Easter Monday Blues

It’s sometimes difficult to tell the difference between the Muslim call to prayer and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church priest singing through a big loud speaker. The Orthodox priest tends to be a bit more tuneful in a rather microtonal, Indian sort of way. However on Easter Monday morning at 5am as I slowly emerged from a deep sleep I could easily tell it was a Muslim call to prayer. Why it was so loud was a mystery – it felt like the loudspeaker was just over the Bingham perimeter wall – but had I needed to get up at that time for prayer it was certainly effective. Now I was awake. I groaned quietly (Chris was obviously still asleep) – not only did I have to go to work as per normal on a day that for every other year of my life was a public holiday, but now I was awake far too early. Fitful tossing and turning saw me through to the 6:30am alarm. More groaning. Up Chris sprang (she’s a lark, I’m an owl) and enthusiastically headed for the shower. Groggily I sat on the edge of the bed and absent mindedly scratched some of the eight insect bites on my legs; where did they come from? I anticipated the day. The Internet has been really bad for a couple of days but at least we have power and water. I struggle into the kitchen to get the coffee machine and kettle going.

Chris bounces into the kitchen. “Your turn!” she says, brightly, “We have water.” I stagger into the bathroom. I flush the toilet. To my enormous alarm the cistern empties dark brown mud into the toilet bowel.  Yuk! Now I’m awake. I turn on the cold tap on the sink. Dark brown water. I try the shower. Dark brown water. I go back to the kitchen to tell Chris brown mud is coming out of the plumbing and not to turn the kitchen tap on. “Oh dear!” she exclaims, and then adds in her infuriatingly positive way, “at least we have electricity!”

Then the lights went out.

Back to the bathroom to wash my hair in the half-light with a bucket of cold water from the (non-muddy) emergency supply, and a jug. As cold water completes the waking up process I idly wonder if there’s a pub anywhere in England called “The Jug and Bucket”.

Easter Monday hadn’t started at all well.

Fasika

There’s lots of things you wouldn’t want to be in Ethiopia, not least a sheep. Especially around certain public holidays and definitely not at Fasika (Easter). Haile my taxi driver once asked me “Phil, do you have any public holidays in England when you kill sheep?” I couldn’t immediately think of any, but at Easter we would certainly eat a dead one (several years younger than the ones they eat here). The central message of Easter is very easy to forget in the UK as you are surrounded by Easter bunnies, chocolate, hot cross buns, Simnel cakes and decorated eggs. Not so here. The central feature of Easter being the sacrifice of Jesus, the Lamb of God, is vividly brought to mind by the sale and slaughter of thousands of sheep, all over the city. Sadly for the sheep there is no resurrection, but the skins are put to good use and are on sale by the side of the road the next day. Sheep are fairly expensive, so less well-off people buy live chickens, often several at a time, and take them home alive and clucking so the man of the house can slaughter, pluck, and gut them ready for the ladies of the house to cook and turn into a quite delicious dish called “doro wat”. A good number of oxen also meet their doom at the same time, often after having caused traffic chaos by being driven on public city roads from market to their place of slaughter at the family home. Although as we were driving through the city a few days ago Chris spotted a group of guys hacking up a dead bull on the road. Literally - on the tarmac.

Fasika in Ethiopia is an intensely Christian and religious affair. Church is attended every day from Maundy Thursday through to Easter Monday – ending 55 days of fasting for many. People throng around the Orthodox churches swathed in white causing pedestrian and traffic chaos. On Palm Sunday strips of palm branches (no Sunday School paper imitations here - we have the real thing growing all over the place) are worn by all and sundry in a way that resembles the strapping used to hold a head-light in place. On Good Friday many will spend several hours at church repetitively bowing and prostrating themselves to exhaustion from “the sixth hour to the ninth hour” (see Mark 15:33) in memory of Jesus’ suffering. On Easter Sunday back to church they go to rejoice in celebration of the resurrection. It’s a noisy, happy (unless you’re a sheep), family-centred weekend and is the biggest and most celebrated event in the Ethiopian calendar. It’s been a joy and a privilege to be here to witness and take part in it. There’s a real meaning to Easter that the UK has largely sadly lost, in a flurry of egg-shaped chocolate.

Easter Sunday Lunch

For the second time since we have been here we were invited to Seble’s home for lunch. Seble does our housework three half days a week, and sometimes on Tuesdays does the catering for when we entertain guests. After attending her church and swathed in her lovely white traditional Ethiopian dress she came and collected us from Bingham and accompanied us on the 15 minute walk to her home. Her two children greeted us; Bezawit looking as pretty as a picture in her yellow dress with her hair in tiny plats. A chicken or two had no doubt met their end here, as the “doro wat” was exceptionally good. The unique-tasting traditionally brewed Ethiopian coffee took an hour or so from green bean to cup. There is a level of genuine hospitality and warmth of welcome here that, coming from one so poor to us who by any standard are very well off, is genuinely humbling and refocuses you onto what in life really matters. Family, friends, sharing, caring, and above all – Jesus.