8,149 Feet Above Sea Level

I’d like you to notice what’s not being said in this photograph. Photos can’t speak, after all. Look closely. Do you notice my arm wrapped nonchalantly around Daniel’s leg? There was nothing nonchalant about that maneuver, but posed portraits lie. Nearly crawling to that spot at Daniel’s feet, not daring to look over the edge, I gave an ultimatum: Daniel could have the spot closest to the cliff only if I could hold his leg down.

When our friends Joe (PCV in Bekoji) and Laura (his fiancée) came to visit for four days, we knew hiking Soloda Mountain was the best way to show off Adwa. The mountain was important in the Battle of Adwa with Italy in 1896, and halfway up there is an old tank, left from the war with Eritrea. Daniel and I hiked as far as the tank last year, then stopped when our guides-by-default (children who refused to shoo) shook their heads. “Is it possible?” we asked in Tigrigna. “Magadi yallan.” There is no road.

It was a two-hour hike that first time. So when Joe and Laura, still recovering from a strenuous hike in Lalibela, said they wouldn’t mind a relaxing visit, we said, “Great! We hiked Soloda in two hours.” Our memories deceived us (it was probably 3-4), and we had forgotten we didn’t go to the top. And when you have three guys on a hike, they’ll find a way to the top. 

The third guy was Gebre, a friend of our sitemate Lauren’s. It was his first time up the mountain, but he insisted we could do it in an hour. He also insisted on blazing up the rocks and plowing through the bushes in a straight line. Trails? Who needs trails?

Americans, that’s who. After maybe the fourth hour, when we’re all covered in thorn scratches, and after Laura coins the phrase “whackingbush,” (because it was the bushes who did the whacking, not us), Gebre announced flippantly, “I am not tired, by the way.”

Two teenagers who insisted on following us (they chose the wrong pack to follow that day), also demonstrated their lack of exhaustion by stopping ahead of us, playing music on their phones, then shaking their bodies to the likes of Gangnam Style, Billy Jean, and I Got A Feeling as they waited for us. We also caught them doing push-ups in their apparent boredom of stopping for breaks.

There was too much crawling on this “hike” to fairly call it a hike. Too much rock-climbing and clinging, and sliding down dirt and rocks because it was too dangerous to stand fully upright. No one counted how many prayers we whispered, but I’m guessing we’d have lost count. But we know they worked. This is rainy season, and while it rained the afternoon before, and rained the afternoon after, somehow this Wednesday had six consecutive dry hours. The black clouds rolled in just as we reached the main road, exhausted. Had it rained, had the clouds covered the mountain’s peak while we were up there, we may not have made it back down. It was scary and risky and slippery enough in the clear sky on dry ground. What’s worse: we all knew we were risking our lives while it was happening, but we didn’t know how to stop it. Once you’re up the mountain, you’ve got to come down. Somehow.

I knew we were in trouble when my husband admitted it. Coming back down from the glorious mountaintop (which, yes, was probably worth it), we made the mistake of following Gebre’s lead. You know, the guy who wanted to take it in a straight line. He did the same going down, as we roller-coastered on our bottoms, sending rocks and more rocks down on our predecessors as we plowed. “Wonder why I wanted to be last?” Lauren giggled, as she sent avalanches down on the rest of us. Joe tried undoing Gebre’s mistakes. “We’ve got to keep left, guys, keep going left. No, Gebre, we’re not going that way. See the tank down there? Left!” Coming up Joe had spotted sheer rock-face cliffs that he knew were to the right of the tank. And we were way right. Gebre had us rolling on our bums straight for the cliffs we couldn’t see. (Thank.God.for.Joe.)

So when my normally we’re going to be fine husband shook his head and said, “I don’t know about this; this isn’t good,” I knew I could start worrying.

We never really found an actual trail, going up or down. Unfortunately, we think we may have thwarted the reforestation efforts of Tigray in the process. There were times we were completely surrounded by thornbushes and new treelings that lined the mudslides through which we tried forcing passage. Hence the need to kick and break them hard with our Nikes to get anywhere. “I don’t feel bad,” Daniel said. “It’s us, or this tree.” When that’s the case, the tree’s coming down.

Highlights:

- Daniel sat immediately beside a scorpion on a rock, just missing it. It was the second of two Laura spotted.

- At some point, whimpering, I unzipped my pants, told Gebre to look away, and thought I’d have to strip down. Something had slipped down my baggy jeans and got stuck in the tight calve area. I shook my leg, begging Daniel to take off my shoe. I was convinced it was one of the several black worms we saw, or a scorpion. It was just a rock.

- Mom, did you hear me call from the cliffs, “I love you, Mom!” when a friend asked for final words?

In all this, at least we got to quote Sarah Palin, bless her heart. We were able to say, “I can see Eritrea from my house,” once we reached the top.

You be the judge. Was it worth it?

 

AHA Camp GLOW, a week in photos

One of Peace Corps’ most popular programs worldwide is the girl’s summer camp that goes by the acronym GLOW (girls lead our world). I wasn’t very excited about the program initially, but Danielle really wanted to do it, and there are so few volunteers this side of the mountains in Tigray that I felt obligated to help the others put it on. I’m really glad I did.

We spent the week in a dorm at Axum University with 7 Peace Corps Volunteers (3 from Axum, 1 from Hawzen, and 3 from Adwa), 8 Ethiopian counterparts mainly university students in the area, and 41 campers ranging from 11 to 15 years old.

Well, ideally they were 11 to 15. We found out quickly that many of the girls were lying about their ages. Maybe a nicer way to put it is that age is fluid here. When Danielle asked Tirhas, one of our older campers, her age, she thought about it for a few seconds screwed up her face and said, “Fifteen?” Two of our campers from Adwa—Luwam and Amleset—were sisters. Luwam, clearly the older sister, told us she was 12. Amleset told us she was 14.

These three girls said they were 11, but I’m guessing they were a bit younger. Sometimes they drove us crazy by running off from their group, turning on lights after bedtime, or obsessively asking to call their mothers. Sometimes they awed us with their cuteness. Grmawit, the girl on the far right, was a no-nonsense Tigrayan mother of four stuffed into a little girl’s body. On the last day of camp, she was using Danielle’s phone to call home and had to borrow it from me. Throughout the conversation she held the phone up to her ear to listen and then quickly flipped it parallel to the ground, the bottom of it resting just above her chin and shouted into it to talk to her mom. She reminded me of kids I worked with at summer camps in the states—strong willed, self assured, hilarious.

Of course, there were a host of things that were different from the camps I worked at in the states. The most notable differences were in the facilities.

As far as taste goes, the food wasn’t much worse (it was probably a bit better) than typical camp food cooked on a large-scale. For nearly every meal, we got a half roll of injera with a pool of lentils and a big roll of bread—plenty of food. It was also, apparently, plenty of bacteria. The last night, several of the girls were vomiting. One of the Axum volunteers Todd was immobilized for days afterwards with E. coli.

I learned after a while, that a good way to get a shy girl to speak up was to ask her if she thought the injera at camp was a little sour. Her eyes would get big; she would pantomime spitting the injera onto the floor; and then she’d invite you to her house, saying that the injera in Adwa or Hawzen or Axum town was delicious, sweet, beautiful—made only from pure white teff.

This photo stands alone in its demonstration of the difficulties of using the bathroom at Axum U. I will add, however, that Danielle saw, scrawled in marker above the fecal streaked walls of a latrine stall: “LERN FROM CAT. CLEEN OUR TOILET.” Danielle pointed out that it’s one of the few times you see a person encouraging other people to learn hygiene tips from the beasts.

For me the latrines were the second worse thing about Axum’s facilities. The bedbugs (combined with the fleas and the mosquitoes) were worse. The bedbug is The Terminator of pests. They can live for months without eating and at temperatures that would kill other bugs. Unlike fleas and mosquitoes, they don’t suck your blood. Instead, they poke a hole in you so that you bleed a bit, and then they eat your blood. You know you have bedbugs when your pajamas and sheets are covered in little spots of blood and your body is covered in lines of welts about twice the size of mosquito bites that recede and inflame over the course of several days before leaving. That is, unless you’re lucky like Danielle, who doesn’t react to bedbug or flea bites.

We don’t have any good photos of the bites that covered most of the volunteers. We do have this photo, though, of our clothes sitting out in the sun. When we got back home we quickly changed and put everything we took with us out in our yard or on our clotheslines to soak up the sun. Apparently, sustained direct sunlight is one of the few things bedbugs can’t stand.

Of course there weren’t only disappointing differences from camps in the states. There were also some nice surprises. One night when we were sending the girls to bed we saw Rosa (far left in the below photo) cleaning out the unspeakably dirty latrines. No one asked her to; she was just being helpful.

Also, about halfway through the week, the girls asked if we would let them do their laundry, so we had to carve out some time for the girls to wash (by hand of course) the few outfits they’d brought. One of the few girls who didn’t want to wash her clothes was Melat—whose grandmother came to campus earlier in the day and asked me and Danielle why Melat was so dirty.

Overall, I was surprised at how similar the camp was to camps in America. We began every day with Grassroots Soccer—a course Peace Corps put together for teaching HIV/AIDS through soccer. It turned out to be more HIV/AIDS and less soccer (kind of a bait-and-switch), but we gave them more time in the afternoon to play soccer or dribble and pass basketballs (sadly, there weren’t any hoops). The girls loved getting to play sports with quality balls. Kids here typically play with rolled up rags or cheap plastic balls that pop after a few hours of play. The girls used the soccer balls as basketballs, volleyballs, precious gems. They hoarded the soccer balls under their skirts, and attacked counselors or volunteers when we brought out the balls, begging for the chance to walk a ball from the dorm out to the fields.

Aside from the sports, we spent time working on arts and crafts. The girls used bleach to stencil words onto t-shirts, made food dehydrators (which would work better in dry season), and braided endless skeins of yarn into necklaces and bracelets.

We also tried to make the camp educational. Each volunteer, with the help of a translator, led at least one session about life skills (decision making, self-esteem, nutrition, etc.), and a few women from a local health center gave an address on puberty and basic reproductive health. At least, that’s what they told us they did; some of the questions Danielle and other female volunteers fielded from girls throughout the week suggested that the health center women could have done better. Several of these life skills lessons featured poster-making sessions, using pictures from magazines. Several of the posters, like Melat’s above, featured kittens. Somehow Ann Romney managed to make it into a number of collages as well.

Each night after a dinner of lentils and bacteria, we had a fun activity planned for the girls. One night we had a dance, another night the girls wanted to watch an Ethiopian soap opera. My favorite of these nighttime activities was a scavenger hunt Danielle and I planned.

The girls were split into teams according to their rooms, which were named after various famous Ethiopian women. Each group had a Peace Corps volunteer to help lead them through the hunt, and they had to complete tasks like taking pictures at various places on campus, answering questions having to do with camp, and unscrambling words in English. For one of the tasks they even got to light sparklers.

I was with the group Saba (named for the Queen of Sheba), and I realized that the girls were really getting into the hunt when they started stopping strangers on the street and asking them if they were history students because they needed help answering a question. With about one hour of the hunt left, the girls started running because they were worried about getting done on time. With thirty minutes left they broke into Tigrayan chants about Saba that seemed rehearsed. When we were the first team to break into the room at the end of the hunt, they broke into a screaming fit that went on—and grew with each other team that arrived—for about fifteen minutes. I had to leave the room, which was completely concrete and echoed like a cave, because the noise was too much.

It was fantastic to see the same girls who hide their faces when they are called on in class because they’re too shy to speak, run and scream their way through a campus packed with adults, many of them teachers and principals taking summer courses at the university.

On the last night we built a bonfire, ate s’mores, and then had a closing ceremony where the girls talked about what they learned at camp. Part way through the night one of the translators came up to Christine, the camp director, and said, “Some of the girls are crying.” By the end of the night, all of the girls were crying and hugging and exchanging phone numbers.

It was a camp.