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.