The Attack of the Killer Rhododendrons (32 page)

“Okay, perhaps you and you and you,” I said to three women. I snapped a photo and then walked forward and said, “Thank you very much,” while handing each a couple of dirty, brown 1-birr notes. The last woman was upset at me; she wanted an additional payment for the baby she was holding. I hadn’t spotted the baby, so I handed her 2 birr more, which started a massive fight between the
mother, who wanted to keep both bills, and our park guide, who insisted that she get only one so as to not ruin the payment scheme for following tourists.

I wanted to talk to someone about their huts and how long it took to build one and whether they were sufficiently breezy on a hot day. I wanted to ask how far it was to the nearest medical facility and how frequently the people had to shoot wildlife to protect their livestock. I wanted to ask what lion tasted like. I also wanted to know their position on clitorectomy and other forms of genital mutilation reportedly practised in the region. However, there was a bit of a to-do brewing between those whose pictures had been taken and those who had missed the opportunity to earn some cash. We beetled back to the vehicle. Along the way I purchased a clay lip disk (“Only one … thank you, I really only need one … see, I already have one!”) for 10 birr. Back in the truck, hands reached through the windows and loud voices asked,
“Luckity, luckity, luckity?”

“What is
luckity?
I don’t understand.”

“It means ‘plastic.’ They want plastic water bottles.” We found three and handed them over.

We dropped our guide at his original post and continued on. We spotted an astounding range of wildlife, including bushbuck, Yellow-mantled Widowbirds, Abyssinian Rollers, White Wagtails, Northern Carmine Bee-eaters, and Hammerkop, heron-like birds whose heads are shaped rather like a claw hammer.

We came across a group of six men on foot, all in military-like fatigues and sporting high-powered rifles. Being so close to the Kenyan border, I began to wonder whether I would ever get to see my retirement and regretted not registering with the Canadian Consulate before leaving Addis Ababa. It turned out that these men were park wardens on the lookout for poachers. Men in the local tribes feel it is important to show their bravery by killing large animals. Why can’t they just pee their name in the snow like men elsewhere?

S
CIENCE FIRST STUMBLED
across eucalyptus plants in 1777. On James Cook’s third voyage, crew member David Nelson collected a tree on Bruny Island off the coast of southern Tasmania. Back at London’s British Museum, French botanist L’Héritier described the plant and named it
Eucalyptus obliqua.
He coined the genus name on the basis of the Greek words
eu
and
calyptos,
implying that the flower bud’s operculum was “well covered.” The species name comes from the Latin word
obliquus,
on the basis of an asymmetric leaf whose two sides do not meet the stem at the same place. The general name
eucalyptus
stuck.

In preparation for our trip to Ethiopia, Lindsay and I had visited a travel clinic in Canada, and between us had been given more than $1,200 worth of inoculations and pills. We were topped up for diphtheria, meningitis, malaria, yellow fever, typhoid fever, tetanus, polio, and hepatitis A through Z. If I was going to get sick, God was going to have to invent new diseases. Our arms had become so sore from the injections that we had trouble raising them for a couple of days. We also got prescriptions for oral inoculations against most forms of traveller’s diarrhea. At the appropriate times, I had mixed up and drunk the horrible concoction that was supposed to keep my intestines moving at the proper rate. Lindsay had forgotten to take hers.

Lindsay had been feeling a bit unwell the previous day, and at midnight she erupted. The walls and doors of our hotel room may have been adequate for keeping out wildlife, but they were useless at blocking sound, and so every echo of explosive diarrhea was a shared experience. To save her the potential embarrassment of being sick, I pretended to sleep through it. Lindsay wasn’t back in bed for too many minutes before she made a return engagement to vomit her lungs out and plead for mercy.

Mark Twain wrote that the “one thing in the world that will make a man peculiarly and insufferably self-conceited” is to have a settled stomach while those around him are vomiting. I was doing my very best not to feel self-conceited that I had remembered to drink my anti-diarrheal potion.

On my pre-breakfast walk through Jinka the next morning, I chose a small side road lined with family dwellings and an elementary school. My wanderings attracted the usual smiles and surprised looks, and also attracted Phillip. He was delighted when I greeted him by name. He must have been searching very hard to find me on a back street, and I felt rather complimented. We talked about Canada and Ethiopia, giving him a chance to practise his English and me a chance to practise talking to young people.

Our group drove east toward Key Afar. En route, I noticed that a lot of men were sporting rifles. Surely this had nothing to do with protecting livestock from wildlife, particularly since the main industry seemed to be road construction. Legese explained that different tribal groups maintained antagonistic relationships. Violent conflicts broke out over stolen cattle or goats, and over disputed territory. Lindsay asked where the guns might be acquired. “We are close to the border with Kenya,” said Legese. “Getting guns is easy.”

Key Afar is a sleepy little spot for most of the week, but on Thursday, market day, it comes alive. We walked along the main street, passing many people bringing goats, chickens, and produce to market. We took a quick look around the market plaza to see what was on offer. We found spices, ochre used in personal decoration, and sandals made of old automobile tires nailed roughly into the shape of a foot. At that point a young man made a very amateur attempt to steal my wallet. He bumped into my shoulder and then made a grab for the wallet in my front pocket. Unfortunately for him, the pocket was buttoned, and he slunk away with a disappointed look on his face.

Whatever had made Lindsay so ill overnight struck me, and I retired to a small café. Bilious waves of nausea hit me, and I was self-conceited no longer. Hoping to settle my stomach, I ordered a Fanta but received a Sprite. Feeling worse by the minute, I nursed my drink in the shade.

A lovely calm settled over me. After all, if I was going to be nauseous, where better than the shade of the verandah of a café in a small village in a remote corner of Ethiopia? I felt a prod at my leg
and opened my eyes just enough to see a young man with his hand out. Behind him were three more waiting to have their turn at me. I said, “No,” shook my head, closed my eyes, and refused to open them. For one older fellow, this was not sufficient hinting. Over the drone of market day, I could hear him talking to me in one of the ten dialects of the south Omotic language, but I refused to look. Then he started tapping my leg. When that didn’t work, he shook my leg. A lot. I opened my eyes, said “No!” as emphatically as I could without being too rude. Then I mimed vomiting, but it didn’t work, so I just went back to ignoring him.

Whatever trite little self-pitying thoughts I managed to accumulate were not allowed to last long. After an hour on a dusty, rutted track, we pulled into a small village near a dry riverbed. The road ahead was choked with a throng of about 200 people, all walking the same direction we were driving. My first impression was that we had found a funeral procession. Fortunately, I am often wrong. Unfortunately, this time I wasn’t. Hassen and Legese unrolled their windows to see what they could glean from the bits of language they shared with these people. They rolled the windows back up.

“Do we know what’s going on?” I asked.

“Death,” replied Legese. As we inched through the crowd, trying to make progress without being too disrespectful, I tried to learn a little more.

“Do we know anything about the person?”

“A woman,” said Legese.

At the head of the procession was a white pickup truck laden with crying mourners and, presumably, the deceased. The truck was surrounded by a church choir in robes. My stomach problems seemed pretty small.

A few hours on, we arrived at a beautiful shady campground bordering the Kaske River, a couple of kilometres from Turmi, the traditional home of the Hamer people. The river was bone dry, awaiting the start of the rainy season. Because the rains were due to begin at any moment, smarter tourists had all gone home and we had the campground to ourselves.

My intestinal tract finally showed its full ferocity, and I dashed off to the distant toilet. “Toilet” in this case is such a generous word, since the structure consisted of a hut around a hole in the ground. Correctly anticipating an eruption, I doffed my trousers and underpants and hung them over the wall of the hut. I was surprised by how long I could squat.

Knowing that it was only a matter of time before the peace at the other end of me was shattered, I sought out a quiet corner of the compound and wandered back and forth, sipping water and spitting, waiting for the inevitable. As I waited, the rainbow I had created with crayons as a child formed across the failing African sky.

And just as I started to vomit, I found that my secluded niche was actually on the path leading from a Hamer village to the river. A man walked by. “Hello!” he called out.

“Hellouuurrggggh,” I replied.

“How are you?”

“I am blluuurggggh fine,” I said. “How are you? RAHHUUURGGGH!”

“I am fine, thank you.”

“That is good. Harruuggggh!”

I spent the rest of the day and most of the night alternating between the pit and my vomiting area, dodging baboons and civet cats. The Hamer man was probably still telling the story of the crazy
faranji
a month later.

T
HE RAINS WERE OVERDUE
everywhere in Ethiopia. Trees and shrubs were doing their best to hold on to a bit of colour, but the groundcover had faded to grey. I could spot no eucalyptus. The cows and goats looked to be in for a pretty rough ride; so, too, would the pastoralists who depend absolutely on their stock. In the case of a famine, those people living closest to the road would likely get some relief from aid agencies, but those whose traditional lands were much further from roads would probably miss the aid, and many were likely to die. “Very sad,” said Legese.

We pulled into a village of the Elbore people. At first, it didn’t seem like much more than a couple of stick-and-grass huts and some goats under a shade tree. We rudely displaced the goats so that we could park our truck in their shade. Word spread quickly, and we were soon surrounded by fifty friendly villagers. Legese could speak the local language and so got a lot of attention, particularly since he had a pocketful of small bills. I had some money, but only in ridiculously large denominations that I had got at the airport. And that was fine, because I wanted to talk to the children, and they quickly accepted that I had neither cash nor candy for them. Girma, perhaps nine years old, wanted to trade watches with me. Mine read 9:07. His flashed 88:88. I think that mine was closer. His friend, Ali, perhaps six, wore a pendant made from a broken metal wristwatch strap.

I pulled out my notebook, which inexplicably caused half of the children to run away and the rest to retreat to a safe distance. I can’t imagine what they thought I was going to do. So I sat on a tree stump, ripped out a few pages, and started folding origami cranes, which has never once failed to get me the attention of young children. The cranes were well received, but it seemed that they would have been much happier if I had been handing out pens, although I cannot imagine why if paper frightens them.

Many hours later, we arrived at a Konso village above the town of Karat-Konso. A remarkably robust stone-and-wooden fence circled the compound. Inside, almost touching one another, were twelve circular huts with walls of sticks and mud a little over a metre high below soaring conical straw roofs. The compound immediately gave the impression of great age. We were given a tour by the hereditary chief, who had adopted the post when his father died at age 60. He in turn had adopted the post when his father had died at 100. I asked the chief to what his grandfather attributed his tremendous longevity. In impeccable English, the chief’s response was “Probably lineage. Other than my father, all of the men in my family lived very long lives. And probably to a life dedicated to prayer and contemplation rather than hard work.”

The Konso certainly knew how to work hard, scratching a living out of the terraced hillside, growing sorghum, beans, corn, and coffee. The chief showed us huts for communal cooking and for eating meals celebrating Christian religious festivals. One hut was set aside for resolving conflicts, and another for the detention of transgressors. A particularly chilling hut was the dwelling place of the grieving widow of a chief. She is meant to reside there for nine years and nine months after the chief’s death. I love my wife, but if she predeceases me, I plan to get on with my life.

T
HE FOLLOWING DAY
was about wildlife in overwhelming quantity and novelty. We had a very early breakfast to give us the best possible start on Nechisar National Park. If roads in Ethiopia are less about engineering and more about faith, then roads in Nechisar are more a state of paranoia and misguided optimism—narrow tracks on a steep and rocky path, with no guardrail to separate us from eternity. If it had rained any time recently, the roads would have been impassable.

The road, such as it was, rose through a forest as imagined by a child raised in inner-city Detroit. Lots of overstorey trees, not so tall as to be boastful, and not so dense as to choke out all the light for understorey vegetation. Warthogs peeked from between trees. Olive baboons dashed across the road, always trying to present their backsides to us, while duikers and velvet monkeys were pleased to stop and have a little look as we passed. Even at slow speed I couldn’t identify most of the birds that flitted past. Up and up we drove, and Hassen got big credit for not tipping us over one cliff or another.