For instance, Google some images of Ethiopia's main language, Amharic. Doesn't it look an awful lot like Elvish?
Also, in addition to the omnipresent, crepe-like injera bread, southern Ethiopia also has a very dense bread called qocho (made of the pounded starch of the "false banana plant"--don't ask me what that is, I don't know). A few bites of this bread could fill your stomach for a day...not unlike Tolkien's magical Elvish bread, lembas!
Finally, take a look at this image, which we found carved into one of the amazing rock-hewn churches (more about them later) in Lalibela, Ethiopia (which, btw, used to be called Roha--that's only one letter away from Rohan!). Anyway, is this not the very image of the EYE OF SAURON??
I could go on all day (Simien Mountains--sounds kind of like Silmarillion!), but I'll spare you. Instead, let's jump back into the story where Andy left off. I believe that our hero and heroine were boarding the bus to Shire, scratching at their innumerable flea bites.
Oh, wait, he didn't mention that part? Yes, well, in the town outside of Simien Mountains National Park, we finally encountered the infamous, bed-plaguing fleas of Ethiopia. We had been warned by other tourists that Ethiopia had a flea problem, but we'd been lucky up until that point. It turns out that a lot of hotel beds have jumping, biting fleas living inside (our advice: avoid the Simien Park Hotel--or at least its older, cheaper section--next time you are in Debark)...but so do carpets at many churches, and you have to take off your shoes to enter a church in Ethiopia. So even if you stay at super-clean places, you may well get some bites while touristing. Ugh. I itched for many, many days after our stay in that hotel.
Anyway, on the very long, very sweaty bus ride north, I was befriended by 7-year-old Aden, who spoke an impressive amount of English for someone so tiny. Lord knows why she wanted to sit in my lap (I smelled terrible), but quickly she was teaching me and Andy the names of barnyard animals we passed in Amharic and drilling us on numbers. Thanks to her, we can now count from 1 to 10 in Amharic! She will make a great teacher someday.We finally arrived in Shire after dark and, horrified by the thought of more fleas, shelled out $15 for a room at the swankiest hotel in town (usually we paid closer to $5 a night). Well-rested, we arrived the next day in Axum, the historically important city in Ethiopia's far north, near the Eritrea border.
One of Axum's main attractions is its collection of tombs and stellae, which date back to the time of Christ. Here we are inside one of the ancient kings' tombs.Unlike the storytelling or god-glorifying stellae you find at, say, old Mayan sites in the Americas, the stellae in Axum are more like enormous gravestones. This collapsed one would have been the biggest ever erected there, but it didn't stay upright long and has been lying in pieces for centuries in the main stellae field.
At the edge of town is this mouth of a tunnel which, legend has it, leads all the way to Eritrea. It hasn't been excavated yet, though. We suggest that archeologists hurry up on that one, since the official border with Eritrea is currently closed (stupid political problems!), so they'd be opening up a great possible new route...
And if you met these kids and saw how smart and vivacious they were, how much they are accomplishing at school and what their plans are for the future, you would just never believe that they were street children. You would not believe that some of them had been taken into the city and abandoned to fend for themselves because their parents couldn't afford to keep them in the village anymore. Or that the parent they were sleeping next to under a plastic sheet out on the pavement died one morning, leaving them orphaned. But somehow, they have survived, and the OCDA is doing crucial work supporting them and working with the community to keep more kids from turning to the streets. Amazingly, there are 60,000-100,000 children living on the streets of Addis Ababa alone...a staggering number.
You can read more about this organization, and make a donation online or find out how to by mail at www.theforsakenchildren.org/projects/childrens-home-ethiopia.org. The organization already has some income-generating projects (like a chicken farm!) in place and has plans to become financially independent within the next few years, but for now I am sure that they would appreciate any donation to keep things running. It does have a slight religious bent, but so do many such organizations in such a religious country as Ethiopia. Anyway, I really hope that you might decide to join me and Andy in supporting their work.
Here are some pics of us with the kids! This is at the drop-in center and girls' halfway house. The tall girl all the way on the right lives there--she 14 and top of her class in English. She is really obsessed with India and wants to go to university there...she spent most of our time talking to us about India and asking where we plan to go when we get there. We had to tell her that she surely knows more about destinations in India than we do!