Wake-up calls

Despite my requests for wake-up calls at the various hotels in which I was staying, which I carefully translated into Ethiopian time, which uses 12 hour intervals, I never received a single call.  But in fact, they were not needed.  In Ethiopia, there are many options for establishing the transition from night into day. The cock’s crow is one such option. Heralding the day, the crow often rings out before dawn, in anticipation, it seems, of sunlight. Next come donkey bellows. Soon thereafter come the dueling calls to prayer. I say dueling because it sometimes seems as though the muezzin and the priest are vying for first dibs to send their voices out to the faithful. The Ethiopian Orthodox Abba seems to win every time. He begins his calls at 430am, the first of seven for the day. By 5am, the muezzin begins his adhan.  If you are not awake by this point, you will be by 6am, when, thanks to the common use of transparent and gauzy curtains, the sun’s rays begin to trickle into your sleeping space.

On one particular morning, I arose before the rooster, the donkey, the Abba, the muezzin and the sun. I had my cell phone’s alarm to thank for my 4am awakening. Trudging into the dark morning, I greeted my colleague Mulugeta and climbed into the truck. As Mulugeta pulled away from the hotel and made his way down the main dirt road of the town, riddled with pot holes and freshly dug trenches, he waved to someone on the side of the road.  He slowed and motioned for me to roll down my window.  I greeted the smiling man who approached us as he and Mulugeta exchanged friendly greetings. “My brother” Mulugeta said as we drove off. We headed east, to Axum, said to house the Ark of the Covenant, and also the location of the plane that would take me back to Addis.

We rode mainly in silence.  We were both tired and my Tigrinya was limited to three words.  On occasion, we would motion to something and eke out a few words in the other person’s language. We saw camels that morning, more than I have ever seen in my life. They came in three groups on our one a half hour drive, with each group containing at least 30 head. They were on their way to market, and at USD1,000 a head, they were precious cargo. We also saw men and women on their way to church, to market and to their fields. The men carried their walking sticks, in typical Ethiopian fashion, on their shoulders-so that the sticks served more as an aid to better posture than in propelling them toward their destination. Bathed in swaths of gauzy cotton fabric typical of the pious in Ethiopia, they girded against the chill air as we sped by in the truck. We saw school children in uniforms heading to class: I couldn’t help but be reminded of the stories generations before us would tell about their mile long walks to school. At 630am and with an 8am call to class, these children’s walks were much longer than a mile each way. We saw Chinese construction crews: the juxtopositioning of Chinese characters and Ge’ez fidels on signs provided for me an oddly surprising example of the rapid and seemingly sudden reach of globalization.

But perhaps the most striking vision that morning was that of the sun. We drove into its ascent that morning, and I was ever aware of its increasing hold on the day. It highlighted all of what I have described thus far, but it too had its own place in the experience that morning. I felt like we were rushing to greet it, to welcome it, to bathe in its glow in some way. It felt inspiring to seemingly become closer to it as it cast its rays over the valleys and hollows of central Tigray province. It also seemed to signal my transition from 10 days off the grid as it were and my return to the reality of the modern age of information and communication technology. I kept my gaze fixed on the sun as it made its way over the horizon and headed to its zenith for the day, and bid my adieu to the peaceful, grounded experience of my time in Tigray.