God's Country

After five days of hotel hopping in Addis, I finally found God’s country. I awoke at 5:15 am on Friday, the Ethiopian day of fasting, to jet to the airport. I was going to go at the trip alone, but I met a nice travel companion during my hotel hopping and conference managing to accompany. We boarded an early morning flight from Addis, touching down in Gondar, and quickly kissing the sky again above Lalibela. I closed my eyes on the tarmac in Gondar for a quick power nap and awoke just below the clouds and just above the towering mountain-scape for which Lalibela is known. The Lalibela airport is just a pinprick in the infinite space of its surrounding universe. Two floors and three rooms, we easily saw our names written in red marker, held by the drivers sent to pick us up and drive us through mountains to the historic city of Lalibela.

The drive is 35 kilometers, but can feel a bit longer because of the winding mountain roads, and because of the pastoralists and their animals: unaccustomed to vehicles and the necessity to hop out of the way upon their approach. There in that van, I definitely felt like I was invading a sacred space, one in which people are still unified with nature under God’s sky. People who look to be 70, 80 years old climb the mountains with loads of timber strapped to their backs. Men with long sticks steer their oxen, goats and donkeys up the long mountain pass. They are often almost shirtless, threadbare, and seem unequipped without water and sometimes without shoes. The women wear their long syrongs and worn sandals. They look as if they have climbed the entire mountain range, or have been dropped straight from the sky, their sharp features and lean figures an ideal for tackling life here on Earth. 

I reference God, here, not because I am a Christian, but because a trip to Lalibela will make you want to believe. Lalibela is famous for its ancient churches, built in the 12^th Century by King Lalibela and his army of angels. With a small pick ax and chisel, along with his angels, it is said that the 11 churches were built in just 23 years. Today, this may not seem remarkable, but when you see the tools and feel the density of the rock underneath your feet, you could almost believe an army of angels was indeed present. Lalibela was created as a second Jerusalem. King Lalibela made the Holy Land a more convenient place of worship for his chosen people by moving it to Ethiopia.

The Ethiopians are true believers. They believe in willing their lives to chance under the promise that God will inevitably have their backs. They still have many children with little resources and walk for miles in the name of God with little food in their stomachs. They believe in priests that extricate demons. The most devout believe that by bathing a barren woman in a fertility bath, she could become the next Virgin Mary. Living among the luminous mountains, the eternal sun,  the dry mountain air, the rain that falls just enough to allow the crops to flourish, and the forgiving clouds that often leave a sliver of sky open to the wandering eye, it is no wonder these people are believers. Ethiopians, the most exquisitely and structurally beautiful people I have ever seen, are living in God’s country.

That day in Lalibela, as we trekked through the rock face caves and gullies which connect the 11 churches through the mountains, we walked among the most devout. We happened to arrive on the Day of Michael, one of many religious holidays on the Ethiopian Orthodox calendar. Thousands of Pilgrims had also arrived to worship, to pray, to chant and to sing. They had come from across Ethiopia to celebrate their saint, young and old, but mostly old. Their faces told stories, but their feet told many more. Some of the oldest wore sandals worn to the dirt, and some of the youngest, sneakers and socks.

They prayed and kissed the rock-face churches. They fell to the feet of Jesus, as he was depicted 900 years ago. Some of them, they walked hundreds of miles to stand and kneel on the old carpets that cover the rocky church floors. A priest sits all day in each church. My mind wandered to how the priest is filled, his thoughts and his journeys as he keeps watch and leads prayer. His mind must wander so differently from mine, as the concept of being sedentary for long stretches of time, in the name of God, is about as foreign as Lalibela itself.

Over five years since I had stepped outside the confines of North America, Lalibela did feel infinitely foreign. Only there for 24 hours, there was no time to adjust to uneven rock, the high altitude, the smell of open fire, the sound of chanting prayers. A pack of mating dogs kept me up all night and I awoke in nausea from my ambitious lunch that included raw jalapenos. Even God’s country is still developing.