aggienaut | The Apinautica

   Continuing posting bits of the work in progress book. Here's the last portion of the chapter about the first trip to Ethiopia.

May 7th [2012], Day 31 – We hike up the forested slope of nearby Girakasu Mountain, single file on a narrow trail, under the canopy of pine trees, over little gurgling rivulets, until we come to an open glade filled with rows of yellow hive boxes. A the far end of the apiary as we enter gray furry anthropoid bodies bound away – monkeys! One pauses a moment to look back at us, it has prominent white side whiskers like the muttonchops of some wizened old dickensian miser.
   “Do you know what kind of monkey that is?” I ask Girmay.
   “I think they’re called ‘grivets’”
   “Do they disturb the beehives?”
   “No I don’t think so, maybe only if all the bees have died in the hive they’ll open it up and look for any remaining honey or brood to eat”
   I had at first been distracted by the monkeys but now I look at the view – from here we can see down the far side of Mount Girakasu from Korem – the slope descends precipitously down, down to a savanna down below that stretches off into the distance – the Great Rift Valley! Down below the landscape is a dry brown savanna quite different from the forests up here. Down there somewhere the three million year old “Lucy” skeleton was found. The escarpment continues as far as I can see to the north and south, with white ribbons of waterfalls cascading down into the valley.

   Much to my relief the beekeepers in this area have no aversion at all to using smoke and they immediately light up some smokers and we begin inspecting beehives.
   Holding up a frame I see a small round red mite on a bee.
   “Girmay! Girmay!” I call out, “what is this??” I ask bringing him the frame. It looks to me like the very troublesome bee pest the Varroa mite, which is present throughout most of the world but at this time not yet known to be in Ethiopia, so it would be an important discovery if it was.
   “That’s a bee louse, the braula fly” he explains to me.
   “Oh, interesting, I’ve heard of it but we don’t have it back home.” I examine the bee louse carefully, it really does look a lot like a varroa mite, though perhaps a brighter shade of red.
   One of the beekeepers is admiring my gloves, which aren’t even traditional beekeeping gloves but nitrile chemical handling gloves because they’re cheap and didn’t take up much space in my luggage.
   “They’re only four dollars” I tell him through Girmay.
   “He says he can’t afford that. These farmers only earn about $12 a month you know” Girmay reminds me.
   “Tell him I’ll leave him my gloves when I leave.”

   The frame hives have been manufactured by non-beekeepers and given to beekeepers who aren’t familiar with them, so the beekeepers receiving them haven’t even been able to identify what is wrong with them. The key to frame hives is “bee space” – bees have innate opinions about spacing. Anything less than 6mm the bees will generally block up with propolis, a kind of glue they make from tree resin. A space of about 9.5mm bees will see as a hallway and use it as such. Spaces bigger than 12mm they consider open space and may build buttresses of “burr comb” into it or “cross combs” connecting across it. These frame hives have lots of improper spacing and as a result frequently the comb is built across the frames such that they can’t be removed without breaking it.
   The beekeepers, though very experienced in their own right, follow with interest as I show them what’s wrong with these hives they’re less familiar with. The burden that has been haunting me, of having nothing useful to contribute, finally feels lifted.
   Over the next several days we have lecture and Q & A in our fortress hotel and walks to forest apiaries on the mountain. Sometimes it rains, sometimes it hails, sometimes the weather is perfect in the serene little town of Korem. I usually have an omelet for breakfast (the one universal food), injera for lunch, and spaghetti for dinner (a lingering Italian influence). This is not a coffee producing region so we drink a lot of tea. A cup of hot milk in a tea cup is also surprisingly popular. Girmay tells me there’s another beverage that is unique to this town called “korefu” that is very alcoholic yet only consumed in the morning, but I am unable to find it.
   One day while walking along the main street a pickup truck suddenly pulls to a stop behind me and a uniformed but barefoot Ethiopian soldier hops out of the back, AK-47 in one hand. It occurs to me that if an armed man had jumped out of a truck behind me in Nigeria I probably would have immediately dove into the hedge, but this is peaceful Ethiopia.

May 9th, Day 33 – “What’s with the awnings?” I ask Girmay as we wind our way back up the road to Mekelle. Frequently we see what looks like a temporary awning erected outdoors near houses and people seemingly having picnics there.
   “It’s Mariam gunbot, ‘Saint Mary’s Day,’ traditionally the same group of neighbors celebrate it together every year,” he explains.
   “Oh that sounds very nice”
   “Would you like to come celebrate with my neighbors and I this evening?”
   “Definitely! Thank you!”

   I join Girmay in one of his neighbor’s houses in Mekelle that evening. Many of his neighbors of all ages are mingling and chatting, I’m surprised by the number who speak English (all education from high school level up is in English), and they’re all very friendly. The table is heaped with traditional food – injera and grilled meats and many spices. There’s the traditional honey wine tej, commercially canned beer (Ethiopian brand St George), and even Johnnie Walker whiskey. Any time my glass has gotten relatively empty an attendee I perhaps haven’t even talked to yet appears with a smile and insists on refilling it with a friendly grin.
   Presently I am pulled into a circle forming in the middle of the room, and traditional dancing begins. At first the dancers keep their hands at their sides while shuffling enthusiastically about to the cheery beat of traditional music; later as the night goes on, the dancing morphs into less restrained joyous cavorting.
Now the music is turned down and someone is standing on a chair making a speech.
   “Traditionally people make speeches arguing that they should host it next year and then everyone votes who should do so” Girmay tells me, “I would like to host some time but not until after I’ve married my fiancee and we have a house together to do so.”
   Likely spurred on by the liquid encouragement of my constantly refilled glass, I get up on a chair.
   “I want to thank you all for your amazing hospitality,” I say, “this has been so much fun and I’m so grateful to Girmay for inviting me and all of you for welcoming me.” People cheer, and then cheer again after it’s been translated for them. “And you know, I would love to host next year, but sadly California is very far away.” I think I’m adequately safe from having to actually host anything, but rather to my alarm shouts of “no, you can still host!!” come back at me.
   I dismount the chair and try to withdraw into obscurity a bit until the voting finishes, which seems to occur informally via level of cheering and applause for various names proposed until one is decided upon.
   I Stumble out of the house at the end of the evening, thoroughly drunk. Girmay hails me a passing bujuj auto-rickshaw. About to get in, I remember how the taxi drivers in Egypt used to always try to scam me and, consider: in my obviously intoxicated state I am an obvious mark. So I hurry back to Girmay who is just turning to return inside, to ask him how much it should cost, before getting in the bujuj. A few minutes later, back at my hotel, I was amazed to find the driver quoting me the exact amount Girmay had said he would. What honest people, these Ethiopians.

   I wake up in the night with my hotel room slowly spinning around me. My mouth is already dry and I realize I’d drank heavily the previous evening without drinking any water. If I learned anything in college it was that one must drink water to mitigate having an awful headache in the morning. I desperately need to drink water but there’s another problem – I have no bottled water in the room!
   I have two choices, drink no water and face feeling deeply miserable in the morning, or drink the local tapwater from the bathroom sink and risk everything that comes with that.
   <>I’ve been in Africa for over a month now, I think to myself, I’ve probably been exposed bit by bit to the local water bacteria. I’ll drink the tap water.

May 10th, Day 34 – I stumble down to breakfast in the morning feeling grateful I only have a headache. Miraculously, the tap water does not appear to have destroyed my guts.
After breakfast Goru takes me to tour the Comel honey processing facility. I’ve already met the director of the plant and their head beekeeper at my training, but now I also meet the owner, Daniel. Serious but kind and personable, he reminds me a bit of my own father. The plant itself has state-of-the-art gleaming machinery, homogenizers, filters and bottling machines, arranged in spacious and clean workspaces. They export 70 tons of honey a year throughout the world and win international prizes. I’m thoroughly impressed.
   “I was talking to a government official from the Agriculture Department and he was telling me about all the investment they were making into beekeeping, the 50,000 hives a year they were producing,” Daniel tells me “and I asked what their plan was to facilitate the sale of all this honey. The official just shrugged. So I built this honey processing plant” he says with a smile.

   I’m in the security line at Mekelle airport. The man in front of me has just had honey confiscated from his carry on. I’ve made sure to pack my jars of honey in my checked luggage and no longer have a hive tool to worry about, having given it to Girmay.
   My bag goes through the X-ray machine as I walk through the metal detector. The security woman scowls at it and puts it through the X-ray again. She scowls again and asks if I can open it. She looks inside, takes some things out, puts it through again, and still isn’t satisfied.
   Meanwhile other passengers are also passing through. An older woman with a hand-held GPS has been sidelined by security, who is telling her she can’t take it on the plane.
   “But I was able to take it on the plane from New York to here!” the passenger insists.
   The x-ray technician shows me the display screen on the machine, which appears to show a pen in the backpack which she can’t find.
   “Can you take out this pen?” she asks. I look in my backpack but can’t find the pen. We take everything out and put it back through the X-ray. The now-empty backpack still shows a pen inside in the x-ray image.
   The other woman has come to a compromise with security, they will let her take her GPS if she promises to hand it to a cabin crew member when she boards the aircraft. Trusting entirely to the honor system they let her go. A hassled-looking American in a business suit takes her place at the sidelined inspection table. A cheerful Australian man in skimpy running shorts breezes through security, winking at us as he passes – “mates dress like me and they won’t try to frisk ya.”
   The security woman gives up on trying to find my ghost pen and waves me through.

[end of Ethiopia I chapter]

I really love this picture, though the runners don't stand out well against the dark background, I suppose if one was crafty one could subtly increase the brightness of their yellow and red outfits until they stood out better ... if someone with some photoshop fu wants to have a go at it go right ahead, it would probably be wicked easy for someone who knows what they're doing

   There's a potential further scene where I negotiate buying a drinking horn in a market in Addis Ababa, which is kind of interesting because it wasn't a standard object anyone had for sale but when tehy found out I'd pay good money for one several shopkeepers called friends they knew who had one for actual use. Eventually several examples were rushed to me, which were all actually a bit ugly since they were home made for actual use rather than for display, and I paid way too much for the least ugly one but I kind of like that its an actual made-for-practical-use drinking horn. But this story felt like it didn't fit here as far as pacing and arc.