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The Apinautica - Tigray
Dec. 4th, 2022 12:31 pm
MEKELLE
May 4th [2012], Day 28, 0600 – I get up bright and early for my 0900 flight out of Bahir Dar. I find my camera battery had failed to charge the night before which is a frustrating start of the day.
0645 – I’m all packed and waiting in the lobby for my ride. Unfortunately I hadn’t had time to eat breakfast, but my ride should be here now to take me the fifteen minutes to the airport, where I’m supposed to be two hours before my flight.
Time ticks by with no sign of Beide. I try calling him but get a “this user’s phone is currently shut off” message. I try calling Teferi,
“Oh you want me to send a driver?” he sounds genuinely surprised.
“Yes, I thought we discussed this yesterday? Please send him as soon as possible my flight is at nine”
“Okay he’s on his way.”
I continue waiting, my stomach growling, but I can’t go eat because I’m expecting the driver at any moment.
0800 – Beide finally arrives. I suspect its not his fault, he seems more dependable than Teferi. Anyway, no point crying over spilt milk, he’s here now. We quickly arrive at the airport and find no rush there, and the plane is not yet on the ground. I say goodbye to Beide, he’s been a good friend throughout my stay here. Unfortunately there is no food for my growling stomach in the tiny terminal.
I call The Organization’s staff in Addis Ababa, where I’m supposed to be from 1100-1450, and ask them if they can change $300 USD I left with them into birr for me, and then my phone dies because the charger I’ve been provided barely works.
1030 – the plane I was supposed to depart on at 0900 finally arrives.
1200 – finally arrive in Addis Ababa. With only fifty minutes until I need to be here for my next flight it doesn’t really make sense for me to go out into the city, and I’m starving – but unfortunately there is probably someone from The Organization waiting for me outside the airport and I have no working phone to call him.
I find the driver outside, and he’s all about driving me back to The Organization’s office. When I remind him that I need to be back at the airport in fifty minutes this seems to be news to him. He insists the office isn’t far, and in my vague memory it didn’t seem too far, so deferring to his familiarity with his home city I agree to let him take me to the office.
1240 – we arrive at the office, I’m veritably freaking out because I’m supposed to be at the airport for check-in at 1250, and I’m also deliriously hungry, and want to immediately turn around and go to the airport. They don’t seem stressed about the upcoming flight, and haven’t exchanged my money yet, but invite me to go with them to the bank, which we do.
1420 – finally back in the airport terminal and through security. My flight began boarding five minutes earlier, but I’m out of my mind with hunger having not had a bite to eat all day, so I order a burger at a restaurant in the terminal. It doesn’t come out until 1432 as I’m losing my mind, but I then devour it like a shark having a feeding frenzy and run to the gate just in time to catch my flight.
1630 – Finally arrive at the Mekelle airport. I was expecting a small shack of an airport terminal like there had been in Bahir Dar – Bahir Dar is one of the major tourist destinations of Ethiopia after all. Instead I find a large and modern looking airport building. It reminds me of some grumbling I’d heard, that Tigray exerts a disproportionate amount of influence in the federal government.
Stepping out of the terminal I see before me a broad valley of pale rocky ground and sparse shrubs. The air is thin, because these are the highlands at 7,400 feet. The sky is broad and blue, and the temperature comfortably in the upper 70s.
I’m concerned that my driver might once again have forgotten me and my phone isn’t working, but I quickly find a man holding a sign with my name on it. His name is Goru. Middle aged, friendly, full of energy, his skin is covered in jigsaw shapes of pale color – the skin condition known as vitiligo.
Goru explains the sparse landscape around us as we drive away:
“No one is allowed to build on this side of the hill around the airport for fear they could fire on the airport.” I quietly wonder to myself if this is a common practice I just haven’t noticed or a uniquely Ethiopian thing.
We crest a low ridge and the town spreads out before us in a low valley. It’s a decent sized town of 300,000 with a handful of five story buildings, mostly hotels, a stadium under construction, a monument on a hill looking like a stylized arm holding a ball aloft, and a large concrete plant looming at one end in a tangle of silos, pipes and smoking chimneys. As we descend into the town I’m struck by the ubiquitous use of stone. The roads are smoothly cobbled rather than asphalted, the walls and buildings are made with blocks of stone. Traffic is only very light, but we must stop and wait for a group of camels to cross the road. Goru turns to me:
“I’ve heard there’s different kinds of camels, are these the same camels you have in America?”
“Well, actually, we don’t really have camels” I explain.
“What?? Really?” Goru is incredulous
May 5th, Day 29 – I’ve just finished a delicious and leisurely breakfast at the pleasant outdoor eating area of the New Axum hotel when Goru shows up again. The day before he had said we were lacking a car to make the drive down to Korem where the training would take place, the usual vehicle being under repair. But now he tells me he has found a car and driver and we’ll leave just as soon as he finds a translator. And he’s off again!
A few hours later he’s back with a car and translator. I notice that of the cars in the hotel parking lot, several are white UN landcruisers with the international “NO” sign on the back windows with an AK-47 in the circle. Someone has written “I love you” with their finger on the dust on the back window of one of these UN cars.
During the hours of the drive south, I get to know the translator, Girmay. He is a pleasant beekeeping graduate student at Mekelle University. We drive through empty highlands and flat shallow valleys divided by low jagged hills. The villages look neolithic, rough stone and thatch, and then suddenly around a rise we are driving past the towering bone-white masts of a modern windfarm, and then the landscape is flat and barren again. After an hour, the road begins to weave up into mountains. The landscape becomes greener. Blueish woodsmoke curls above clusters of huts perched on mountain saddles, surrounded by terraced fields of tef, the millet-like grain Ethiopia lives on. As we slow to avoid hitting the wandering chickens and goats of a village, children see me in the car and excitedly shout “Ferengi!” and “China! China!”
“Ferengi” because it’s the Amharic word for “foreigner,” “China” because usually the only pale skinned people they see are Chinese engineers, and don’t we all just look the same?
After a very long series of switchbacks up a steep slope we reach a mountain pass.
“This is Dembeguina Pass” Goru tells me, his eyes glowing with pride, “here during the Italian invasion in 1935 Ethiopian forces surrounded an Italian force and defeated it.” I look around the windswept lonely pass and imagine the tired and slow moving column of troop trucks and tanks being overwhelmed by screaming warriors, and share his pride, for a love of Ethiopia is quickly growing in me.
We descend down the other side into green valleys, and more hidden little towns. Finally we come to Korem town strung out along the road in a green mountain valley. The hotel we check into here has solid concrete walls with narrow windows and a dark cavernous bunker-like interior, the rooms inside opening to a central – what would be called an atrium except it isn’t open at the top. Getting suspicious I walk around the outside and the building is shaped like a star. Like, perhaps … what one might call a “star fort.” This might very well be the very fortification from which Haile Selassie commanded his troops in the last major battle of the 1935/1936 invasion of Ethiopia – where the brave Ethiopian warriors proved no match for mustard gas bombs dropped by aircraft. 
May 6th, Day 30 – I’m not optimistic we’ll be able to start the project today since it’s Sunday. I’ve never seen work proceeding on a Sunday in Africa, and Ethiopia is a particularly religious country. But no all the trainees are gathering in the morning outside our hotel-fort. We take our seats in the narrow banquet hall adjoining the main building. Two of the attendees wearing a sort of white turban stand up and lead the group in some short prayers – we have the priests among us!
After the morning lecture, Girmay and I walk down the quiet mainstreet –cars are actually rare on this road– to a little restaurant with a nice outdoor eating area overflowing with leafy foliage. While eating our injera based lunch it begins to rain, so we move under the roof overhang. The temperature remains pleasant and the water sparkles as it drops off the many leaves around us.
There’s no internet here, not on my phone, not in the hotel, not even an internet cafe in town. If I can possibly get internet I always find a way but when it’s simply not an option as is the case here, it’s kind of a relief. The noise of the outside world is severed and there is nothing but the here and now, and the here and now is nothing but drinking milky tea after lunch while watching the rain dripping from the plants.
Back in the lecture hall in the fortress after lunch, lightning flashes outside the windows and thunder rumbles in the distance. The light flickers. This place is like a haunted castle. These beekeepers are among the most experienced I’ve encountered yet, asking in-depth and insightful questions – and unlike some of the participants in the previous two locations they’re not just trying to “show up the Ferengi” but taking the opportunity to learn.
After our afternoon session is over Girmay and I and three other young men stroll around town again (there is, after all, little else to do). The others with us consist of an accountant from The Organization, and two young men from the Comel honey processing business (the head beekeeper and the director of the honey processing plant). The rain has stopped, though everything is still damp, and the air is imbued with a combination of the smell of fresh rain and wood smoke which hangs, bluish-white, wispily in the air over low parts of the valley.
We come across what looks like a bar – young fellows are loitering in front drinking something and loud music can be heard reverberating within. Girmay approaches the patrons and asks if the place has tea, but they say the place only has milk. What I had assumed were barflies drinking beer were in fact lads drinking milk.
I'm thinking of coming back and adding a sort of dream sequence story (though it might not be "as a dream" and it may be more expositional then scene setting) between every day like there had been in Nigeria I, with the history of Ethiopia up to Haile Selassie's overthrow (with future Ethiopia chapter dealing with the overthrow of the Derg and current war), paced so the Ethiopian invasion events mentioned here fall in the appropriate place in that story. I've noted that the current book I'm reading (Congo Journey by Redmond O'Hanlon) deals with this problem of wanting to introduce added context, by having himself read a book during the journey, and I think I've seen that elsewhere. Maybe I should invent myself a fictional book.
