Gondar

Gondar could not have been more different from Lalibela, but getting here was an experience in itself.  I prefer to fly from one place to another rather than spend hours driving, especially driving on bad roads.  My flight was scheduled for 12:45 but my driver picked me up at 9:30 for a thirty minute drive.  Really?  Two hours early for a short hop from a small airport with only a dozen passengers getting on the flight?  And it was the only flight during the three hours I spent at the airport - three hours because the plane  was half an hour late.  The flight to Gondar is forty five minutes, but there were thunderstorms there so the pilot wouldn’t land.  He went fifteen minutes further to Bahir Dar which was supposed to be the next stop.  I’ll be driving there tomorrow and leaving from there on Monday.  We waited on the ground for thirty minutes for the weather to change and finally flew back to Gondar.  I guess I could have driven here faster, but would I want to drive five hours on these godawful roads in a thundershower? I took a couple of pictures from the airplane to show the beautiful pattern of the fields.

Today is market day and tomorrow is New Year’s, so as we were driving out of Lalibela, we passed a constant stream of people walking to the market, many bringing their goats to sell for the feast tomorrow.  The flow of people went on for miles.

I could see from the air how big Gondor is.  It turns out to be a large city of 400,000 people with paved roads!  There are two story houses and five story apartment buildings with satellite dishes.  There is a real downtown area with shops and restaurants, city buses (well actually, city vans), and even a handful of private cars.   Some things are the same; we drove by a small market where people were selling goats for the feast tomorrow.

It was after 3:00 when I got here so my new guide, Belete, took me to the main attraction of Gondor:  a six palace complex.  Gondor was the capital of Ethiopia from 1632 to 1850 or thereabouts.  The first king was Fasilides, called simply Fasil, an easier name for me to remember since facil means easy in Spanish.  First we stopped at the fifty meter swimming pool that Fasil built in 1636.  It is quite impressive.  In the middle of the pool is a church.  The big festival here is the Annunciation on January 19.  For two days before, they bring the Ark of the Covenant replicas from five other churches, and have a colorful procession carrying them into the church.  Then the priests stand all around the swimming pool chanting, and finally the head priest blesses the water in the pool, turning it into holy water.  That is the signal for everyone to jump into the water.

Next we went to the castle complex.  I was surprised because it looked just like a British castle.  I didn’t expect to see that here.  Was there a European influence here or did the Ethiopians independently develop the same type of achitecture?  It turns out that my assumptions about “the dark continent” unseen by Europeans until Stanley wandered around are completely wrong.  A handful of Westerners came here; the first was a Portuguese in the mid-fifteenth century, followed by a lot more Portuguese and Spaniards.  Needless to say, the Jesuits showed up.  But the Ethiopians themselves went back and forth to Jerusalem and they are not that far from the Red Sea.  They must have seen Crusader fortresses in the Holy Land.  They also had to fight minor skirmishes with the Moslems as they spread across Africa.  But, my guide told me, Ethiopia harbored Mohammed’s wife and daughters when they were persecuted in Arabia, so when he came to power, Mohammed ordered his officers never to invade Ethiopia.  Perhaps that is why today Ethiopia remains such a Christian country.

On top of one of the tallest hills in Gondar (and Gondar is a very hilly city at an elevation of more than 6,000 feet) Fasil build an impressive three story castle.  His son, Yohannes, was a musician.  He built a smaller castle with two rooms, one for chanting and one for dancing.  Yohannes’ son, Isayu, built a roman style bath house for his castle.  His son, Dawit, built another impressive fortress type castle.  Then, Dawit’s son, Bekafa, built a one room castle - a 400 foot dining room.  Bekafa died young and his 8 year old son, Yohannes II, became the king, so his mother, Mentwab, served as regent and built another castle and a building for teaching weaving and other skills to women.  Yohannes II was assassinated leaving a young son, so his grandmother, Mentwab, continued to rule until the grandson, too, was assassinated and she gave up.  She moved to an adjoining hill, built some new castles, and lived out her life privately.  The country fell into an eighty year period of fighting warlords, until finally one united Ethiopia and moved the capital to Addis Ababa.

The guides here tend to speak mediocre English and don’t always understand my questions.  I thought that Belete was the best guide I have had.  He has a university degree in history, seemed to understand me completely, and gave me good explanations.  Were they accurate?  Who knows?  If I understood him correctly, Ethiopia had its own religious wars like those that went on in Europe for a century, but they condensed them to ten years here.  The Portuguese came to “help” the king before Fasil, but insisted that he convert to Catholicism.  At one point, the king did and he made Catholicism the national religion.  After ten years of fighting, he was forced to abdicate.  Fasil and his son expelled all the Europeans and reestablished Ethiopian Orthodoxy.  Eventually, even the deposed king reconverted to Ethiopian Orthodoxy.

My hotel is in the downtown area so after a traditional dinner, I went for a little walk.  Most people say hello to me but within minutes a young man started walking with me.  I told him I just wanted to stroll by myself, but he insisted on staying near me.  Not too near at first, so another young man started talking to me.  Then the two argued in Amharic and the second man said goodbye and walked off.  Hmmmm…

Here is how every single conversation with these young men goes:

Where from?  America

Obama.  

What your name?

First time in Ethiopia (or Lalibela or Gondar)?

You like?

Then they might continue with:  what your job or you have children?

Even the people who don’t walk with me all ask me as I walk by, where from?  It is always young men who approach me, but ninety percent of the people walking or just hanging out are young men.  There are some couples, but very few girls alone, and they walk purposefully, going somewhere.  The men are just walking aimlessly, so once they start talking to me, they will go wherever I do.  I asked my guide about this today when he walked me downtown and he said he had never noticed that the vast majority of the people of the people on the streets are male.

I started talking to the young man tonight.  He is twenty four, studying electrity (electrician?  electrical engineer?) at college and lives at home with his mother.  He was disappointed when I said I was leaving tomorrow because he wanted to bring his mother to meet me.  Really?  After talking for ten minutes?  Am I a target or does everyone just want to talk English to an American?  I’m feeling moderately guilty for not buying a goat for Solomon’s family.  So it was a scam.  He’s not Bernie Madoff making obscene profits.  He can make more from me than hundreds of shoe shines so it seems like a good business strategy on his part, but he’s still poor and just trying to make a few birr every day.  Am I encouraging him if I give him money?  Can they afford a goat for New Year’s tomorrow?  I would not even have noticed the few dollars.  Besides, no one has ever asked me to buy a goat before.

I have just had a very quick real life lesson in the problems of philanthropy in a poor country.  Where do you start?  Where do you stop?