Playing Tourist – Debre Birhan Selassie Church

Living in a tourist town has its pros and cons. Pro- Lots of people are always coming through. Con- My excuses not to tour said people around are becoming incredibly feeble. But, my good friend Chad cracked my tour aversion and finally got me to go to Debre Birhan Selassie Church, one of the more famous churches in Ethiopia, a hop, skip and jump away from my doorstep.

Debre Birhan Selassie Church

Debre Birhan Selassie loosely translates to Mountain of Light Holy Trinity Church. That fact alone got me star tourist status immediately. Gotta love Peace Corps language training. The Australians thought me and Chad were super gobez.

Chad and I getting our tourist on

The typical big eyed floating head paintings you see in many hotels and restaurants around the country are modeled after the artwork in this church. It is one of the more famous orthodox churches in the country, and for just 40 birr they will doctor your birth certificate too! (Seriously. The lack of record keeping here means you can pick what year you were born if you need an ID).

Angel heads on the ceiling

Painted in portraits from top to bottom, scenes of biblical characters and some not so biblical characters cover the walls. This is actually one of the only places in the world there is a depiction of Muhammed, since in Islam you cannot draw living things.

Mohammed on a camel… Not exactly sure what’s leading him, or I am and I won’t mention it.

Daniel on a lion, I assume after the lion’s den

Being some of the only tourists who can speak Amharic, I was able to get a student discount on my ticket (what up no date on the BU ID) and got a personal tour from the priest, who seemed to like me… a lot. Could be a difference in personal space thing though.

You can’t tell, but he is holding on to my arm for dear life

Showing off for the camera

St. George is thought of as the patron saint of Ethiopia. We have Georgis draft beer, about 100 churches named Georgis, and of course a prominent spot on the wall of DebreBirhan Selassie.

St. George killing the dragon- did not know there were dragons in Ethiopia

The Selassie – The Holy Trinity

And some other photos of the grounds:

Favorite Photos Q2

A holy cave

Can’t believe it’s that time again, 8 months in and another rangling of photos. Again some are great, some have a great story.

Tikel Dingays

World Malaria Day

Drying spices

Roots at Fasil Baths

Fasil baths in off season

Papyrus boats- Gorgora

Solidarity

Peace Corps Ethiopia represents!

Making berbere

 

Habesha Libs- Traditional Clothing

Traditional clothing in Ethiopia varies by region, religion, tribe, and socio-economic status. In Gondar there is a mix of traditional clothing and modern clothing, and even some modern-traditional styles running around.

Especially for the holidays, everyone gets dressed in their traditional best, even if sometimes it doesn’t match what a middle class Gonderian would wear. This year at Timket I saw a lot of Gojam outfits from stylish men and women who clearly were not Gojam farmers. Gojam is the region south of here. So traditional or not, or “semi-traditional” or however you want to call it, it’s still cool to see the influence of these cultural clothes on modern fashion. There is a hoodie made from traditional material with embroidery that is super popular in Addis right now, and I might have to pick one up.

For women, the traditional dress is a white linen with embroidery on the cuffs, in the middle, on the bottom, or all three, paired with a white nutella (scarf wrap) of the same fabric. A very Gondar version of this is to have a thick rim of embroidery on the bottom hem, but only on the back. There is also another traditional dress that is made of thicker white fabric that is loose around the arms with symbols of the Orthodox cross.

Girl with the largest forehead ever, wearing the cutest habesha libs

stylish leather bag not included

And of course, the hair makes the outfit. Traditional braiding here can get pretty crazy. Especially in the north (Tigray) there is braiding style that looks like 3 mountain ranges on the top of the head that is let loose about mid way down the head, with skinny braids over the forehead like a crown, supposedly representing Jesus’ crown of thorns.

women with nutellas and Tigray braids

Then there is a more Gondarian braiding style that is basically cornrows on crack, and they are beautiful.

braids- with smaller braids, and other braids around those. Cool.

For the men there are the traditional white clothes, and then there are the Gojam button clothes. Green is the typical colour for Gojam farmers and they wear these short shorts in order to work more efficiently. Then for a little flair, white buttons are sown all over.

Carmen and Wendeson, my landlord’s brother

Gojam kids with a sheep horn

In addition to the shorts, there is also a type of pantaloon pant with suspenders that they wear sometimes. I saw some stylish girls rocking a fashionable version of these Gojam pumpkin pants, and maybe I’ve been in country too long, but I could totally see wearing that out. The other farmer accessory is a straw hat, almost like a cowboy hat. Gotta protect yourself from the sun. The priests also have a turban like wrap made of the same traditional nutella white fabric as the women wear.

the straw hats

priestly hats

So a mix of traditional, modern, well-off and farming culture has created a new kind of traditional clothing that mixes elements from all of it. Fashion is always one of many lenses into culture, and which elements get picked up from where create a story of cultural dominance, migrant movement, historical patterns, and modern twists.

And how these travel around the world are even more interesting. I heard the other day that the intricate Ethiopian Orthodox cross was becoming a popular pendant in America.

straight from Etsy

Equal and Opposite Reactions

Life comes in waves here. I can feel incredibly happy, excited, everything is lucky go la-dee-da, and not ten minutes later come crashing down as I literally fall into a ditch. Understanding the roller coaster of emotions volunteers can go through within even a single day, I try to practice prudence and flexibility in dealing with both the good and bad. Even when things go awesomely, it can be dangerous to let my emotions swing to widely to either side of the pendulum less Murphy’s law comes to take its vengeance.

Usually these periods come in bouts of days, weeks, or even months before emotions change. Check out this long range volunteer life cycle [future blog post], but a few days this past week showed me how quickly events can change, and if something bad happens it will usually be outweighed by a touching experience later.

Walking home from work one day, I passed a group of children, of which I pass hundreds each day, near my house. The kids almost always ask for money or pens or a soccer ball or something, and I usually smile and keep going, sometimes I stop and talk with them, explain my job (penniless volunteer), and that asking for money just because I look different (like a tourist) is actually rude. It depends on my energy. On this particular day, the group of boys yelled at me “GIVE ME MONEY!,”, without a hello or any greeting at all. In addition, they were clearly not street children, had backpacks and school supplies, and their uniforms were suspiciously clean. So as I passed I yelled back “YALANYM,” which means “I don’t have any,” and kept going. Usually the kids laugh and giggle at my bad pronunciation, but one rabash (rude/obnoxious) kid in the group picked up a stone and hurled it at me, where it hit the back of my head.

I whirled around, pointed my finger at the kid and in my scariest teacher voice said he was extremely rude and he should NEVER do that again. Which in Amharic probably came out like “rude! Never! Bad! You!” or something embarrassing like that. The point came across though and an adult walking past who saw the whole thing walloped the kid up the side of the head. Not exactly what I wanted, but whatever, he deserved it.

As I turned away, holding back tears, I realized that it hadn’t actually hurt, it had just hurt my pride. After over a month of meeting people, integrating, and living in this community this was the first (probably of many) blatant moments where I was singled out like that. I was most frustrated with the fact that I had felt like in a moment where I let down my guard, a kid had found a crack and forced all my walls back up in 30 seconds.

Not 50 feet later, though, I ran into an older man who is my friend Morgan’s counterpart in her small town in Aykel. He had recognized me from a meeting and was walking down my road after visiting a friend in my neighborhood. While he works in Aykel, he said much of his family lives in Gondar and so he comes to visit a lot. In a moment where all I wanted to do was go home and eat chocolate and sulk, I bucked up and let him invite me for tea. I’m really glad I did. What would have been an awful afternoon was negated by this kind man only 10 minutes later. I’m also proud that I took advantage of a moment that I could have easily brushed off.

Another example a few days later, I left work and ran into a group of street kids who I am particularly fond of. Sometimes we chat; they are funny because they are clearly little con artists, but not quite good at it yet. On this occasion though they told me that the bread coupons an NGO had been handing out were not able to be redeemed at the bakeries because of some problem or another (it has since been resolved). Because it’s not my organization, but I know the program, I agreed to just buy the kids some bread, which is 1.25 birr for a loaf, or the equivalent of 7 cents USD.  Of course when we got to the souk, 3 kids had become 15 and bread had become donuts. I agreed to buy no more than five donuts (which are more expensive) and they could share however they wanted. Mistake. Some of the older kids ran off with a few of the donuts before I could do anything, and as I tried to extricate myself from the situation one of the kids yelled “I hate you!” as I was walking away. You’re welcome, kid.

But only a few minutes later when I walked up to the Post Office to find it closed, the package man recognized me, knew I had a package and opened up just for me and called me family. It also helped that the package had chocolate in it for me to eat when I got home : )

So even in the span of a few minutes I can have equal and opposite emotions competing in my brain, but taken as a whole, this experience, while difficult at times, will always have hidden gems of moments that make it all worth it.

Timket – The Epiphany Celebration

About a week ago we celebrated one of the biggest holidays in the Ethiopian Orthodox tradition – Epiphany or Timket. It was a three day celebration with parades, holy water blessings, eating, discovering new parts of Gondar, and learning more about the Orthodox tradition.

As a bit of background, the Orthodox Epiphany is different from what most protestant Christians think of it. I grew up understanding Epiphany as the time when the wise men came to Jesus (ya, it wasn’t Christmas Eve, sorry Nativity sets). But Orthodox Epiphany is the celebration of when Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist in the Jordan River some 30 years later. Epiphany being less of the wise men’s eureka moment and more of the commencement of Jesus’ mission and teachings on Earth.

Going even farther into background, the Arc of the Covenant is also believed to be housed in Ethiopia (Axum- Tigray Region). It was taken here from Jerusalem for safekeeping by Menelik I, the lovechild of the Queen of Sheba (Ethiopian) and King Solomon (wise old dude ruling Jerusalem). But Menelik didn’t exactly ask permission to take the Arc, thus creating a legend of Indiana Jones proportions (seriously, Indiana Jones goes to Ethiopia in the Last Crusade). Each Orthodox Church has a replica of the Arc of the Covenant and during Timket these arcs get paraded around each city or small town. But no one is supposed to look upon it (since it houses the Holy of Holies and all) so what you end up seeing are a bunch of umbrellas running around town.

What makes the Timket celebration in Gondar unique, and the biggest in the nation, is the ceremony at the Fasilides Baths. Most towns have parades and some holy water blessings, but Gondar goes through an elaborate ceremony and a priest converts and entire castle moat into Holy Water. Ya, it’s epic.

So I’ll walk you through some of the celebrations, history and ceremony from the vantage point behind my camera. My house was directly on the parade route and only 10 mins walk from the baths so I can safely say I was in the thick of the celebration all weekend.

Friday afternoon the celebration started with a parade of all the churches coming together with their priests, arcs, some floats and thousands of people walking from each church to the baths. There are 44 arcs (44 Orthodox Churches) in total in Gondar.

The parade coming down from Piazza, view from the mountain by my house

Some of the bigger churches had floats and entire entourages, all the arcs had to travel on a carpet which boys rolled and unrolled in front of the procession all the way down the hill

The arcs arrive, AKA a flock of umbrellas

Arc Parade Float

Each church had their own personality, uniform and group. In addition to the church processions many people joined and watched the parade in their finest traditional clothing [future blog post]. For women, habesha libs, as their known, are the white shawls (nutellas) with white linen dresses with beautiful embroideries on the hemlines. This year, there were a lot of Gojam (West Amhara region) farmer clothes as well. The green or blue outfits with the buttons made for the cutest little children.

This horse is decked out

Gojam boys and outfits

nuns and crowd

watching the parade, and protecting herself from the sun

As the parade passed we jumped on to the end and walked toward the baths. On the way, impromptu dance parties were happening everywhere. Morgan and I made sure to document. I was lucky enough to host Dan and Nicole, third year extension volunteers who spent their first two years in Gondar and were able to introduce me to more organizations, hole in the wall restaurants, and their favorite places around the city.

Ryan getting his shoulder shake on with a Gojam farmer

Morgan getting a good shot

Dan and Nicole- best tour guides

At the baths on Friday evening, the arcs arrive and the priests begin to set up. The more committed pilgrims stood vigil all night saying prayers and giving thanks. We returned the next morning in the dark at 4:30am to bleachers already full. BBC was doing a documentary on Timket this year (yay for Ethiopian tourism!) so there were a lot of media around as well. But being some of the only ferenjis able to say more than four words in Amharic we got pulled to the front and given prime spots. The enthusiasm by Ethiopians to share their traditions is really great to witness and experience. The weekend was full of anecdotes extolling Ethiopian hospitality, including the next day when five priests walked into my compound and invited us to have tea with them.

Fasilides Baths

This priest came out and posed for our cameras, pretty awesome

Prayer by candlelight at dawn

Priests lined up and chanting

There were no seats left so people started climbing trees, very Zachius…

The ceremony lasted through the dawn and priests and worshipers sang, chanted and prayed as the sun came up. A quick sermon was given in Amharic and one of the priests blessed the water in the moat around Fasilides Castle. Not even three seconds later, hundreds of young men stripped down and jumped 20 feet off the walls into the water. Events got pretty chaotic as mobs pressed in around the sides of the pool. It’s a moment of ecstasy as (mostly men) jump into the water for blessing and then turn around and “bless” everyone else by throwing large splashes into the crowd. It was a lot of fun, if not a little claustrophobic.  Young boys climbed over scaffolding, jumped from trees, and old women filled water bottles with holy water to bring back to their homes.

As an aside, in Ethiopia, there is a superstition that holy water can cure AIDS and so part of the public health communications approach  (which is part of my work here) has been working with religious institutions not to necessarily discredit this belief, but to advocate a dual holy water/ART drug strategy.

Priest blessing the water

The baths are open all weekend for revelers to come take a dip. Sunday afternoon we returned and the baths resembled more of a community pool with kids diving in and out and racing each other around the sides. It doesn’t sound like there is an expiration date for the Holy Water, so I filled up a bottle myself. It’s sitting full of silt on my kitchen counter- I’ll have to remember not to boil my pasta in it.

Diving in

Lots of blessing going on

Jumping in, clothes and all

Baths become a community pool

A more leisurely time to bathe

So there’s a long winded but very brief description of Timket in Gondar. It’s clearly the place to be for this holiday if the explosion of tourists (both foreign and Ethiopian) are any indication. It was a great introduction to some more of the cultural aspects of the city and Orthodox faith which pretty much dominates this region. I’m taking reservations for my floor for next year, but you’ll have to bring me chocolate.

For more Timket photos here is a link to my facebook album 

A Bit About Gondar

So I’ve been living at site for just over two weeks now, and I’m getting a lot of questions about what it’s like. Hold your horses people, let me get to know the town first!

Ok, I stepped outside my house for two seconds. Here’s what I gather so far:

Skyline of Gondar

Gondar is a big city of about 350,000 (very rough guestimate) that is steeped in Ethiopian history. It was established as the capital of Ethiopia in the 1660s, though no longer is (what up Addis Ababa and Menelik II!). It was the seat of power for Emperor Falisides way back when, and he built a bunch a castles here. Thus, the city is known as “the Camelot of Africa.”

A close up of the castle

The city is built on a hill. The castles and the ancient city are located at the top of the hill (like every ancient city ever). There is a market area and a “piazza” roundabout (another volunteer) and the area is near my work. I live mid way down the hill, and further down is a teacher’s college (and another education volunteer) and the University of Gondar (another health/ICT volunteer).  So a total of four volunteers and one giant hill.

Part of the ancient city walls near my office

In addition to the castles, there are seven ancient churches built by subsequent rulers. One such ruler was Tewedros II, who one Ethiopian told me was “the right man at the wrong time.” His major contribution is basically destroying Gondar’s economy in an attempt at modernizing the army (but yay for roads!), but then saving the city from the Italians in the 1800s. He was ultimately defeated by the British and actually committed suicide with the gun Queen Victoria had given him as a token of friendship years earlier. For his efforts he gets a statue in piazza.

Tewodros on a rainy afternoon in Piazza

Father down the hill is my house- about a 15 min walk to my work at the AIDS Resource Center. It’s a nice neighborhood with a primary school that has some sort of chant over the loudspeaker in the mornings with the kids… 80% cute, 20% creepy. A bit further down my road is a stadium that sounds like a good time on Sunday afternoons. My compound is nice and quiet (cue Kudjo the guard dog barking as we speak).

Not a bad view- the mountains, not the junkyard tires

Traveling further down the hill, passing “expat row” where all the hospital doctors and medical student researchers live (in fancy apartments and where the “rich ferenji” stereotype comes from), and continuing on out of the city is the major volunteer tourist attraction- the Dashen Brewery.

Dashen Cellar on tap

All you Denver microbrew lovers, keep your pants on, it’s nothing special, but it’s one of the more solid beers of Ethiopia- think Blue Moon. I know, Peace Corps is so hard.

And that’s a little overview of my site for the next two years. As cool as all of these things are, and as excited I am about my work (more on that later), I think the number one reason I like living in Gondar is the 300% increase of Lord of the Rings jokes there are in my life now. Keep ‘em coming!