“The first thing to know is that we’re one of only two African countries that have never been colonized by a European power,” he bellows. “The second is that we use a different calendar than the rest of the world. These two things alone will make Ethiopia feel like a completely different place from anywhere on earth.”
Atkelt is married to an American, and his understanding of a Western worldview helped him land this job as a translator and guide for Americans who come to visit. Even though his family has firmly settled in Addis, they travel to the States every few years to visit his wife’s family.
“Some say Italy colonized us during World War II, but it’s just not true,” Atkelt yells. “They occupied us here for a few years, but we kicked them out.”
Ethiopia remains the oldest still-thriving civilization in Africa, and one of the oldest on earth. Addis has its fair share of strip malls, but a few miles out of town feels otherworldly. Outside the windows, grasslands are dotted with stick huts, elderly shepherds draped in rough brown cloth traipse through fields with walking sticks, and camels—so many camels. Camels are at every intersection, poking along the shoulders of the main road with their unwieldy, knobby-kneed gait. We are so close geographically to Uganda and Kenya, to the African Great Lakes landscape of wild animals in pastureland, but Ethiopia sits as a crown in the Horn of Africa, soaked in Middle Eastern sensibilities. Because of its history of not (or barely) being colonized, it has a culture of its own, its own geography, its own climate.
The Ethiopian calendar is connected to Orthodox Christian history: Ethiopia uses the Julian calendar instead of the more conventional Gregorian one. This year, 2015, is 2008 here, and the Ethiopian day begins at sunrise, whenever that is, not 12:01 a.m. The first hour is around our six or seven in the morning.
I ask Atkelt if this adds confusion in his family’s life. He shrugs his shoulders. “Nah, not really. It’s mostly confusing for the visitors.” I wonder about specific opening and closing times of shops, how to know when your favorite show airs on TV, or when to arrive at the airport. There are no proper Western answers for these questions.
We’re here in Ethiopia for one specific reason. Actually, a specific little boy. Our family began sponsoring a few children after I traveled to the Philippines to write on behalf of Compassion International, and Abubeker is one of these kids. We figured this trip was the best chance we’d have at meeting him together, as a family.
Atkelt has worked with Compassion for years as a translator and guide, but he’s never been to Abubeker’s microscopic village, where Compassion runs a children’s center. There the village kids play after school, receive help with their homework, and find physical and spiritual nurturing. The center is a conduit through which sponsors can support local children, which ultimately results in supporting the child’s entire family. It is his family we are making the effort to visit.
Eight bruising hours later, we stop for the night at a hotel still an hour away (Abubeker’s village has no sleeping space for guests). There are three twin beds in our room for the five of us, and dinner in the hotel restaurant includes some sort of meat (chicken? goat?) and injera, Ethiopia’s national sourdough bread made of teff flour. Its spongy texture is moist, and it is fermented, tart. I nibble at it politely. We’re also slightly parched nutritionally from a lack of vegetables, since Atkelt has warned us not to eat any while we’re in Ethiopia (he says it takes a while to acclimate to the natural bacteria found on produce, and we aren’t going to be here long enough to bother). The next morning, we take cold showers in our rusty bathroom, eat cereal in the hotel restaurant, and hop back in the van.
In an hour, we pull up to the center. A crowd of children has gathered, holding signs and chanting a local welcome song. No sponsor has yet visited their village or center, so this entire community has come out and sees us not as Abubeker’s visitors, but as theirs. Young boys in soccer jerseys and dress shirts, teenage girls in their best dresses of vibrant yellows, pinks, and greens, all chant in unison and wait for us to open the van door. I see him there, in the middle of the crowd—I recognize him from years of photos sent to us. A pint-sized Abubeker holds a sign as big as him, shy smile and big brown eyes. He is seven, Reed’s age, yet he’s the size of Finn, our four-year-old.
The five of us are pulled by assorted hands through the courtyard and into a side office, where local volunteers wait, ready to serve us a traditional Ethiopian coffee ceremony with popcorn, the favorite local snack. Children’s photos are plastered on the concrete walls like wallpaper, with names, ages, and religions scribbled underneath. More than two hundred kids are part of this sponsor-driven community effort. I sip my coffee and visualize a map covered with thumbtacks scattered worldwide, pinned strings gathered at this village so small it doesn’t make local maps—Australians, Europeans, South Americans, North Americans, Asians, fellow Africans, all giving so that families in this little village have more to help their kids thrive. The concept is not foreign to me, but it blows my mind standing here. How many roads converge here?
“This center supplements food staples so families have enough food. Women also learn trades here so they can sell goods,” the center director explains as we munch popcorn. “We’ve got a fantastic algebra teacher in town, so he holds weekly math tutoring here. We’re growing quite a lot of math scholars.” The staff members laugh at this inside joke.
Tate, Reed, and Finn are summoned to play schoolyard games outside, so we swallow the last of our coffee and head outside. Abubeker plays on the swing set with Finn as if it’s after school and they’re having a play date. Reed plays duck-duck-goose with other boys, and Tate is surrounded by girls touching her hair and giggling at the sight of it. The English-Amharic barrier is unpassable, but everyone laughs, shouts, plays.
We say good-bye to the crowd of children, leave the community center, and give Abubeker a ride to his house. He sits next to Finn, and I admonish them both to stay seated, to stop horseplaying with each other in a moving vehicle. If there were seat belts, I’d tell them to buckle up. These boys are so much alike.