Losing Something in Ethiopia

LOSING SOMETHING IN ETHIOPIA

April, 1973

Author’s Note: 

I’d been traveling for nearly two years, an odd sort of odyssey, eastward across North Africa, through the Middle East, and was now on the final leg of my journey, southward toward my destination, Tanzania. I’d hitchhiked, taken trains, and lorries, and even bought a VW van I drove through the Middle East and sold in Beirut. Just before this story begins, I spent six weeks in Sudan, and, rather than continue southward into Uganda, where Idi Amin, an unpredictable tyrant ruled, I boarded a paddle-wheel boat from the southern town of Juba northward, before crossing over into Ethiopia. It was the only way to avoid Uganda. This story picks up at the Sudanese-Ethiopian border.   

After waiting three hours at the Ethiopian border with about twenty other people, a lorry arrived, headed to Gondar, hauling crates of empty beer bottles. The others clambered up the rickety ladder onto the lorry’s bed with their goats, chickens, and overflowing baskets of vegetables. I threw my backpack up onto the lorry and followed them. The entire mass of bottles and people was at least two feet higher than the top of the cab. We left around noon, empty bottles clanking and jiggling beneath us. The whole thing felt totally unstable, like a half-filled rubber raft sloshing over river rapids. 

Unlike the Sudanese desert I’d just left, the terrain was becoming mountainous. The sinuous road wound itself atop the crest, more perilous than anything I’d driven on since I was in Iran, driving my VW van. Although I began the ride with the others, sitting atop the swaying beer bottles, when I saw the condition of the road and the sheer drop-offs on either side, I felt so unsafe that I moved to the roof of the cab where I could grip the chrome railing two inches above the roof. Winding around each hairpin curve, I imagined the truck falling into the chasm below. I began making my escape plan—if it fell to the right, I’d jump to the left and if it fell to the left, I’d be off to the right. Probably neither option would have saved me. My heart was in my throat for most of the fifty-five-mile trip. The driver has probably driven this road hundreds of times, I thought, trying to calm myself. He needs to get those beer bottles to Gondar, because his paycheck depends on it. 

The dangerous ride couldn’t, however, distract me from my burbling intestines, which were giving me more and more trouble. I’d filled my water bottle at the border, but it was soon empty and I could tell I was getting dehydrated. After a few hours, I banged on the roof of the lorry to get the driver’s attention. He stopped, and I called down to him, “I need some water! Can we stop for some at the next village?” He didn’t answer, but when we came to a small clearing with a few houses around it, he stopped. I jumped down to find some water. The only water in the village, a slow-moving trickle of a murky stream, was as brown as beef broth. I was so dehydrated, I filled my bottle anyway. I wished I’d done that on the long boat ride down the Nile, when I was so thirsty that, on the last day of the trip, I drank the water before popping in an iodine tablet. This time, I waited for it to take effect before I drank it. Brown or not, I needed water.

 Around four in the afternoon, we came to Ouahni, a village so small it’s not on any map. The driver informed us we were stopping. “Night is coming,” he said, “There are bandits on the road ahead. We have to wait until morning to go farther.” I wasn’t convinced he was telling the truth, because as soon as we stopped he disappeared into the village bar. It was the first bar I’d seen in Ethiopia, and I hadn’t seen any in Muslim Sudan. 

I also went in, hoping to buy a soda or some form of clean, drinkable liquid. The room, with a low ceiling, was dark and smelled of bonfire smoke. Sing-song music in Amharic blared out of a radio, and four or five bored-looking women leaned on the bar, most likely prostitutes, I thought. Our driver had disappeared. He must have purchased one of the women for the night. 

“Coca-Cola?” I asked hopefully. 

“Here,” one of the women said coolly, sliding a bottle toward me across the bar. They all seemed so unfriendly that I didn’t wait to drink it in the bar, but scurried back outside. 

After I finished the Coke, I unrolled my grass mat next to the lorry and tried to get to sleep. I missed my wool poncho that I’d left on the train. By now it was probably warming some man or woman in eastern Sudan. I was up and down with the runs all night long, using a nearby tree as my general deposit area, grabbing leaves from plants growing around the base of the tree as make-do toilet paper, since my roll had run out before I reached the Sudan border. 

At one point my stomach was so bloated and gurgling that I loosened the strings of my money belt, where I’d stashed the $400 I received in Beirut for the sale of my van. On my last trip to the tree, it fell off, and I remember, in my stuporous state, saying, I’ve got to pick that up. Then that thought evaporated, I found more leaves, pulled up my pants and returned to my mat. 

 Soon after that visit to the dumping tree, around four a.m., the driver roused us—we would leave in five minutes. I rolled up my mat, heaved my backpack onto the many layers of beer bottles, and climbed on top of the cab. 

 We’d been driving about a half-hour when I realized my money belt was gone. At first panicked, I thought, Now you’ve done it. You drank Nile water without purifying it, you left your poncho on the train, and now you’ve lost $400. What’s going on?” Just after that thought, I noticed lights from an approaching lorry shining in our direction. I was so lost in my personal castigation that it didn’t occur to me to ask our driver to let me off so I could take the oncoming lorry back to Ouahni to retrieve my money belt. Maybe it’s for the better. Maybe my intestines need to get to Gondar more than I need that money. If I even make it to Gondar.

Then, a wave of what I can only call freedom washed over me. I was freed from the decision of when to go back to the States! After talking with Ayo, the nurse I’d met in Juba, Southern Sudan, I’d been wanting to work in Africa. Now I would have to work, to make enough money for a plane ticket home. Once I realized this, my mind began cranking out ideas of how and where to do that. I still wanted to go to Tanzania—maybe I could find a job there. Was it possible that my crafty unconscious had master-planned the whole loss, so I would have to stay in Africa? I felt absolutely buoyed by the thought of working somewhere in Africa, alternately joyful and terrified.

I burst out laughing. I’d spent over a week in Beirut, trying so hard to get a fair price for my VW van, not be gouged by those seasoned Arab negotiators. I hadn’t turned it into Traveler’s Checks because I wanted to use the dollars on Kenya’s black market. Now I’d lost it all. There must be a lesson in this. Maybe avarice was a vice I needed to let go of.

I began thinking about the money belt and its $400 contents. What might happen to it? Visions of different scenarios paraded through my mind. Who would find it? Would they know the value of U.S. dollars? The village was so poor, it was probably worth more than a year’s salary for four families. What would the finder do with the money? Would he take it to someone who might know its value? I doubted it would be thrown away without someone discovering its contents. I imagined someone taking it to a lorry driver passing through, who would certainly know its worth. The lorry driver would say it was worth much less than the actual value, would give the villager a few Ethiopian dollars, and pocket the U.S. dollars. Or, someone would find it and slyly make his way to Gondar or Addis Ababa to start a new life, with my $400 as a cushion. Or, the finder would take it to the head of the village, and they would build a new school or health clinic with the money—$400 would go a long way, in that part of Ethiopia. I liked that possibility the most. 

My fantasies helped me forget the fact that now I was nearly broke.

By morning we were about ten kilometers outside Gondar. The lorry stopped. The driver spoke in Amharic to the twenty or so people riding on top of the beer bottles, apparently telling them to get off the lorry. They obediently gathered their belongings and animals, climbed down, and then began filing across the field toward Gondar, their huge loads now resting on their heads, goats trailing behind. I was appalled. How can the driver treat these people so badly, and why did they so readily accept his treatment? 

When he called for me to get down, my U.S. sense of entitlement rose up inside me. “No!” I said. “I bought a ticket to Gondar, and I’m going to ride to Gondar.” I didn’t feel like an Ugly American, just someone who wasn’t going to be pushed around as the Ethiopians had been. Besides, by then I was so weak from dysentery that I probably wouldn’t have made it, walking. To my surprise, the driver agreed to take me the rest of the way. I rode on into Gondar and climbed down just before he reached the brewery.

I found a room in a cheap hotel easily and immediately went in search of a pharmacy, looking for something that would end the dysentery. When I told the pharmacist the problem, he handed me a small box of Entero-Vioform, an intestinal anti-amoebic drug. As soon as I left the pharmacy I took a pill and felt better within an hour. A few more days and my guts were back to normal. I was thrilled. It was such a “wonder drug,” why hadn’t I known about it when I was in the States or Europe? I asked around and learned the reason—some Dutch volunteers had taken the pills prophylactically to avoid getting dysentery and had gone blind. Once again I’d been lucky. Later I learned it had been banned in most industrialized countries, but, like so many other dangerous products, was dumped on the Third World. It’s hard to say who the lucky ones were, but I named myself as one.

* * *

Two months later, after traveling around Ethiopia and Kenya, I reached Tanzania, where I found a job. The year I spent in Tanzania, working throughout the country on a nutrition project, was far more valuable to me than the $400 I deposited under that tree in Ethiopia. I hoped whoever found the money had used it well.