The (not-so) Great Escape

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That evening I had slipped out the door and made it to reception without being spotted ad stopped by Mattias, Daniel and their friends. The worst of the gastro was over, though my body felt internally bruised and utterly shattered. I had the overwhelming urge to flee Bahir Dar, and that horrible feeling of being trapped and powerless. The hotel staff arranged for a bus to pick me up at 5am the next morning. It was going to take me all the way to Lalibela on a twelve hour journey I was not looking forward to.

I had slept heavily and undisturbed, with no further signs of illness.

At 5 am I stood in the empty semi-dark laneway waiting for my bus. I waited as the sun slowly crept into my little part of the world. I watched as the light woke shadows, crying babies and feral dogs. Finally the bus pulled up at my feet at 7am.

With the help of the driver and an obligatory tip I loaded my backpack on the top of the bus and hopped in to the front seat. Apart from the driver there was just one other young guy on board. The bus took off and I was instructed to pay way too much money, and I wasn’t polite about it either. I was so desperate to get out of the city that I paid it anyway.

The bus drove about 4 blocks and stopped. The driver, and the young guy, got off and left me sitting there alone so that they could buy chat. Then they sat and drank coffee. I got off and bought a plain bread roll. I hadn’t eaten at all the day before, and though I was still wary that my guts were still gurgling I figured I wouldn’t last 12 hours without eating something.

After half an hour at this stop we boarded the bus again. It drove about four blocks and pulled up in the same lane way out the front of my hotel where I had already spent two painful hours waiting.

“What are we doing?” I tried to ask. But neither man spoke English. The driver cut the engine and the two men just sat there waiting… for something… I never found out what. I got off the bus and tried to find the hotel staff to find out what was happening.

“They are probably just waiting for more passengers” I was assured by the hotel man who booked the bus.

It was 8:30 and the sun had finished warming up and was beginning to burn. I was about to board the bus for some shade relief when right in front of me the engine sputtered into action and it took off.

I stood dumbfounded, watching the back of the bus bumping up the lane away from me. My bag with almost all of my belongings was still tied to the roof and I watched helplessly as it sailed further and further away from me.

I plonked down on the side of the road, sitting in a heap of trash. I was conscious of the smell of shit from a source close by, but I didn’t care. I didn’t know what else to do. So I just sat there. I remember feeling fairly calm, all things considering. I wasn’t crying or angry or stressed out or even making a plan of action. I just sat there, staring at the rubbish and smelling the shit. I simply didn’t know what else to do.

People walked by occasionally, gawking at me of course. Probably mildly amused at the sight of a white (therefore automatically rich) woman sitting in a heap of crap in the burning sun on the side of the road. When they asked me for money I just stared back at them. ‘Are you for real?’ my expressions plainly read. Taking the whole sight in they didn’t linger for long.

I still had the bread roll in my hands. I didn’t have anything else to do so I started to eat it. I knew that it was in-polite to eat in public, but at that time I took a slither of satisfaction by saying ‘stick it’ to Ethiopian manners.

What felt like hours later, but was possibly only a half hour later I heard the throbbing of an engine and saw my bus, saunter back down the lane way. My bag was still tied to the roof, and I was surprised to see that it still looked full. It pulled up in front of me and the driver motioned for me to board the bus.

I should have felt an overwhelming flood of happiness and relief but instead I was utterly peeved.

I stayed sitting in the pile of trash and ate my bread roll.

The driver got off and stared at me. It was hard to tell if he was confused by the sight of me and the smell of crap, if he was finally feeling in patient and ready to leave or was mortified that I was eating in public.

“If you guys can shit and piss in the street and drive off with my luggage I can eat a frikkin bread roll”.

He cocked his head, his expression changed slightly but I still had no idea what it was telling me.

Reluctantly I rose, I wiped the crap off my butt and boarded the bus.

In my diary on the bus I wrote:

“This is what I am finding out about Africa. It will leave you alone, defenceless and sitting in shit… but in the end, eventually, you get picked up again.”

The time was 10:50. I had first waited for the bus at 5:00am.

At 11:30 the bus pulled over for a half hour breakfast stop.

You might initially think that 4 months in Africa would teach someone patience… it didn’t. More and more Africa was wearing me down. More and more I was turning into a short-tempered neurotic bitch. Less and less I was able to empathise with people, to smile kindly at them. And at least once a day I was throwing a tantrum from frustration.

As I sat slumped against the bus window I was beginning to calm down. I was wishing that I could take photos through the window but each scene flashed passed in seconds. Long enough to have a moving effect on me but not long enough to get my camera out.

They were simple scenes, like naked children playing outside stick huts or a line of girls trudging up the dirt hillside, hunched over with the weight of water barrels on their head or bundles of sticks and branches loaded across their backs. Behind them were rolling hills, as beautiful as they were in the The Sound of Music. I found it simultaneously calming and thrilling. While I enjoyed those images I also wondered how much energy I had left, I wondered how much longer I could stay in Africa. It felt like my time there was coming to an end.

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.

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.