Bereket and his Promise.

By the time we got back into Jinka I was exhausted. I had a lot on my mind, I was covered in literally hundreds of itchy little pink bites from Turmy, I was limping and holding my arm and still had dried blood down one side of my body after the motorcycle accident. I was sunburnt and I hadn’t eaten in 24 hours. I was sitting at a little bar in town guzzling a much-needed beer when Bereket, the hotel guy, found me. He had run into Andy who told him I was back and so he asked around town and was directed to where I sat. Argh! I craved anonymity again.

Bereket invited me to join him at the river.

I told him I needed a nap.

“Maybe later” he said.

“I doubt it” I replied.

Instead of a nap I decided to go for a walk up the hill to the north of the town. On the way a twelve-year-old boy who insisted that he was a professional tour guide escorted me all the way to the top.

“You are way too young to be a tour guide” I told him. I also told him that I was just going for a casual walk and didn’t need a guide. I told him that I wasn’t going to give him any money.

“No money, no problem”. He said and continued to follow me up the hill.

I told him again that I wasn’t going to give him money because I did not need a guide. And so when I got to the top and he demanded money I had an overwhelming urge to throw him off the side of the hill.

But when I said no again he looked hurt and cheated by me. I felt so bad I nearly caved and paid him, but then I thought ‘no way! If I give him money now then he will do the same thing to every other tourist that comes after me’.

At the top of the hill I found a tranquil lone house surrounded by perfectly manicured lawns and a view of rolling hills as far as the eye could see, extremely uncommon for Ethiopia, especially this side of it. With  little more exploration it turned out to be a museum.

I wandered in, I was the only person there, and I looked over photos of various people from surrounding tribes. I looked at their jewellery kept in glass cases and read their testimonials shared with researchers. I read that the Hamer women get beaten by their husbands if they don’t have coffee waiting for him when he returns to the village at night. I read that they get beaten if they stay at the markets for too long. I read that they are forced into marriage and forced into sex. I looked at the photos of the scars all over their bodies, proof of the ‘lessons’ they were taught by their husbands and fathers. And I read one very moving piece written about scars, it struck a chord close to my heart:

Scars are symbolic of many things at once. They imply both strife and healing. Scars mark the fissure between inner and outer worlds… Scars present a semblance of permanence, but they evolve and fade with time and are eventually lost, much like the memories stemming from them.

As I walked around the museum grounds I came across a woman I had seen in a restaurant in Turmy. Her name was Bex, she was German and working and living at the museum on an internship. She introduced me to Gail, an American woman also living and working at the museum. They invited me to join them for dinner.

Their ‘helper’ had cooked a vegetarian dinner and set the solid wooden table in the back of the garden overlooking the town bellow and out to the rolling horizon. The food was tasty, the company was pleasant and the surroundings were tranquil.

I left as the sun was setting so as not to get lost in the dark and went back to my hotel. I was coming out of the bathroom when I saw Bereket standing there waiting for me. My first thought was how much he had seen under the huge gap of the doorway.

“Come for a beer with me” he insisted. And finally I caved and agreed to have one, just to get rid of him.

Much to my surprise Bereket turned out to be a very interesting character.

First we talked about the Mursi. He said that they are actually very playful and that money means very little to them. He said that at the end of the day the women line up their notes and see who got more. Whoever had the most notes was the most beautiful and the most clever for tricking the Faranji’s (white people).

Bereket was from the Maale tribe, but he ran away when he was 10. Apparently as kids they are given a bow and arrows to practice shooting birds. When you shoot a bird you smear its blood over your body and go home to be welcomed as a hero.

Every day for months and months he tried to shoot a bird, and finally one day he was out shooting with an older boy in the village and this time he actually shot a bird down. However the bird that Bereket shot down landed closer to the other boy and before he could get to it the boy had smeared the blood of the bird on his own body. When they went back to the village everyone praised this older boy and no one believed that it was really Bereket who shot the bird down. In anger he ran away from the village, and to this day he has never returned.

He made it to Jinka and lived on the streets, polishing shoes and hustling for survival. He told me he was grateful for the day when a woman taught him to say “youyouyoumoneymoneymoney” (the words were like a knife to my own ears).

He looked up to the older guys who worked as tour guides and he decided that that was his dream. He tried to go to school but never finished and instead dedicated his time to learning English, and sure enough, 14 years later, at the age of 24 Bereket was a tour guide, with close to perfect English.

The next morning Bereket showed up at my hotel door. He said that he wanted to take me somewhere that no tourists ever go to. I told him that I was packing my bags to leave, to head back to Addis, to go home in a few days time.

He promised me that if I spent the day with him I would not regret it. He had borrowed his friend’s motorbike and was ready to take me away from Jinka for the day.

I didn’t really need to head back to Addis that day. I was a day ahead of schedule. But I was also suspicious. I had already had countless bad experiences with tour guides hassling me, ripping me off and expecting sex. But Bereket was a charmer, a smooth talker, and also good-looking, which is why I was so easily persuaded to stay in Jinka an extra day with him.

When I hopped on the back of his bike I wondered if I’d made a big mistake, I wondered how soon it would be before I regretted it.