January 7 is Christmas Day in Ethiopia.
Ethiopia was Christianized in the fourth century when a young man named Frumentius found himself shipwrecked on the on Ethiopian shores while on the way to India. Frumentius was taken to the Ethiopian palace of King Ella Amida eventually finding favour with the King as his personal secretary. Frumentius was granted freedom to share his faith and started several informal Christian communities in the northern region of Aksum. Eventually the young man returned to Egypt and requested the Egyptian Orthodox Bishop Athanasius send a bishop to Ethiopia to establish the church there. Athanasius in turn ordained Frumentius and sent him back to Ethiopia where he worked tirelessly as the first Bishop of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Frumentius is remembered fondly as Abuna Salama or, Bishop of Peace.
But Ethiopia has deeper memory than that. Legend remembers the Queen of Sheba as being an Ethiopian Queen who travelled to Palestine to meet King Solomon. While there, she was impregnated by Solomon and upon return to Ethiopia gave birth to Solomon’s son Menelik. At age twenty, Menelik returned to meet his father and according to tradition, Menelik asked his father for a replica of the Ark of the Covenant to take back to Ethiopia. Solomon granted his son his wish, but Menelik had other designs and somehow managed to swap the copy for the original and brought the actual Ark to Ethiopia where it remains under guard to this day. So, Ethiopia has deep Jewish roots as well. Emperors since eagerly boasted Solomonic lineage including Hailee Selassie who claimed to be the 225th direct decedent of King Solomon, son of David. There are still remote Ethiopian-Jewish communities of people called Falishas whose practice, through centuries of isolation, is almost unrecognizably Jewish. For those interested there is a great book about all this called: The Sign and the Seal by Graham Hancock. I’m about halfway into the book now and it is terribly interesting.
ANYWAY…back to our trip. We woke Sunday morning and had a leisurely breakfast in the hotel before 
walking the gorgeous grounds for a couple of hours. These were originally the grounds of Hailee Selassie’s palace. There were several wedding celebrations with exuberant dancing and singing spread out over the compound among the exotic trees, grasses and flowers. According to the doorman, there can be as many as sixty weddings a day here.
We went for lunch at Sam’s
house passing through the city witnessing the thousands of goats brought to the city to be bought and slaughtered (on the spot) for the Christmas festivities. We saw mounds of fresh bloody goat skins recently relieved of their inhabitants. Mmmm-mmm.
At Sam’s we had an orientation to the country and the week’s plans. It was also a good time to relax and get acquainted with each other. Heather read from Isaiah 58 which I’ve heard hundreds of times I’m sure but here, in the poorest country of the world, there was an weighty press to the words: “Why does your worship seem vacant? Why do I seem to not be listening? This is the fast (worship) I’m interested in – that you share your food with the hungry, invite the homeless poor into your homes, put clothes on the shivering ill-clad Do this and your lives will glow in the darkness, your shadowed lives will be bathed in sunlight. You’ll be a well-watered garden, a gurgling spring that never runs dry.” (my paraphrase)
Later in the week, Jim would mention a recently discovered stat that if everyone in the world were to live at North American standards, we would need the resources of three earths. Another stat that shocked me was that if your personal net worth exceeds $60,000 you are in the top 1% of the wealthiest people in the world. I don’t know many middle-aged Canadians who are not in this category. By contrast, in Ethiopia, the average person’s net worth is $60. It’s amazing how comfortable we are with these realities. And I know that no matter how disturbing this reality is for me here in Ethiopia, I know I’ll easily make my peace with it within a short time of being home.
We returned to the hotel for supper. This would be our first traditional Ethiopian meal – various vegetable and lentil dishes (some hot, some mild) served on a communal bed of greyish flat bread called Injera. Injera is a sourdough pancake made from a tiny grain called Tef which is pretty much unique to Ethiopia I believe. There are no utensils, one simply rips off a piece of bread and uses the bread to grab the various offerings in the center of the dish. If you run out, they bring a plate full of rolled Injera that resembles a tray of hot face cloths. This was all washed down with a honey mead called Tej –
a fermented sweet drink which tasted like yeast and sugar – not great, but interesting. It was all pretty good, the ambiance was fantastic and the company fine. We may have been less enthusiastic had we realized that every meal thereafter would be a variation of the same theme. As Larry T would later say, “Injera! Injera! Injera! …spam and Injera!” (-Monte Python reference…. you had to be there.)
We were in bed by 10pm – heads somewhat fuzzy from the combination of jet-lag and Tej. Sleep came quick but didn’t last long. Both Nanci and I woke up numerous times, eventually abandoning the attempt to sleep altogether spending a good bit of the night reading.
