The first of three or four posts to fast-forward this blog to the present moment
The first few times I walked up the winding main street in Lalibela, passersby flicked their hands at me in an impatient gesture. I took it as a sign of unwelcome, until I realized that the motion was actually a swat aimed at the persistent armadas of flies that were as much a feature of Lalibela as the heat and dust. Apart from the insects, the small town was a pleasantly scenic place, set on a large hill with views in every direction across the surrounding valley. I was happy to be here, freshly arrived from Gondar three days before Timkat, otherwise known as the Epiphany, a festive celebration of Jesus’s baptism that is at least as central to Ethiopian Orthodoxy as Christmas.
Lalibela’s claim on its Eighth Wonder of the World moniker is its cluster of a half-dozen rock churches, They’re defined by negative space, not constructed per se but hewn from the hill at the town’s center. You can stand on the lip of the ground and stare down upon their roofs, watching the devotees sitting around the perimeter of the buildings below.
My first morning, I showed up to the churches at sunrise. I wandered blindly through the tunnels and passageways that connect them, occasionally scrabbling through the pitch-dark. The one time I turned on my flashlight I was scolded by the janitor walking confidently behind me, so I switched it off and contined to grope cautiously along the tunnel walls. White-clad worshippers gathered between the buildings, in the dug-out open spaces that served as courtyards. The men chanted, slapping drums, the picture of piety. The women were much more discreet. DSLR lenses protruded from the hands of tourists who walked the fringes of the gatherings. One man was leaning so far into a semicircle of chanters that I thought he might tumble into their center.
I was starting to feel slightly allergic to the presence of the tourists. I ducked through the rough-hewn doorway of one of the churches to find a dark, cramped interior. Worshippers were clustered around the walls, prostrating themselves at the guilded red curtains at the front. I wondered about those curtains. I find so much of the Ethiopian orthodox religion to be literally shrouded in mystery. A priest chanted lines from a leather-bound book that was too thin to be a Bible. As I stood in the corner, a western woman walked in, scarf wrapped around her head, camera cocked in her hands. She raised it to her eyes and I heard the crisp click-click-click-click-click-click of the shutter. She ducked out again.
I took pictures too, but I liked to imagine that my careful distance and my restraint from using a camera inside the churches themselves placed me in a higher tier of virtue. I found comfort in this self-satisfaction, relief from the knowledge that my Lalibela photoset would be considerably less impressive than my fellow tourists’.
I hadn’t intended to be in Lalibela longer than a night or two, but with Timkat just around the corner, I resolved to stick around. I learned to my chagrin that my guesthouse’s nightly rate was about to triple. This expense was reflected in the pool of tourists: I found myself eating dinner in ornately decorated restaurants surrounded by grey-haired European tourists in Patagonia. Each group was attached to an Ethiopian guide speaking English or German. I was back to eating spaghetti.
On Timkat itself, I walked down the main street into a crowd of locals milling around expectantly. I had been avoiding people for much of my stay in Lalibela; over the holiday the town fills not just with tourists but also with con artists and thieves. Each time an adult male voice called out to me, I inevitably bristled, prepared for a sales pitch, a nagging presence at my shoulder. The request for money was assured, an inevitability, a visible point that these men reeled me towards one exhausting platitude at a time. Give me a beggar over a tout any day. I began to recognize a warning sign in myself when I started to call myself Andrew or Barnabas. I was from Denmark or Kazakhstan, or wherever. When defense mechanisms like these flare up, I’ve begun to close myself off to a place and cast suspicion on any gesture of goodwill.
But children were the exception to my burnout. I stood in a circle of a dozen of them now, cycling through my script of readymade replies to their amazingly consistent questions. To alleviate the tedium of divulging my name and nationality every time a new kid pushed into the group, I turned questions back on them. I found they liked physics and math; they wanted to be engineers and doctors. I was frequently surprised by how old these children were when I asked; my judgment of age is poor, but I found myself squinting at a fourth grader who looked six years old. Was I that small then? I could bask in these kids’ benign curiosity all day. It was actually soothing. Even their needles for textbook money were gentle and quickly abandoned, small gnats of irritation, not the flies of Lalibela that had come to symbolize both the uncomfortable heat and the pestering touts.
The knot of children dissolved, an indication that the Timkat parade was about to begin. I looked around for a spot to post myself; after some hesitation I hoisted myself up onto a dense shelf of branches overlooking the road, alongside half a dozen teenage boys. The branches crackled under my weight, but they maintained their shape admirably, a springy viewing platform eight feet above the street. The teenagers were twiddling vuvuzelas in their hands, which they periodically raised to their lips in startling staccato bursts.
Some of them clutched a handful of little limes, no bigger than grapes, which they lobbed at pedestrians strolling below. This is a Timkat tradition: Boys throw limes at girls they want to attract, and the girl expresses her own interest by picking up the fruit. In practice, the limes ricocheted off of parasols and the sides of people’s heads. Irritated looks were thrown our way, romance unkindled. I felt some secondhand embarrassment, but the boys shrugged off the casual rejection.
A murmur of drumbeats and voices along the street to our left annunced the arrival of the Timkat procession. A slow-moving mass of humanity filled the entire width of the road; bystanders on either side were squished into the bushes, but we were comfortably above the fray. First in line was an army pickup truck, soldiers reclining in the back with machine guns lazing across their laps. Knots of a dozen men jogged to and fro after them, chanting and thrusting long wooden sticks into the air. I had seen similar celebrations by soccer fans marching from the stadium after a victory. Behind them was a crowd of deacons, cautiously dignified and clad identically in white.
The clergy followed next, bedecked in their festive finest, tassled parasols protecting them from the bright sunlight. They advanced slowly along a line of red carpet that was being hurriedly unrolled before them by a group of handlers. A retinue of broom-equipped women vigorously swept the carpet as the robed masses advanced, their motions bringing to mind a curling match with fussy priests instead of an iron. Periodically, the procession came to a halt as one of the handlers fumbled the carpet roll or one of the sweepers fell behind the others. At these points, the clergy waited patiently, glancing among themselves and at onlookers, looking slightly self-conscious. When the obstuction was cleared, they continued on, a dense mass of umbrellas and colorful headwear plodding up the street to shouts and drumbeats.
Behind the priests streamed a mass of locals, khaki-clad tourists popping out among them. Children dressed as priests waddled past in baggy costumes, hand in hand with their parents. The steady stream began to thin, and then only a few stragglers remained, following a trail of detritus and crushed limes.
The parade would finish uphill at the churches, but I said goodbye to my viewing mates and clambered down from my bed of branches, doing my best to avoid the snagging thorns. I walked the opposite direction towards my guesthouse, down the gratifyingly empty street.