replied.

He chased after me.

“You come here often?” he was referring to the internet place. “I will come here everyday to look for you.

“I am leaving tomorrow for Bahir Dar” I reminded him.

“But you will be back, so I will come here every day looking for you”

“That is insane” I said. “I don’t know when I will be back, or even if I will be back, so you may come everyday and never find me”

“No matter! I come everyday anyway”

“Do as you want, but don’t count on seeing me again”. I said, knowing full well I will never be back at that internet café again.