Travelogue 617 – May 10
The Meuse
Part One

By the vineyards, by the orchards. It’s noontime, and the air is thick with moisture. Not a breath to be had.

I’m nearly halfway through the distance. I’m making good time. Maybe it’s the heat. I feel a flutter in my breast, and I am having trouble accessing catching my breath. I drop the pace, just for a moment. But it’s enough. Enough both to regain my breath and also to break the rhythm I’d built toward my best time.

Maybe it’s the heat, maybe it’s just the leeftijd. Don’t forget your age, the body says. You don’t escape that, despite the exhilaration of the race. Each moment of life comes tagged with time and context, like hidden code. Yes, the body says, you have done well in adapting these muscles to the sport. And yet, there is the ageing heart. There are the lungs made tired from years of pollution in Addis Ababa, years of recurring asthmas and bronchitis.

I’m a long-distance runner. (We weave our sub-plots. We rebel against the imperatives of narrative. Diverting as they are, there is no escape.)

My readers will pardon my use of the Dutch word for age above. The mind wants to produce the funnest word for the moment. And Dutch provides many fun words, if only for the ringing sound of them, like cute, hearth-side innovations. It’s a perfect little word for age, leeftijd, a time of life. The Dutch have assembled words this way, well before the first local grammarians could have frowned at the practice, and so it is that in the twenty-first century we still communicate with words conceived from an almost childlike instinct. So it is you can listen to everyday language like a song, in any tongue, closing your eyes, setting aside all the signals of the cynicism of the age, and you hear the vestiges of a heart-breaking innocence.

So the leeftijd has its say, and I say that’s fair enough. Running is such a mental sport, I forget once in a while that the body has its part, has its price to pay for the activity. I chop up the steps, slow it down, recover equilibrium, and then resume as best I can.

By the garden, over the cobblestone. We are going to cross the river again. I can see the bobbing coloured running jerseys on the bridge ahead.

The river is the Meuse. The River Meuse runs placidly along through this pretty country, made so green by the spring. It flows placidly through the little town of Visé in Belgium. It’s a town of less than twenty thousand, small jewel of Wallonia, a place with two little avenues running parallel to the river for a mile or two, the Rue College set with quaint brick and chain retail outlets, set with bistros and brasseries. At the southern end of the rue stands the modern reconstruction of the very old church of Saint Hadelin, built first, according to tradition, from a benefice granted by a daughter of Charlemagne. Saint Hadelin had been one of a corps of missionaries converting the Belgians, not much earlier than old Charlemagne himself.

The crowd of runners is thinning out. We form a trail along the country road, leading by small orchards and past the small houses of the families who tend them. We share the road with cyclists, easing by, and with nervous motorists. We are heading north toward the Dutch border.

Travelogue 616 – May 1
West

Just one kilometre can make the difference. We’re further from the centrum now, and I suddenly there is more drag on the bicycle. I get up in the morning, and I don’t feel the energy to ride in as far as the central station for my first coffee. I do like starting early, and I like starting with some exercise, travelling to my espresso. But how far?

Today I try going further west, toward Schiedam, instead of east into town. Schiedam is a satellite town, the first of a series that follows the Maas toward the sea, toward the Hoek van Holland, or the Corner of Holland, that jutting lip of land that identifies the coast of South Holland.

I had never thought much of Schiedam. It’s a train stop on the way to Delft and Den Haag. But now it’s so close. It’s really only a smooth and straight ride along one bike path beside one road, passing the endless ports on the left, and quiet little blocks of flats on the other. Suddenly I’m in Schiedam Central.

It’s early, and only a few wall-eyed pubs are open, a few dazed men sitting out front with coffee. I stay on the bike, and wander among the alleyways of the town. I discover that it’s not the blank suburb I assumed it was. It has history and character, founded around the same time as Rotterdam.

I take a turn along a curving alley, laid in cobblestone and describing an arc circling around to the station, running parallel to a pretty canal. It passes church and museum, old city hall and eventually the basilica. All of these are signs of venerable age, signs of Schiedam’s success over the centuries as port on the dammed Schie, and later as center of production of sacred genever, gin of the Dutch. It becomes known as place of high windmills, only because men must build high to clear the genever distilleries and warehouses.

Still, circling all the way back to where I started, I don’t see a café. I enter the ‘Passage’, a shabby indoor mall, furnished with all manner of convenient shops. There’s a bakery but the bakery has no tables or chairs. I end up having breakfast in the cafeteria of the Hema store. Hema is a chain of department stores, perhaps analogous to Target in the U.S. My breakfast costs one euro seventy-five, and I listen to the store mix of inoffensive music, interspersed with their advertisements, always preceded by their little whistling jingle, an insidiously invasive sample that corrodes thought with surprising efficiency. I sit at one table among many, nearly all occupied at this hour, by elderly locals and working moms with their kids.

Back in my own neighbourhood, I stop at an Arab bakery. I’ve become fairly knowledgeable, and fairly quickly, about the map of these bakeries in the area. Menna and I have developed a taste for baklava, and there are many varieties to try. The Turks and Arabs are thick on the ground in Rotterdam West, and there are plenty of options to choose from. There are blocks whole and long sections of road that sound and smell like the Middle East. I stand in line with men just leaving the mosque, bearded and robed and chatting happily in some language far from Dutch. I point to my choices behind the display case so the woman in her dark head scarf can package them up for me. I will put them delicately in the backpack for transport back to the house. We’ll have a snack tonight.

Travelogue 615 – April 27
King’s Day

‘Happy Holiday!’ I bid Jelle the barista. The café staff is overwhelmed by a mid-morning rush, and Jelle is looking grouchy. ‘Happy?’ he replies. ‘Are you happy?’

I tell him I am. I tell him I’m happy because my wife is happy. There is a King’s Day tradition called vrijmarkt, which allows the good citizens of the city to set up stalls to sell their second-hand goods in squares throughout town. We’ve been shopping early. We’ve found a few nice chachkas for the new flat. I’m happy because the rise of a bitter wind cut short our shopping expedition.

‘It’s too happy,’ Jelle complains about the holiday. He apparently finds it a bit galling. Too sentimental. Or maybe he just resents the intensity of the traffic at the café counter.

But it is a happy holiday, after all. The city center is bustling with smiling families. Many are wearing orange, carrying orange balloons, sporting orange cowboy hats and blown-up orange crowns and over-sized, plastic orange sunglasses.

The Dutch Republic, one of the earliest republics in Europe, celebrates its king. It’s an odd story, the story of the republic that chose to become a monarchy, and that in the aftermath of a long occupation by the Emperor of the French.

But the house of Oranje had always cast a long shadow over Holland, since William the Silent led the old provinces into revolt against Spain in the sixteenth century. A special place was crafted for his descendants, adapted from a medieval feudal role, called the stadtholder, and this became a sort of monarchy.

James Madison had a few words to say about the odd republic built around this collection of rebellious provinces that made up the Low Countries, held in uneasy union by the Stadtholder. It took a drunken boy on the train to remind me that the American Madison had written about Holland. But, however the drunken boy remembered Madison’s words, they weren’t approving. In his Federalist Paper No. 20, Madison described a state mired in ‘discord among the provinces,’ and even ‘imbecility in the Government’.

But it’s often forgotten that, by Madison’s writing, and pre-dating France’s spectacular revolution, the Dutch had already begun a rebellion of their own against the stale rule of the Stadtholder. This rebellion became known as the Batavian Revolution, and the rebels as the Patriots. The struggle was only resolved by the French, who marched in in 1795, and helped to declare the Batavian Republic.

The House of Oranje waited out the storm in London. When the new European order was put in place, two hundred years ago this year, the son of the old Stadtholder became the new king, Willem I, direct antecedent to the present king, Willem-Alexander.

‘Too happy,’ grouses the busy barista. Yes, it does seem as though those two hundred years have eased some of the ‘discord among the provinces’. The children wear orange and proudly they march around the café, shouting their acclaim for the republic and its king.

Travelogue 614 – April 23
What the Medicine Says

‘Read your medicine!’ he insists as he stands to exit. He has been sitting across from me since the Den Haag station, focusing his innocent blue eyes on the stranger. The drunken boy has become innocent again in his revels.

I’m returning home on the train from an evening in Den Haag, and it’s late. The trains in Holland become rather like a moving carnival, people weaving about and singing, shouting to each other in sudden camaraderie.

There are three of them, and they occupy the three seats around me with a rush of boozy air. ‘How are you, sir? Where are you from?’

I fold the newspaper and stow it. ‘Minnesota,’ I reply, and I let them struggle with that for a minute or two. They resolve this mystery in each their different way. Blue eyes just nods and repeats. The hefty boy next to me tells me he loves New York. And the third stares, and finally returns to his demand that I love Feyenoord. I tell him I’m for Sparta. I don’t tell them it’s because my new house is a few blocks from the Sparta stadium. Whatever my reason, they cheer.

‘Where are you from?’ I ask. None of them are from Rotterdam. They are from Arnhem, Breda, and Leiden. ‘Arnhem?’ I’m going to challenge the leader of the pack, the one with the innocent blue eyes. ‘That’s not even Holland. You’re German.’

‘No!’ he protests. The others laugh at him. ‘And you,’ I continue, ‘from Breda. You’re just a Belgian!’ He is the farthest gone of the three, the one who was shouting for Feyenoord. He stares at me with wide eyes that he is having trouble focusing. He will compose sputtering denials for me when he pulls himself together.

‘And here is the true Nederlander,’ I say, smacking the back of the young man from Leiden. He’s the quiet one, sitting beside me. He’s the one looking like a thug, in contrast to the others’ choir-boy-gone-bad style. Suddenly he’s soft-spoken, almost urbane. He starts to explain how his accent is so different from that of the other boys, a rather arcane claim for heritage, but I’ll listen.

Leiden is quickly drowned out by the others. No, I say, trying to shush Breda, you don’t get to root for Feyenoord. You’re closer to Eindhoven, where the local team, PSV, is in any case outperforming Feyenoord. ‘No, no, no!’ he shouts. What’s so bad about PSV? ‘I don’t like them. They’re arrogant,’ he replies. It’s what they have already said about Ajax, Amsterdam’s team. All the good teams are arrogant.

Blue eyes is going to defend Arnhem. But they have run out of time. They are getting off the train in Delft. Delft is a big university town, but somehow I don’t think this is an academic visit. Blue eyes makes one point as he goes. ‘Read medicine!’ he insists. ‘Read medicine!’

‘Medicine?’

‘Your father. Your founder.’

‘Oh, Madison. My father, James Madison. …Really?’

‘He wrote about Arnhem. He loved the republic.’ And the boys are gone.

The republic of Arnhem? I’m stunned, and intrigued. How mysterious the mind of drunken college boys. I try to follow this lead, to read my medicine, but the only reference I’m able to find at this short notice is a relatively uncomplimentary essay about the Dutch republic among the Federalist Papers, written in 1787, written on the eve of the revolution in France that would destroy the republic. And no mention is made in the essay to Arnhem at all.

Well, so it goes with fathers. We cling to their spare words, exaggerating the hint of praise inside them, making them in our memory into personal encomia to share with strangers on the train.

Cheers, boys. And long live the Republic!

Travelogue 613 – April 17
The Strength of Suns

The afternoon verges on evening, and the Locus Publicus is positioned fortunately on the Oostzeedijk, its streetside window turned just the perfect degree west, so that while I sit at my table I feel its touch on my shoulder. Sometimes it seems like this might be the real narrative to my life, the thread that connects moments in the sun.

Jamie and I are talking about suns, but just for a moment. We never talk about anything for more than a moment. To do so would be a disservice to the seriousness of God’s creation. We have been discussing movies, and the films for the moment are ‘Interstellar’ and ‘Sunshine’. We have been analysing the physics in each story, the terrible power of gravity in suns dead and alive. In Interstellar, the hero must survive a descent into a black hole. In Sunshine, setting a bomb off inside the sun should save it. Each movie tries to evoke a sort of mysticism from the experience of deep space. ‘Sunshine’ was probably the more successful, weaving a scary spell around the light of the sun and gravity at close quarters.

With surprising perspicacity, Jamie and I demonstrate that the science in the films is faulty. How much more impressive is this show of intellect, I’m thinking, when neither of us has studied physics.

We move on to the coming premiere of the new Avengers film. Though we must speak about it with some reverence, Jamie does feel he must set the record straight on how the characterizations diverge from those in the comic books. And I must make sure that the pub realizes that, though the Avengers movies are fine creations, they will never measure up to anything by Christopher Nolan.

These pressing matters settled, we are free to open the beer apps on our phones, and log our choices. I have chosen British beers for the night, perhaps in tribute to Jamie, who hails from Bath, one of my favourite places on this sunny globe. Sadly, I have to assign poor marks to tonight’s choices. While I like British ales and American IPAs, it would seem that British IPAs are not going to be the right compromise.

The Locus Publicus is a bar proud of its beer selection, in the hundreds. Last time, I devoted myself to Belgian blondes and triples, and I was well pleased. The pub is small enough that they could probably line the walls with the menu in bottles. Instead, we are presented with a variety of blackboards, beers listed in a baffling sort of order that began as alphabetical, muddled by erasures and additions, new As and Bs appearing among the Ms.

Above the working area of the bar, there are scenes in ceramic tile that are very Dutch, farmyard scenes painted in a cheerful, glossy style onto large panels made of palm-sized square tiles.

The beer app has stalled, as it so often does. Jamie’s does, as well, and he tosses the phone onto the table. We are left with only the real beers. Last time we were able use the apps to research the beers, find provenance and family, find recommendations for the next round.

Sandra and Wouter show up just as we are resorting to ‘Game of Thrones’ for conversation, talk of the Imp, and so forth. Wouter is Dutch and Sandra is French, and they conduct their relationship in English. I find that amazing, and certainly a sign of the times. I’m sure that would never have been the case before, even thirty years ago. The thought of this language play makes me recommit to my language study. All sorts of wonderful things are possible in this world, all sorts of wonderful ways to misunderstand one another, and all in the name of culture. The two are a study in stereotype, Wouter laconic and literal-minded, Sandra vibrant and laughing.

Sandra tells how their first fight was over a night out, and the misconstrued meaning of ‘night out’. He took her to a pub, and she didn’t talk to him for a week.

We play guess the baby’s name. Sandra will not give up, after I have told them that we have chosen a French name. There are a lot of French names, we realize, and most of them have English cognates, which we have to explore. Finally I have to go, mystery unsolved. I won’t tell them; it feels like a jinx.

It takes longer to cycle home from city center than it used to. The sun is still up, though angling for its exit, radiant just above the horizon. I am heading more or less west, following the long curve of the River Maas, past my old neighbourhood, Delfhaven, and out toward Schiedam, aiming for the three square buildings that standing alone as road signs toward Marconiplein, the western edge of Rotterdam, where our apartment complex stands. I’m speeding along with great enthusiasm. It’s a perfect spring evening.

Travelogue 612 – April 12
A Song of Comfort

The little angel is dressed in white. Still he doesn’t mind lying full-length on the floor. He’s searching for his car under the sofa.

The little angel is dressed all in white because today is Easter in the Orthodox calendar. It’s traditional garb, silky little shirt with sash and straight-legged slacks. He somehow keeps it all clean, despite slithering across the floor. It’s a testament to his mother, no doubt, pregnant with an angel’s brother and still industrious.

His name is Rufael. He’s named after an angel. Angels are made to work, and he has a lot to accomplish today. He needs to stamp in place for a while, watching his bare feet strike the panelling of the floor. He needs to run up and down the passage outdoors and watch his shadow as he’s running. He needs to explain to guests exactly who Dusty the airplane is and what he can do. He’s got to fish the red car out from beneath the sofa.

It’s a special day. He’s in his whites. His mother has put on traditional dress, and she makes coffee for guests. People are stopping by. There is doro wot, the holiday dish in Ethiopian homes.

This is how the holiday goes. I have seen a few more than Rufael has. I know the drill. We will gather in front of the television, where Ethiopian music videos are looping. Conversation spirals round a few familiar topics: where to shop and how much to pay. There are a few new topics, such as how to treat the aches and pains of pregnancy, and what the big day, the day of delivery, will look like. Rufael is expecting a brother about the time that we are expecting our little girl. He tries to look up his mommy’s dress when they talk about his brother. Then he lifts her hair and searches into her ear. Where is he?

This little family communicates in three languages, blending them continuously, shifting mid-sentence, one language feeding the right word when the others fail. ‘Opstaan, Rufi. Na. Come here.’

All this I’m used to. The kaleidoscope of languages, the chatter, and the food. I’m used to the full and over-full feeling after the huge meal, and the sleepiness. I’m used to the collapse into sofa cushions while the coffee is being prepared. On TV, well-fed Ethiopians dance on American streets. ‘This one,’ daddy tells me. ‘He is famous now.’ This dancer and his colleagues have already appeared in a few videos this afternoon, videos for very different singers, singers from diverging styles and different generations. But there they are again, lined up and smiling on sunny American lawns. The famous one is sincerely happy. He moves with perfect assurance, sinuous and muscular. And he smiles as if he sees you. ‘Have a good holiday,’ he says with a wink.

We share a secret, don’t we, famous one? The secret must emerge cathartically, during the meal. ‘Things are getting worse.’ I have to nod in affirmation. I’ve seen it myself. Things are becoming even harder for their countrymen back home, for the countrymen of Rufael’s family, for the countrymen of the dancers. I see it more often than they do.

Daddy attempts to draw a picture of it, how, emerging from a restaurant where altogether your bill amounts to over a thousand birr, emerging after a long meal and many beers, you are confronted by a gauntlet of boys begging, boys who have not ten birr between them, boys who sleep in the streets. He tells us emphatically, urging its truth. There is a horror to it, a sentiment alloyed with shame and fear. Are we not here, a shudder of panic, are we not here at this Easter table? Touch wood. Steady oneself at the table.

Rufael doesn’t find any of this frightening. This is his home. And Rufael is his name. He will bear the name of his angel. He will carry it forward through a lifetime of stamping on floorboards, laughing about it.

Travelogue 611 – April 10
An Easter Song

From a distance, the map of the apartment compound seems to spell ‘HE’ in merged block letters. The map is printed on little tin plaques that are hung on the yellow brick walls at several corners, and in the stairwells.

We moved into a new apartment this week. It’s been a lot of work. We have no car. Until the day a friend shows up with a van, I’m carrying duffel bags on my bicycle. It’s not too far from the old place, thankfully. We have no furniture, so the great shopping spree begins. Menna is having fun.

Everything becomes the move. It’s an occupation. Other things sink into a haze of weary confusion.

I call to Ethiopia this morning. I’m talking business with Yenebeb, even though I hear the baby in the background. He says, in his mild way, ‘Okay, okay.’ And then, ‘You know today is a holiday, right?’ Oh, is that right? I had retained in a vague and detached way that Orthodox Easter was this weekend. But then there are the extras. There is Good Friday. ‘I’m sorry, Yenebeb. I can’t keep track of all these Christian … things. I’ll talk to you Tuesday.’

I’m locking the apartment door, and I’m turning to walk along the outdoor walkway encircling our courtyard. I spot the sign across the enclosed space, on the wall opposite. ‘HE.’

It’s a beautiful day for a remembered crucifixion. Spring has arrived in a glorious way, the sun breaking through and lighting the past two days as though he were thinking of summer in Spain. Spirits are high in the streets.

We love the new flat, four rooms in the top two floors of the four-storey complex. The building is a renovated beauty from 1922, a complex built as worker’s quarters. It’s a solid, modestly art deco complex of yellow brick, set with quiet squares inside with lawns and places to sit.

Ours is a sunny flat, big windows allowing sunlight in one side in the morning and in the other in the afternoon. There’s a big window in the bathroom that lights my face as I stand at the mirror. I am suddenly confronted with all that was hidden in the former flat, which was lower to the ground and full of shadows. I see the fine wrinkles that have spread across my face. I see the grey that has spread among my hair. And these are only the most flattering developments in the intervening years at old Buytewechstraat.

It occurs to me that Jesus never had this pleasure, the very refined torture applied by Time, the experience of watching oneself decay. What must it be to be whole in the moment of death? Does one protest? ‘But I am beautiful. I am strong.’

Having served some years past my prime, I wonder what a person is, what a biography is, without the losses.

But it’s a time for celebration. It’s spring, and we have moved into a new place. I turn from the mirror. I massage the muscles that ache from the continual, domestic labours, supervised by the woman of the house. She has surprising stores of energy for this undertaking, carrying baby and willing to carry more. ‘Put that down,’ I say, and then it’s on me.

Travelogue 610 – April 5
Spring Song

There’s a boy standing in the doorway of the flat. The doorway opens directly onto the pavement, some three meters of flagstone to the bike path. I’m passing on my bicycle. The sound is surprising, like a wheezing engine, like a carnival. The boy is blowing on his harmonica.

The two of turn to look, two men on bikes. The other has just started out from his own flat. He is wobbling along the flagstones. As he brings the old bikes thumping over the kerb and into the bike path, he’s laughing. He’s delivering exclamations to me. He’s telling me his father used to play harmonica. I know enough language to understand that.

It’s a day to make songs on a harmonica. The sky is clear blue, and the sun warm. This is the outcome of a blustery week with winds gusting so powerfully they stop you as you turn the corner. It was a week of dramatic clouds racing, patches of sunlight sweeping by, tantalizing in their hints of warmth.

There is no need to chase the sunlight today. It is abundant; it is free. We celebrate with our songs. A boy stands in his doorway playing chords on his harmonica. The man on his bike is laughing. He’s riding beside me now.

‘Sorry, I don’t speak much Nederlands.’ I tell him

‘Where you from, mate?’ He hunches over his handlebars. He has a raffish look to him, tousled ginger hair and his eyes a cloudy blue harbouring racing thoughts. He assures me he has been to America. ‘And I’ve lived in England for three years.’ In Plymouth, he says.

He smiles with yellow, neglected teeth, and I do think of England. ‘I worked on the Rotterdam-America line for years, mate. I’m a cook.’ He announces the latter with much pride. I admit that it sounds like fun, cooking on the trans-Atlantic cruise ship.

The bicycle is too small for him. His knees, clothed in corduroy, swing to the sides. He hangs over the handlebars. He wears a puffy jacket in colours of combat green. He pushes the pedals with flat soiled sneakers. He makes the pose look like repose, even as he pushed the reluctant little vehicle forward, in sidling lines never straight, but like the line left by slackened rope.

‘Where you from, mate?’ he may well ask. I’m not from here. What’s more, there is no here that I’m from. There was once, but I don’t feel it. Does he say ‘mate’ because he fancies himself a sailor, or because he fancies all English-speakers as portside Brits, or all of us Aussies? I do somewhere inside me bear a pocket of blood from the British Isles, but much more of me is descended from the landlocked middle of Europe and from landlocked American tribes far from the sea.

We part ways after we cross the bridge, he heading forward on the Binnenweg, and I turning to follow the Schie a ways. I have no purpose for the moment. I left the house only to cool off from a busy day. I’m cycling north, staying with the river, staying with the light.

Travelogue 609 – March 15
Sounds of Soddo
Part Seven

Outside the hotel bar window, the pitch of blue in the sky has deepened suddenly, and the day is coming to a close. The gold tint to the air has been turned. There is something crisp there instead. The goatherd looks aside. He stirs. He snaps the switch in his hand. The goat leaps. It leaves the grass behind to leap onto the macadam of the city road.

I’ve become fascinated by the science that makes roads. One sees so much of it in Ethiopia. In Kembata-Tembaro, road-making is a matter left to ghosts. In Addis, the procedure seems to require one Chinese man at every site standing idle in a straw conical hat. Is that culture, or is it science?

I’ve become fascinated with science of many stripes lately. It’s because I’ve begun returning to academic reading, curious about research in my field of work, and also curious about history again, reading for example about the men of the French Revolution who believed that culture was a matter of reason, or could be, that it should be.

Levis-Strauss seems to know better, writing a century and a half later, as a scholar well acquainted with Freud, writing about his travels during the early years of World War II, that final and perverse indulgence in forces released by the French Revolution. He might be forgiven for saying, ‘Travel and travelers are two things I loathe,’ when travel in this instance is forced on him. This is no happy adventure. It yields no shamanic power of discovery through displacement. It’s a demeaning escape from persecution. He will make his way to study and teach in America while French Jews are deported and killed. Earnest modern, he will not abandon the tradition, the grand enterprise that begins among the excited gestures of the Enlightenment. He will write.

Interestingly, very much as though there were an artist behind things, as though there were a tableau to complete on that boat, the Capitaine Paul-Lemerle, there are a few other hot-blooded moderns escaping France, one André Breton, father of surrealism, and one Russian revolutionary and journalist named Victor Serge. One wonders about the playfulness of the eagle-eyed destinies.

I’m becoming a believer in science again, in my own way. It could be said that I have to be, as a child of the space age. It’s my culture. I know it’s my culture because I found it so boring for so long. I’m taking another look.

What motivated the moderns was a belief in the tradition, the literature that accumulates over centuries, that evolves, and that changes reality. I am a child of the space age. I am a witness to reality changed. I have watched the Chinese man with the straw hat, standing at the side of the road construction site in Ethiopia. I am a witness.

What motivated the moderns was a faith in the religion of betterment. Underneath it was the scientific method, a scripture that post-moderns feel arbitrary. Like cartoon characters upset by three dimensions, the post-moderns protest the power of text.

Levi-Strauss stands at the stern of the ship, resolving to write, even as his prospect extends to the last frontiers of modernism, where the philosophers of relativity and psychoanalysis collude to question philosophy itself. He writes anyway, standing against the shamans and the cynics, declaiming for straight paths even as he admits that no way is straight.

The shamans don’t write rebuttals.

I think of Kevin. I think of his crazy road around the planet. I met him almost exactly ten years ago. He had travelled eight months of every year of his adult life. He had seen 120 countries or so. His eyes glittered with a kind of manic alertness made of the alienation gathered and inverted over twenty years. Unlike me or Levi-Strauss, Kevin had resolved never to write. And so he was the witch doctor without a village. There’s an integrity to that silence that seems a kind of bookend to Levi-Strauss’s.

I write Kevin’s name among the romping goats on my page. We are in Dire Dawa together, in the east of Ethiopia. We have travelled there from Harar in the back of an Isuzu flatbed. We are going to celebrate his birthday at the old Mekonnen Hotel, a beauty of neo and post and decrepit colonial architecture on the main square, where the ancient French train station stands, a little yellow dream of a building from a time of brutal elegance. We are sitting on my room’s balcony above the square, as the sun goes down. We are eating goat mat and drinking Harar beer, and we are talking about scimitars and about hyenas and about Ethiopian women. The next day, I will say farewell as he boards the train to Djibouti. He doesn’t board the passenger car. He slips in among the burlap bags in a freight car. He will cross the desert here, napping and dreaming among the grains and the coffee.

These are the days of the goat paths. Levi-Strauss knew that, standing at the stern of the good Capitaine Paul-Lemerle, noting every stage and every detail of the dramatic sunsets over the Atlantic, notating them among the text of Enlightenment. It’s a kind of admission, gentle poetry in the work of a young scientist. Even in the ocean there are goat paths. Even in war there are the moments of beauty. Even in science there are moments made for the priest.

Travelogue 608 – March 14
Sounds of Soddo
Part Six

These sorts of pauses are the stuff of travel, the hours in the van covering miles across the yellow hills of Ethiopia, Levi-Strauss’s sunsets over the Atlantic, and then the more prosaic moments, the hotels and the airports.

I’m tired. I could have stayed horizontal in the hotel room, but the mattress is hard. The sheets are rough. My skin is irritated by dust. There was no water to wash. I may as well sit in the hotel bar, where I can drink something and stare at something besides the blank TV screen.

I feel like I’ve been tired a long time. At least I can share it with someone, with the strangers in the bar. We share the thin light. We share the ambient dust. We share the flies. What I share with the notebook is a kind of lateral and parallel sketch of the day’s journey, drawings from a distorted mirror. Reassemble a picture from the surviving fragments of detail.

We are on our way to see the rural literacy site on the magical hilltop, when we are stopped by a crowd in the road. They are gathered around a figure face down in the road, some of them advancing on the helpless man, and then retreating. They are throwing stones. The driver rolls down the window to ask what’s going on. They say he has been eating human flesh. ‘Ah.’ He rolls the window back up, and we edge slowly through the crowd. The Ethiopians in the car, city people all of them, seem stunned.

Does one read it as fact? Did the man eat human flesh? Did the people in the road even believe it? Or were most of them indulging in the excitement of the moment? I tell my urban Ethiopians about Belai the cannibal, saint portrayed in medieval church paintings in northern Ethiopia. At first they deny it. No, there’s no such saint. I repeat the story a few times, remembering more details of it as I go. There is the shadow of merciful Mary, adding just enough weight to the right side of the scale to save the cannibal’s soul. Now Ijigu remembers a piece of the story. There were seventy-seven victims. The rest nod somberly. There was a Saint Belai, after all. It appears to make them sad ‘But that was in Jerusalem,’ Ijigu asserts. ‘He wasn’t Ethiopian.’

Does one record the event in the road as a cultural artefact? In Kembata-Tembaro, I’m reporting breathlessly, cannibals are punished by stoning in the middle of the road. It would make an exciting passage. Maybe accuracy was never as important as amusement. Maybe it’s enough that the story is a diversion from the mundane. The crowd in the road may say the same. It’s something to do, they might say with a shrug. ‘But what about Belai here?’ I ask the crowd. ‘Do we leave him here in the road?’ They laugh.

The road Belai lies in is unfinished, perpetually unfinished. Here it is only a winding way cut into the stubborn hills of southern Ethiopia, wide dirt highway, with deep gutters along each side. This road has earned a certain fame as the never-finished road. There are anonymous detours marked with signs saying, ‘Men Working,’ set in a wondrous silence, a silence of deep irony. The cars crawl along rocky and deeply rutted country detours in silence, spotting through the trees heavy machinery idle, abandoned on the never-finished road. All is empty. These detours are moved from time to time, as though by playful spirits.

There is something totemic about the asphalt road here in Ethiopia. It means a lot. And it’s a labour never quite done. Do we admit in Europe or America how fragile our foundations are? Even as we are diverted time after time by work crews in our lush cities, can we admit how fragile the network of beautiful macadam really is?

Travelogue 607 – March 13
Sounds of Soddo
Part Five

I am ready for dinner, though I can’t say I approach it with much anticipation. The menu at the Soddo hotel is limited. There is meat, and there is spaghetti with meat sauce. The meat was tough last night. The atmosphere will be spare. These rooms lose their only charm as the sun sets. There is a corollary to Ethiopian culture that light must be found suspect. Homes and inside spaces shall be dim. Lamps shall be fitted with the lowest wattage. The TV must outshine lamps. The foreign psychology bows under this pressure, becoming either sleepy or depressed. All instincts toward life are suppressed. My companions will be tired from the day’s travels. We will chew our tough meat in silence.

Still, that will come later. There is some lingering light in the skies. The heat of the day has built behind these high windows. The flies are indulging in a final bacchanal before the darkness that must comprise a significant spell of mourning in their short lives. They buzz with quiet and desperate abandon. I place the dry half lime over the opening of my bottle of tonic.

Levi-Strauss mocks the travel writer of his day for peddling false tonics, distillations of heightened experience, appealing to domestic audiences who seek a scent of wisdom come from the wilds of the borderlands, where civilization falls off the edge of the world, like the map did in Columbus’s day. Psychological monsters peer over the edge at us. For several centuries after the discovery of the New World, writers churned out stories about the bizarre monsters found there, the wild tribes, the paradises and the infernos.

Levi-Strauss doesn’t seem to question the existence of the monsters, just the motives of the hunters. He simply impugns the quest for thrills. He prefers the pursuit of real knowledge, travel for purposes of science. Writers for thrills tend to distort, he says. They reflect the common naiveté of travellers. They see, they discover for themselves, of course, and personal discovery is authentic as far as it goes. It’s when they draw general rule from personal discovery that they get into trouble. Everything observed is offered as a first; every sign of culture offered as ancient and unchanging.

I am recording ‘awesome’. We’re riding up the mountain on the back of motorcycles, each one of us riding behind one driver, as we assault the dirt trails winding up the slopes, riding over stones, swinging wildly to catch a dirt groove on the side of the trail, inches from the drop down a steep hillside. At one point, I turn to see a young, tan bull galloping after us, its horns only a couple feet from my back. I’m not sure how scared to be. The bull is persistent, but could be following, playing, fearful, as much as attacking. I’m more alarmed later, as we whip round another bull, black and stubborn, lowering his head to swing his horns. There are six of us on six bikes. Senayit is quite at ease on the back of her bike. She’s turning to take photos of us, while she’s talking on her mobile.

We arrive just below our intended rural literacy site. We have to abandon our bikes to cross a narrow river on the backs of stones. This river, we discover, empties into a waterfall a few meters on, a waterfall so high we can’t see the bottom. Our trail leads up the slope opposite, so that we emerge on a small summit that overlooks the ravine of the waterfall, so that we see the ribbon of it against the rock, still never seeing the bottom, even when we climb down to the edge of the ravine. We gather at the bare summit of the hill, while the teacher points out the villages on adjacent hills, villages whose children will participate in our mobile literacy program.

We ride back down the hill, and one of the foreign guests says, ‘That was awesome.’ I write it in the notebook. I know what made it awesome was the motor bikes. It was indeed fun.

The dust of the road still clogs my nose, still makes everything gritty. I know from long experience that it will be days before I’m rid of it. I accept it. It’s just a kind of duty paid on the travel.

The goats bleat on the notebook page, and I must write some response to them. This is what humans find awesome on their journeys out of the yard, I write. They find dust. They find grass. They find wild trails. I must talk to the goats on the page in their language. It’s a kind of hunger, I say. ‘Awesome’ is like coming on ripe fruit on the ground. It’s like Changeable Nature loves you just then.

The goatherd stands blankly by the side of the road outside the hotel. His several animals stumble over each other among the spare grasses on the blunt hillside. I can tell by the quality of the light that the sun is readying to set.

Levi-Strauss interrupts his account of weightier matters to describe in several pages of lyrical language the sunsets over the Atlantic. This he writes largely from notebooks and from memory. This is the process of thought. He is unashamed of that, always a traveller, even for science.

Travelogue 606 – March 12
Sounds of Soddo
Part Four

I had to buy this notebook on the run. I mislaid my last one. This is a new habit of mine, manufacturing the missing item, usually something important, the list of critical tasks I had laboured over for days, or the paper I had printed so I would always have it handy. I’m missing the latest notebook, with all its lists, so I stopped by the corner mudabbir by my house, local stand stocked with an amazing variety of household goods inside its narrow walls. I asked the boy at the counter for a dubter, and his hand reached instinctively to the stack beneath his counter. These are the small, ruled booklets for primary school students, about 4X6, with always some new fanciful design on the cover. That day’s was ‘Dream Car’, words stencilled in blue outline over pink and blue splotches and yellow lines. In the center there was an orange cartoon of a sports car, the kind in which doors slide up in the fashion of wings.

I’m spoiling another page, drawing goats in ink. I’m sketching out schemata for false ideas. The hotel bar in Soddo is awash in a soft yellow glow of late afternoon. It resonates softly with the cheers of football crowds in England. The flies make no noise as they circle. They are fond of their circuits. I wonder about them, why they want so badly to land where they landed last. Even as I chased them off, did they still have time to leave some trace of themselves, some smack of fly scent, some invisible beacon?

We know about place. We circle, too, in our way. We call the pathways ‘culture’. Humans return to their fires. They built their early fires according to patterns that became ritual. The stories they told at the fires became religion. The masks for characters became worship. So on. It all speaks to me about harsh lives spent in a harsh world, where knowledge is impossibly fragile.

It’s a new age. The fires have proliferated. Bored with the routines of safety, we turn away from ours. We discover other fires, other people circled around their own boredom. We seek difference, and we settle for the immediate signs of it, vaguely disappointed to discover underneath them the same organization around boredom, the same construct of ego fighting instinct with civilization. Difference becomes an enthusiasm for aesthetics. We study cuisine. We study architecture. We study language. Travellers’ discussions become text for footnotes.

Sometimes I wonder what it is that still strikes the senses, strikes them with something more than the cool touch of intellect. I’ve got the notebook open. I’m reviewing the events of this trip. There might be insight.

First, I’ll record ‘unique’. I heard the word one time among the foreign visitors during the trip. I’ve invited RJ on a run into the mountains with some members of the team. We’re running the fiel menged, the goat path through the chaka, or the forest. This is the way the athletes train, following each other single file through the trees, weave and dodge and climb. I have missed it. RJ bravely, stubbornly stays with us. I’m second in line behind Fikre. I’m focussing on enjoying the run, every moment, the liberation inside this style of running, in which every moment is a challenge and a departure from the steadiness that defines city running, from the lulling, from the same and sustained, from the breath held and the eye on the horizon. A glimpse of the sunlight flashing among the leaves above, and then one must concentrate quickly on the root below, the stone, and then right into the pain of the steep, scrambling ascent.

‘Unique,’ he says. I make a note of that.

At the end of the run, as we re-enter the village on top of the mountain, as we emerge from a rocky trail between rows of houses, emerging into the open, dusty lot in front of old Maryam church, I try to find the strength for a final kick. We’ve run for an hour, but I still have something left. The athletes are re-engaged by this, roused by a spark of native competitiveness to sprint with each other to the end. We laugh, and we all shake hands, a kind of ritual.

This ‘village green’ on the mountaintop is a timeless place. I like being here, lingering briefly after the run. Small children gather and mimic our stretching exercises. The beggar, the ascetic, sits on his blanket, and he eyes us. Women guide their school-age children by, and they laugh. The men sit by the road, waiting for work, waiting for taxis, waiting for the afternoon and then the evening. They are making jokes about us. They wave when we wave. Their smiles are both genuine and mocking. I love that sincerity in Ethiopia, the accommodation of all sentiments simultaneously.

Maryam might be the oldest church in Addis Ababa. The emperor Menelik was crowned here in 1882. RJ and I enter the grounds and walk around the octagonal church, austere grey in the walls, encircled by a wooden portico painted in light blue and Ethiopian colours. It’s peaceful. I meditate on the century of worship here, fervent and focussed, its ancient words lifted above the mountain, above the hum of the capital city, where the nation tries every day to write history.

We turn back toward the van. It was the run that was unique. I’ve written it on the goat’s page.

Travelogue 605 – March 11
Sounds of Soddo
Part Three

A blank notebook page is a wonderful thing, a source of hope. We might write many silly words in a row. We may draw pictures. It’s a delusive sort of hope, luring men and women into committing to paper all sorts of follies. We say fatuous things when we’re lulled by hope. And we are proud of them, even knowing they are fatuous. And we know intuitively that for most of us it’s the freedom of the page that counts, more than the value in dried ink. It must be a game to be really worth the time.

We follow the fiel menged. The Amharic comes with an image. We’re running in the mountains above Addis. Ijigu can’t help himself. He cannot run along the dirt road. He must break away and dash through the forests and brush, weaving, climbing and falling among the rocks and roots of the hillside. This is the fiel menged, the goat path. I tease him with this, until I discover the fun of the fiel menged for myself. I’ve been conditioned by years of city running to think of straight lines and destinations. The goat’s way is much more fun, and, finally, meaningful.

I’m watching the goats now, out the window of the hotel bar in Soddo, three of them making their herky jerky way along the side of the road, under the lazy watch of their keeper. They nibble. They lift their heads on long necks, craning, staring through those odd eyes, distorted pupils. Goats never become graceful. They are perpetually knock-kneed kids.

I draw in my notebook a goat with an elephant’s howdah on his back. The man inside is not hunting or leading armies. He’s a man of science with a mortarboard cap and a smile of discovery. He hauls some verbiage behind the filthy goat tail, like a haul of trash, leaving tracks in the dust that has settled on the notebook. I’ve outlined my meditations on the term ‘monoculture’, used by Levi-Strauss in his Tristes Tropiques.

The first tenet, I say, is that the only monoculture is the one that stands inside boredom. As long as we find something charming – goats on the road, the coffee ceremony – we have not entered the monoculture. We are observing it. And it is not an element of culture until the persons performing it perform it absent-mindedly, with that critical attitude of boredom.

Secondly, the elements of said culture of boredom are utilitarian. If the ingredients or order vary from place to place, it is only a recipe of chance among the several mundane ingredients of survival.

We want ‘culture’ to be the coffee ceremony and we want it to be the group of people gathered around it. This equation never resolves. People are not single quantities. They are amalgams of content and motion that only appear as unities. If this is true of individuals, so much more should it be true of groups. More interesting than identities is why we want them so badly.

So, a third law, perhaps: as tempting as it is to extend ‘culture’ to identity, it will always be problematic. Even self-identification, ‘I am the people of the coffee ceremony.’ It is messy. We find it easy to cede the fact of change in our own time, while insisting on a nostalgia for ‘traditional’ cultures as stable, as bedrock. But societies were always fluid and unstable. Classical Greece was a chance and ephemeral amalgam of various local brands with Persian and Egyptian, and others hard to count. Imperial Rome was strata upon strata of cultural artefacts, some enforced, some local, some international, some perverse and signs of rebellion.

But back to monoculture, centred in its ring of boredom. One turns inward and sees little. One turns outward and perceives the event horizon. That rouses curiosity, excitement. This thrill is what fuels the ritual ordeal that Levi-Strauss references. Approaching the event horizon, one suddenly sees the objects of one’s monoculture. One begins to dress them, paint them with designs, create cults from culture. At the horizon, the blood races. One has visions. And then one escapes. One sees a galaxy of monoculture systems, like circles of people with their hands to the fire.

The TV in the bar has begun airing a Premiership game. All eyes fix on the fixture. It’s a passion here. I know any one of these guys could recite names and results with keen accuracy. More important are the loyalties. Hazard is dangerous, and the fan smiles with real enjoyment of the Belgian’s game, and with a feeling that the star plays for him.

I turn back to my game with the flies, protecting my drink with lazy swats. On average, it takes three repetitions to discourage the fly from coming back. I could write a new theology, sprung from the contest with flies. ‘Wave thrice, place one palm over the chalice.’ The flies like my backpack. I debate internally the health hazard of flies on my backpack. Shall I double my efforts, expanding my territory to the adjacent chair, where the backpack sits?

The goat returns to its flock. It has pursued its vision along the hillside abutting the road, following erratic paths. It has found its meagre clump of grass. It awkwardly runs behind, the joints of its legs seeming strung only loosely with string. It falls into formation, its head bobbing, one eye set alertly, inscrutably out toward the street. I return to my drawing, and I play around with the pupil of the eye, such an odd aperture into that box of angles, the goat’s head.

It wasn’t until the 1960s that humankind saw the globe of earth. We still marvel at the sight, at least I hope we do. It features in so many movies, I notice, as a kind of revelatory image. Journalists have tried to attach text, but wisdom from beyond the event horizon isn’t convenient that way. Text doesn’t attach. We see stuff. We know something more, but only in the value-neutral way of true knowledge.

Pour the coffee. It doesn’t speak. One grows bored listening.

Travelogue 604 – March 10
Sounds of Soddo
Part Two

It’s a hot afternoon in Soddo, and I’m trying to read. I’m doing my best to read while also monitoring the flies. I’m sitting by the window, watching the street through the gauzy white drapes. There is a reassuring familiarity to the sounds of the Ethiopian street, the nasal voices crying out, the horns of the cars and rumble of the trucks. The traffic surges with familiar urgency, cars swerving around the three-wheeled bajaj, around the goats. Boys in sky-blue school uniforms are horsing around, shouting, while lanky elders in windbreakers and baseball caps leisurely climb the slope.

Soddo is a town of slopes, arrayed against the side of one green range of hills rising above the surrounding countryside. It’s a pretty setting. It had been Jon’s idea to make Soddo the base for our trip, instead of Hosanna, a city to the north of our school sites, in the Hadiya zone. It was a good idea. There’s an element of peace to Soddo completely lacking in Hosanna, where the streets are madness in dust. The one faranji-friendly hotel in Hosanna, the Lemma, stands like a fortress on a hill. Outside the gates of the Lemma, the van wades through jeering crowds.

I return to the text. Between the erratic attacks of the flies and the senseless slaughter of random words by the e-reader, I find it slow going. The poetic rhythm to Levi-Strauss’s prose is all but lost. I push forward.

With what seems like notable prescience in someone writing in 1955, Levi-Strauss develops a quiet, recurring argument that the boom in population will rob the world of particularity, that, in his words, ‘… humanity has taken to monoculture, once and for all, and is preparing to produce civilization in bulk, as if it were sugar-beet.’

It’s not a difficult argument to digest in our times, something we say ourselves with the ease of familiarity, a Time Magazine lament – though I think Time editors might hesitate at the big dose of salt there in that word ‘civilization’.

Myself, I hesitate over the word ‘monoculture’. I begin to wonder how the word should be deployed. I might easily set the concept on its head.

There are few places that can strike someone from my culture as more different and perhaps alienating, maybe disturbing, certainly discomfiting, than Ethiopia. One can thrill at the differences, or one may despair. But ultimately, submerged in the culture for a while, one can hardly avoid the real experience of tedium and boredom. For all the chatter about diversity, as an endangered quantity, as something to celebrate, there is little discussion about how monotonous culture is from the inside, no matter how challenging the entry into it. So which way is the indicator, this term ‘monoculture’, pointing? Or to put it another way, what exactly is the diversity we fret over?

Isn’t it possible that the discipline of anthropology has become as much a relic as the items in its cabinets? Isn’t there something to it, some key ingredient in the mix that makes up its foundation that could only have germinated in the colonial era and blossomed in the twentieth century, a conception of ‘cultures’ as tectonic plates, contemporaneous sets of manners and habits rubbing against one another.as they slowly shift? The researcher creates a taxonomy, and then he worries about the fragility of the species he has charted, a sort of solipsistic method, calling his snapshot the measure, building an institution to preserve it.

Mr. Levi-Strauss makes much in his book about the path in his youth that led to anthropology, how it fit him so perfectly, young man fascinated by geology, history, and psycho-analysis. It was in the youthful science of anthropology that he found the perfect fusion of his interests. But I think I see something in his nature that bridles against the codifying instincts of his discipline. I’ve seen there is a playfulness to the man. He teases and challenges. Theory is the pick-up game after school, rather than theological councils in debate. This is the man, after all, who composed structuralist theory around the trickster figure in mythology, long before hordes of fantasy and sci-fi authors made cotton candy out of Jungian thought.

Dust motes settle among afternoon’s golden light, a sort of African summer shower upon the wings of the flies settled on the edge of my table, and I am drawing spider webs around the word ‘monoculture’, the nib of my pen catching on dust, and I’m sketching out theories of culture in my notebook. I’ve made a drawing of a goat, and on his back balances my contribution to science, a new theory, the boredom index to culture.

Travelogue 603 – March 9
Sounds of Soddo
Part One

I’m in Soddo. The city is the head of the Wolaita region of the Southern Nations, Ethiopia. This is one of the best hotels of the city, but still I’m fighting off the flies. There’s been no water. We’ve been out all day, visiting two schools in the Kembata-Tembaro region. I would have loved a shower. I’ve only been able to wash out of buckets for days now, even in Addis Ababa. Now they have taken the bucket away so, returning from a day driving among the dusts of our roads, I have no water whatsoever.

The sun beats in the window of the ‘bar’, which is a bare room with plain tables that looks exactly like the ‘restaurant’ across the lobby. The flies are relentless. I’m drinking bottled water. Mercifully, they have limes to add flavour, and to cleanse the palette. This much water I can have. I may have to splash down with bottled water later.

I’m re-reading ‘Tristes Tropiques’ by Claude Levi-Strauss. The book had come up in conversation recently at my café in Rotterdam, brought up by the philosopher barista there, the philosopher and professional football player. It seems like a good read while travelling. Claude Levi-Strauss famously opens his book by saying, ‘Travel and travelers are two things I loathe ….’

I’m having trouble focusing on the book. It’s been a long day among the dusts of Kembata-Tembaro, and I’m tired. It doesn’t help that my version of the book, adapted for the e-reader, is rather garbled. I have to interpret nonsense text mid-sentence. Often, it’s a matter of squinting my eyes and seeing if some resemblance to a real word emerges. Sometimes it’s context. If it’s a name, I assume it will pop up again somewhere. The names are challenging, anyway. He’s writing about his anthropological work in Brazil during his youth, in the 1930s. The book was published in 1955. It’s a memoir looking back twenty years, and he writes as though it is a time lost in the distant past. It must have seemed so, separated from him by the war and asylum in the States. But reading the book now adds another, longer angle of perspective, if the reader knows that Levi-Strauss died only recently, in 2009, having lived to be over a hundred.

‘Travel and travelers are two things I loathe ….’ I’ve been meaning to write a rebuttal to this, though I’m not sure what arguments I could marshal. He spends a good amount of time early in the book criticizing travel writers in particular, and I’m trying to self-publish this travel memoir about Ethiopia, with Troy’s help. I might be a little sensitive. Obviously he makes his case somewhat ironically, embedded as it is in a travel memoir.

He hypothesizes rather broadly that the popularity of the travel story (with real colour photos, in 1955!) is related to the ritual ordeals among certain native North American tribes, in which young people achieved wisdom and power by submitting themselves in solitude to extreme situations outside the norms of their societies. Ordeal scenarios were often contests with elements traditionally seen as alien and hostile to the culture; i.e., wild beasts and cruel nature. The ordeals had to involve suffering, of course, and extreme alienation.

I wonder if the preponderance of flies in this bar will qualify as ordeal. I am suffering a good deal of annoyance. And when I blow my nose, I am still finding dust and blood. I am hoping there is some wisdom for me in this, as reward for my suffering.

Travelogue 602 – March 2
Making the Rounds

Ijigu and Frehiwot are hanging back. I’m leading a small group of white guys down the rocky slope of the dirt road, down toward the stink of the wenz, or river, below, and apparently into danger. ‘You know,’ Ken says, ‘your own staff is saying we shouldn’t go down there.’

I had wanted to take the group as far as the wenz. It stands well below high banks overgrown in sickly brush. You can’t see it, but you can smell it. Like most streams through the city, it is treated as latrine, wash basin, trash dump, and bath for both human and animal, and it is horribly filthy. I remember the wenz from earlier visits to families, stepping with some trepidation into dilapidated shacks of corrugated iron that teetered on the edge of the bank.

We don’t make it that far. I see the brush atop the banks, past the point that our road disintegrates into an abandoned plot of dust and trash. The road was once laid with stones. They form now a broken mosaic of disuse in monochromatic tan tones of summer dust. There is no one around, not even the children begging attention. But there lurks some risk there in the shadowless terrain, I am being warned, and since I must be responsible for the safety of the guests I turn us back, commit us to the sweaty climb back up to the asphalt, where the van can pick us up.

I’m disappointed. I want the foreign guests to see where our students come from. I can’t say why, really. No one in this group funded the Mercato project. But I wish they could see those families the way I have. Maybe it’s a certain loneliness inside my history.

So yes, I am completing the work on a memoir about the first years in Ethiopia. Writing does strange things to my brain. I see double; I see triple. The day merges with other days. Last week I was writing about Ethiopia. This week I’m here. The two Ethiopias aren’t lining up quite right.

It could be that you write your story, and afterward you realize that not all of it is true. That’s not to say any of it was a lie or a fantasy. But a memory is one step from truth, and writing is another step. You’ve said something about a place, and the place denies it. You’ve said something about the Self, and the Self denies it.

We’re visiting the first location of the school. It looks the same to me, standing quietly amidst the chaos of the Mercato, warehouses on one side and on the other the hillside that descends through kilometres of shantytown.

Last year we had to close the Mercato school. It was a sad experience. Two years ago we were forced out of this location by a restless landlord, hungry for commercial projects. We moved into a second house, not too distant from the first but across a line dividing administrative districts. The officials in the new district refused to re-license, stringing us along with ever new sets of conditions.

We stand outside the gate of the first location, and there is nothing different. There is no G+ under construction. There is no banner above the gate advertising grand enterprise. There is no commotion, no trucks moving merchandise, no ring of cash registers. All is silent.

So we tramp back toward the melee that is the Mercato, where all is relentless motion, and into it. We walk single-file among the crowds, past the warehouses, past the trucks, past the streams of people who seem so intent, as though intention has lost its purpose, become the purpose. People push against each other and against us, past the open stalls of merchandise, displayed in piles and stacks, sacks of grain, plastic flowers, and rows of shoes; alleyway of bras, jamboree of carpets, carnival of plastic and aluminium pots.

Travelogue 601 – February 25
What Resounds

I’m walking through the oorlog. There is a lot of debris. Though it is organized and catalogued, it is still debris. Oorlog means war in Dutch.

They have finally completed the work around our Metro station, which is called Coolhaven. For months, the road and sidewalks were ripped up, and sections fenced off, where bricks were piled and where heavy machinery stood mostly idle. The sandy ground underneath Rotterdam lay exposed. Now the brick promenades along the water are restored and clean.

Coolhaven Station is a ten-minute walk from home. It sits beside the Schie River, where the river pools before the locks that allow ships into the Maas River. The station stands below a bridge that crosses the little Schie and offers a nice prospect of Delfshaven to one side and downtown, still a few kilometres away, on the other side. There is a small road that runs underneath the bridge and passes before the station entrance. That is where the brick promenade provides access to the water, accompanying the small road. This is where all the debris lies during construction.

Built into the bridge, so that it is across the road from the Metro station, is a small museum. In front of the museum is a sculpture in grey stone of a fighter plane standing on its tail. The museum is small, fit snugly under the bridge. It documents the experience of the city during WWII, or WOII in Dutch, the O for oorlog.

I’m walking through the oorlog. There is little more than debris on the brightly lit shelves. The museum itself is in great shape, just re-opened after renovation. The debris is also in good shape, cleaned and catalogued. Curators have organized it into displays, and yet debris remains in its nature an accident. Total war leaves behind the pieces of things, melted and bent household objects, shells, bits of stone and brick, paper strewn and burned to ash. War leaves items of its own element, uniforms and weapons.

So the first impression is one of life reduced to rubble. The second impression is one of time. I grew up in a world definitively ‘post-war’. The war was past and removed, but never so ancient and alien as it suddenly seems to me now. The weapons look antique. The uniforms are small and awkward. The posters and signage and headlines make civilization seem such a small endeavour, channelled along such narrow channels. Our contemporary world is something of a different order, made more of complexity and polish.

There are two types of people attending the re-opening, children and the old. The debris registers with each in markedly different ways. That is apparent. For the children it will never be other than history, as alien in essence as the Roman Empire. For the old, there is some personal connection, in memory or in family experience.

The museum volunteers proudly invite us into a room where we will be treated to the ‘Experience’. It’s a multi-media presentation meant to bring the bombardment of 1940 alive. We sit at tables with touch screens. There are projections on the wall. There are tablets programmed with catalogues of exhibits. However nice the media, though, the challenge is the lack of data. For example, there is no film stock of the bombardment, so instead we are given a collage of pre-war photos interrupted by sounds of planes and explosions, images of fire. The sound system is strong, and the media are choreographed well, but I’m disappointed in the interpretation of impact. In an effort to make numb post-moderns feel something of the significance of the event, they turn to the explosions. Terrifying as the bombardment itself was, I question whether the cinematic moment, the fire and screams, is the one that really captures the horror of the event. I would guess that the silence afterward might be more horrible, the shock and the collective effort to assimilate what had happened.

Levi-Strauss writes that some of the islanders on Martinique believed that Hitler was Jesus come back to punish the white race. Funny, sobering. Made sobering most by the ocean, perhaps. It’s the long reach of trauma, the kind of trauma visited on humanity by men like the Nazis, that finally makes the biggest mark.

One leaves the Experience to return to the collection. Maybe it’s the debris itself that offers the hope of most impact, the scanty collection a testament to human lives treated like trash, the scantiness of the collection itself a statement. This is what’s left of a city, it says. One’s mind rebels. One is tempted to smile. It’s not real. But it follows you out the door the way that simulated noise of bombs will not.

Outside, the city is restored. The humble promenade beside the river is neatly composed of its tiles and stones, and it’s been cleared and swept for the city’s families. The spring is coming. Some teens anticipate it, gathering on the benches, shivering in their coats, sharing cigarettes, talking about the silliest things possible.

Travelogue 600 – February 20
Rounding Sums

The skies are teasing us with a semiotics of spring. The clouds are big and fleecy, dodging among the winds as though in spring frolic. There is enough blue there behind them to trigger the cheeriest hormones. And yet one also senses the false promise, uneasily, despite the most sincere exertions to deny it. Winter hasn’t let go of us.

In the morning, there are trails of salt spilled along the roads. The bike paths crunch with salt and ice. There is a sheen to the surface of bridges, and one slows and wobbles on one’s bike, trying to avoid upset. The swan coughs vapours. She drifts quietly on the quiet river, the somber colours of which deny the sky’s dry ruse.

The ride is bracing. I am alert by the time I sign in at my morning café. The temperatures lend vitality to my work. I spend the early morning hour editing, and the work is a net spread wide to catch the whole room. The topic lies in the past, but the writing is present. The writing is woven from a hundred impressions in this moment, becoming past, becoming merged with the topic of the past. There have been so many edits by now the narrative rings with a mélange of captured moments.

I’ll finish the story now, my little memoir, and I’ll put it between some covers, with Troy’s help. And then what? The only result I can imagine is embarrassment. The story is incomplete. Stories never round neatly as sums. And the edits would not be complete in another ten years.

I am made to think again of poor Maximilien, victim of his own strange lights, an intelligence lacking all wisdom, a life rounded so succinctly and dramatically. Perhaps I’m all right with my indistinct story, illogical and starved of violence.

Belloc would hesitate to attribute even intelligence to young Robespierre. He has a poor opinion of the boy, repeatedly asserting his mediocrity. He asserts it so often, one wonders if there is a code to the assertion. Does he resent the boy’s impact on history as undeserved? Does he feel the times were corrupt, as evidenced by their worship of the boy-king?

Belloc is writing in 1905, a time still reverberating with the impact of the Revolution, the post-Napoleonic order beginning to break down, Russia facing its first revolution, European powers positioning themselves for mutual destruction. Einstein is opening a window onto true uncertainty; Freud is opening his window into the unconscious. But political science clings to Enlightenment certainties.

And isn’t that Robespierre’s sin, his certainty? It’s a transgression particularly galling to Belloc, I would think, proud public Catholic intellectual that he was, modern mystic. ‘The Incorruptible’ they called Robespierre in his day, code for consistent, rational disciple of the philosophes. Even when he opposed the most popular initiatives, like war, like the death penalty, he did so with the arguments of the philosophes.

Thinker of dry thoughts, and in over his head, poor Robespierre. Belloc has such a low opinion of him, as most everyone has. What might the unfortunate himself think if a shutter opened for him onto 2015, if he were suddenly present in the bland age of Hollande and Cameron, present to read his biographers? I have a sense he would encounter it with a shrug, with an irritatingly smug smile. ‘I made history,’ he might say. ‘I was right.’ He would find his place. He would dress well. He would work in the courts. He would have the best coffee maker.

‘We knew we may die,’ he would say. I wonder why they didn’t imagine themselves an honourable after-life, these writers of the new order, writers even of religion. It was one of Robespierre’s last acts to re-write the nation’s religion, creating the ‘Cult of the Supreme Being’. To be fair, he didn’t start that game. His colleagues had first introduced the Cult of Reason.

It could be they did legislate a place of rewards for good revolutionaries, and he sits there now, reading the Contrat Social one more time, nodding and saying, ‘We were right.’

Travelogue 599 – February 19
Whether Ends Define

It’s all too sobering a feeling, this business of finishing stories, and on a sober morning, a morning that follows yesterday’s beautiful spring day with fog and chill. The grey has returned, and I have forced myself, against a foggy sleepiness as deep as the heart, to get out of bed. My routine propels me outside and onto the old cycle in any weather, to face into the chill winds and the morning’s torpid half-light.

My weekdays start the same. Before the sun has risen, I have to call Addis, or at least attempt it. That done I’m free to write for an hour or so before office hours begin.

I’m finishing the memoir. It’s been a project for years, and now Troy and I will publish it. I’m on the last edit, the last words. It’s a sobering feeling to bring a memoir piece to conclusion. It’s a memoir that begins with a closing. Many do, I suppose. This one opens with Leeza’s passing, so many years ago now.

The seed contains its end. Classical wisdom tells us this, and it goes further. It wants to tell us that the end envelopes the beginning. A story is essentially false until the end has been recorded. We cannot assess a person’s worth until we know the manner of his or her death.

That seems like the philosophy of a hungry people to me. I’m more forgiving myself. I attribute stories with more complexity, composed of multiple strands, some extending beyond the evident beginning and evident end. But that might be facile thinking. I tend to think that most thinking is a matter of convenience.

Certainly I see the application of the end-makes-the-story principle in reading the biography of Robespierre. I know the end already, as most readers would. Indeed, it’s impossible to escape it. The author, one Hilaire Belloc, writing over one hundred years ago, cannot escape it. How does the story arrive here, he asks. It serves as his organizing question.

That the demise of the man defines him in this unsentimental study makes me sad. It’s not that I sympathize with the man’s cold nature, his cold-hearted logic, but I regret that the cold world makes it so with such unheralded regularity. Robespierre stands in for all of us in our coldest hearts, figure of dramatic moment, standing in for all macabre ideologues, in offices and assemblies, school halls and pubs, the dandies with tight smiles that describe our fates.

I continue in my fascination with the French Revolution. Belloc does a decent job of describing the indescribable, the all-encompassing power of it, the purity of the fury. It might be the closest analogue in human movement to looking into the bursting and changing light of the atomic blast.

Is the image too dramatic? It’s a metaphor driven, I suppose, by the mechanism of released energy and power. One pictures the light, intense and consuming. One sees the rings of destruction expanding outward, people bracing for them.

I pause among my edits to study the thin elderly man, regular to this café, dressed impeccably in an autumnal coat, black shirt, and tie checkered in orange and brown. He wears a black fedora. He is reading a newspaper. His lips inside the grey Van Dyck move as he reads, and it seems clear he’s of jolly temperament.

As I enjoy this sight, the café’s music shifts. Lou Reed is voicing his way through ‘Wild Side’. The old man takes no notice. He has lived through Lou Reed’s moment. I want to know what that meant to him then. I won’t know. Chances are, for him, as for the majority of humanity, the moment and the moment’s mood passed with little to remark upon. It’s a trigger for a passing personal nostalgia, if anything.

How strange it is that music was Revolution for my generation and even more so for my older brothers’ generation. How odd that is, how strange it makes our societies appear. Does it imply that our times are more nuanced than Robespierre’s, or perhaps just more watered down? Maybe they did all our work back then, and we are left with the work of adjustments. Mr. Marx might object. Mr. Reed might object.

This is Revolution at its most attenuated, subversion in poetry, undermining order in painted words. The words never quite fade. They change. Generations after pick them up. When perversity has little of old challenge to it, the words still go on. The sign becomes pretty. No one looks up.

Mr. Robespierre did not mince words. Metaphor was a blunt instrument. “Terror is nothing else than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible,’ he famously said.

Travelogue 598 – January 22
Esprit

I’m running in the fog. It masks my path. It masks the river. It designs little mysteries from the stuff of everyday life. Things will emerge in a day or two, wearing the aspect of the normal again.

My joints vaguely ache. I should have worn more gear, something over my legs. But the ache is something for me of Europe. I take it into the body, with the damp air of the mornings. It tells me I’m here, tells me also I’m older. I’m ageing, and this is the place for these years, gliding among sea salt skies, the continent named not for the charging bull, but for the submissive cow.

This is the grim timelessness I’ve inherited in returning to European winter. Europe endures, somewhat like the blinded will in a fog, pushing time aside in its tortoise progress through the mud of continuity. There is even in the perishing of things a continuity. I think I have found it here. There are marshes still here, in this land of drained marshes. The sea gulls find it, and they fight over it, winging crazy circles around each other.

Since returning from Africa, I’ve been revisiting the sites of my European hometown. I’m writing a report on projects in Ethiopia, sitting at a table at the Hopper Café, when ‘Purple Rain’ starts to play, the measured sad strains of it, sweaty little ballad made of Minneapolis in the 1980s. I’ve been reading academic anthropology, about identities of mobility, the slippery notion of community in the post-modern era. I’ve also been reading biographies.

There was a boy once who was captured in the woods while duck hunting. His captors kept him, raised him, and taught them their language and their ways. He eventually broke free again, rejoined his people, forged a new identity among the frontiers. He was an adventurer. He was a trader. He entered villages with his hands raised in the air, and he spoke their languages. He hunted in forests far and wide. Young Pierre-Esprit explored, and he collected furs.

This boy is acknowledged to one of the first white men to set foot in Minnesota. His family name is Radisson. In the 1660s, Radisson with his brother-in-law did much of the early exploration of the Hudson Bay, collecting boat loads of fine furs, and laying the foundations for the Hudson’s Bay Company, established in 1670. The French and English were tussling then over the expanses of land and resources in North America, and Radisson played one side against the other and switched, as best suited him, but he had the wisdom to approach the Brits about business matters. Eventually, trading days over, he ended up in London on a pension.

It was the heirs to the British Empire in North America who established a luxury hotel in Minneapolis in 1909 and named it the Radisson. The boy was nearly forgotten, but his name and memory fit the branding well. The name has now arrived in many cities around the world, raising flags and speaking all languages.

In 2015, I am one weary traveler loitering on the grounds of one Radisson, not to stay, but only for nourishment and for wifi. This is the Radisson Blu in Addis Ababa. This is Kasanchis, a grubby section of the capital, just down the hill from the prime minister’s palace, where the old Hilton set a standard for fine hotels in the day.

While I savour a real espresso, I’m reviewing days spent in the south, where coffee is a heady and gritty elixir, brewed in clay and delivered into any old cup of plastic or glass at hand. It is delicious and powerful, but I am comforted by the dainty little espresso.

We have traveled to far Kembata-Tembaro, where we entered the villages with our hands held high … while children clamoured around us, showering us with shouts and smiles. We wade through them toward the school buildings. The teachers are wearing the white lab coats, as is the fashion among teachers here. They lead us inside the library, under high ceilings of corrugated iron laid on beams of slender eucalyptus, and we are treated to local avocados and bananas, and to some amazing honey collected from village hives.

We are working in this village because one of its own children now lives thousands of miles away in America, being taught our language and our strange ways.

Other children remain, all along this road forever under construction. They shout at us from the side of the road as we make our way back, along the long road laid covered in deep layers of fine dust. They shout at us, and then they pull their shirts up over their noses as the dust overtakes them.

It’s a place of accidents, this world.

‘Being persuaded in the morning by two of my comrades to go and recreat ourselves in fowling, I disposed myselfe to keepe them Company,’ writes the boy from Trois-Rivières, writes the man years later, after the twist of fate – twist that left his two companions dead – has written a story for him. ‘… Wherfor I cloathed myselfe the lightest way I could possible, that I might be the nimbler and not stay behind ….’

Travelogue 597 – January 21
Impenetrable

Where does the fog come from? It might rise from the river. It might rise from the sea. I can indulge in idle thoughts. The fog has robbed me of time. It has rolled in for a long stay. It stays for days. It’s a cold fog. My fingertips burn in a mild but icy wind.

I’m taking a run along the river. The fog hides the other side of the river. It hides most of the river itself. What is left is the one river bank at my side, and the spirals of squealing gulls and terns above, challenging the heights of the cold lamp poles and the heights of the fog itself.

My thoughts spiral like the birds, among my travels and my readings. My readings have led me through the ravages of the French Revolution, through the ravages of jihadist emotion. They lead finally to eternity, like all worldly struggles do.

Fog soaks up the light, and it soaks up time. To say that the fog prompts thoughts of eternity is to be lazy. Eternity is not the same as timelessness. What fog erases does not constitute a positive space, a place where time frolics unbounded.

Even as I move, the fog robs me of the sense of movement. There is no measure as I throw step forward after step. Here shadows are cast by everything and nothing. There is barely light to call the day, nor shadow to call the night.

In days of fog, a part of me remains in sunlight. A couple weeks ago I was in Tunto, in the Kembata-Tembaro region of Ethiopia. My colleagues and I are crowding together in the busy cafe, our knees set round the circular table. The café door and window of the café open directly onto the expanse of dust that separates this set of ramshackle buildings from the road. This is the same road that has tortured us for several days already as we, with only good intentions, have returned to school sites that cleave to this tenuous ribbon of transport, the road that is barely a road. It is a road because the land is cleared along a long, meandering line threading villages and hills, because cars do travel it, but any definition beyond that must be tentative, must be forgiving. No surface prevails, no standard of smoothness. There’s a child standing at the peak of the bank above the road, staring. She is waiting for the cloud of chalky dust from our passage to overtake her. Then she disappears into the trees behind her.

A girl comes to pour us all coffee. She first brings the little cups. She shakes them like shallow porcelain bells, spraying the water in which they were soaked, setting them on the table. She offers sugar, broken clumps of it from a battered little aluminum can, collected in a small tin spoon. Next she brings the jebena, the traditional clay pot. Coffee slops onto the table. She makes a point of pouring to the brim for everyone.

The place is crowded. The crowds are staring. Gruff old men encircling the next table cast long, assessing glances our way. Boys stop by the window, lean into the frame and watch us, with a keen and unselfconscious interest. They inspect my face and my hair and my clothes at length. I’ve been coming to Ethiopia for years; it doesn’t bother me. I’m focusing on Yonas, an enterprising young local, who might serve as a guide for the moment among the capricious ways of Kembata-Tembaro, green hills harboring peoples, at densities high relative to other regions where we work, open grasslands, villages sparse. We would like to know about the schools in the district, from someone outside the system, someone raised and educated here, someone who cares.

We lapse into silence. It’s a comfortable one. We sip our coffee. The café crowds look, and I look back. There’s no challenge. I’m just a visitor. I don’t give; I don’t take. The measured chaos of the town carries on outside the walls, across the town square made of dust. The horse comes to rest, and the family climbs out of the two-wheeled cart. They pay the driver. The horse is sweating, shaking off the flies. It has so little flesh on its bones, and scabs from the work of the whip.

As we prepare to go, we realize Yonas has paid for the coffees without any of us knowing. We are guests.

Travelogue 596 – January 8
Feel the Noise

I don’t like noise. I’m one of those untouchable solitaries who haunt cafes and want no contact. I need people around, but not too close. We’re a miserable lot, who really should give up coffee.

That confession on record, I can say that I understand that noise is necessary. More, it’s desirable. It’s the sensory correlate to happy chance.

Is chance happy? Matter is a product of chance. So says the modern. From the chaotic clouds of rebounding particles and atoms to the accidents of evolution, the material world is a product of chance. Society mimics nature, and we all suffer and prosper by chance collision.

Are we happy for chance? There is that in human nature that abhors the noise of it. There is that that sets the mind to working out how to minimize or abolish it.

Of course I’m speaking about Paris. It seems as though some people can stand no dissonance. The world is their café, and the rest of us shall keep the chatter down. Or else.

As I’ve mentioned in this blog, I’ve been reading about the French Revolution. First it was Mantel. Now it’s Thomas Carlyle, oversized author, often annoying author, whose Voice must resound even above the clamour of one of History’s noisiest events. And yet, his style does fit, the Revolution as much a rhetorical achievement as a physical one, an accomplishment of writers every bit as sensationalist as Carlyle himself, (who was writing, it must be said, only twenty years after Waterloo). I speak of the pamphleteers, direct antecedents of the hard-working satirists at Charlie Hebdo.

‘Freedom of the press’ became a rallying cry back then. Practically overnight, there were hundreds of little bulletins and pamphlets being circulated, with vivid cartoons drawn of the fat king -- the ‘baker’ they liked to call him, -- and of his wife, accused of every sort of vice and crime. She’s portrayed kissing one of many lovers. She’s portrayed reaching for a giant male member rearing on horse’s legs. The people consume these publications. They rush to the streets to protect the authors, men like Marat and Desmoulins. They elect them to one or the other of the pinwheeling representative assemblies of the early days of the Revolution.

Days before I’ve heard of Charlie, I’m indulging in some of my own reading from favorite magazines. It’s Ethiopian Christmas. I have some down time. I can sit in the sun and read through the latest Harper’s. There’s an article there by Sam Frank about the occult musings among super-geniuses in Silicon Valley, the Bayesian extropists, extreme believers in the power of mind, to overcome psychology, corruption and poverty, ageing, and even the biological anomaly we call death. It’s an odd little lab for tyranny, somewhat reminiscent of the Jacobin club in the early days of the Revolution, where debate among the best and brightest of the patriots could only lead to finest solutions. Of course, everything is reminding me of the French Revolution right now.

There’s a vicious sort of self-selection at work among geniuses who would serve the world, whether it’s Allah’s geniuses or Rousseau’s or Stanford’s. How exhilarating it must be to discover that everyone in the room (those who have survived the mental shake-down at the door,) all have the same vocabulary and have stumbled upon the same solutions to the world’s ills! It must be providence! Shut out the noise. When we have the strength, we will issue forth from this room. We will eradicate the noise. Our solutions will prevail, and the thousand-year reign of paradise can begin.

Oh, well. I’m no genius. There’s little I can do to avert the next invasion of bright-eyed problem-solvers. (Has anyone studied the influence of coffee on the French Revolution? Coffee houses were all the rage among the political and culture classes of Europe in the eighteenth century. And I’ve seen firsthand the manic pace of caffeine consumption in the Middle East.)

As much as I complain about it, I will miss the noise. It’s distracting, but it is the language of celebration and exultation. It’s the true sound of pain and protest. It is song. It is the language of things spontaneous. Of course we will all be happy under the rule of the geniuses, every move planned by the smartest and the best. But I might just miss the whoop on a Saturday night from the mouths of dumb kids, the outburst of uncouth laughter, the whistle of the girl so happy she hasn’t noticed I’m reading.

Travelogue 595 – January 6
Bugs on Parade

Back in Addis, the Parade of the Bugs has begun. It’s the day before Ethiopian Christmas. Families are preparing for the feast. Bug means sheep in Amharic. Anywhere there’s a bit of open dirt roadside, the shepherds have set up shop. Families stroll among the meager herds, and they haggle. Young men follow their matriarchs home, each holding up one side, one holding horns, one holding hooves, while the big ram squirms against the ropes binding him.

We have made it back to Addis safe and sound, even if exhausted, even if a few of us are still coughing up the white powder of the roads of Kembata-Tembaro. (Driving through a moon-dust landscape, where the powder has coated everything near the road. Children standing at the top of the bank of the channel of the road, arms and cheeks white with dust, staring down at us as we pass, even as we raise clouds of the noxious powder.)

We hit the asphalt road early in the morning, heading north again. We have been bunking in Hosanna, nondescript capital of the Hadiya region. We take to the highway again, the highway being a slim and dilapidated ribbon of asphalt winding around its north-south meridian, connecting Addis to Ethiopia’s southern regions, only one of two main arteries doing so. When we stop in Butajira for lunch, Ijigu goes out to buy sugar cane and a pumpkin for his family.

The rest of us indulge in ‘fool’ for breakfast. That’s a treat. I remember when Leeza’s mom used to make it for us. It’s one of the few Ethiopian dishes with beans. In this case, beans and eggs. We sit outside at a small, bustling roadside café that the driver has recommended. We sit in the usual formation, me in the sun and everyone else, as many as can manage it, in the shade.

The weather has been getting heavier. When I first arrived in Ethiopia the skies were bright and clear. But a haze has been gathering day by day. Horizons fade into the murk of it. A few high clouds drift slowly along, far away. The afternoons are sweltering.

We’re home in Addis. We’ve returned to the office. It’s going to be a busy day. There will be two days off for Christmas, and then I only have Friday with staff before I fly home. I set up on the third floor, in the conference room, a room too cold in the morning and too hot in the afternoon, when the sun beats on the windows. There is a sliding glass door opening onto a narrow balcony. I stand there in idle moments, soaking up the sun, taking in the view over the neighborhood and beyond, to the hills around Arat Kilo.

On the bottom floor of the office compound is the Gebeta library for children. There are plenty of children there in the afternoon. Semhal, our in-house librarian, has arranged a Christmas party. She has set up a small Christmas tree, and underneath it are empty boxes, wrapped colorfully. The children are laughing uproariously. Jessica from Madison is leading them in a game. ‘Run, run, run, four!’ she chants, and the children have to grab each other in groups of four. Whoever is without a group is out. ‘Run, run, run, two!’

The day wheels by quickly in a succession of meetings. When it’s done, I head home to rest. I want nothing more than sleep. Opening the gate to our compound, I see the landlord family has secured its bug. It is tied up in the courtyard, and it bleats mournfully. The dogs in their guard post cages growl at him. It’s no way to spend one’s final hours, but there’s nothing I can do. I know its fate in the morning when the knives come out. Merry Christmas, little guy.

Travelogue 594 – January 4
Powder

We’re traveling in the south. It’s my fifth sunny day in a row, dazzling to someone who has been living in the Netherlands. We are driving west into Kambata. The road changes from asphalt to dirt to a substance in between, a rocky amalgam of earth and macadam. A road all the way to Jima is being cut into and across the hilly landscape. The road has been under construction as long as I have been traveling here. We rarely see road workers. We encounter lonely signs saying ‘Men Working,’ and we take pictures of them.

We go further and whole sections of the road are surrendered to dust. Passing buses raise it sky high. When we pass them, we drive blind into a cloud of it. My throat is burning. I hold a scarf over my nose, but still I’m blowing it so often there are spots of blood.

We pass through Mudula, a town built on hills, a town of mud roads and mud walls, set among country that is a southern Ethiopian shade of green, rich but not the heavy color of jungle, leavened by the yellows of the highlands. The blue skies are still bright and crisp with morning.

We have left the new road now, to travel downhill along a road just wider than our vehicle. We are looking for our teacher. His name is Ananu. He is a local we have hired to facilitate our rural literacy program hereabouts. We are stopping people along the road and asking, ‘Have you seen Ananu?’ ‘Have you seen a guy on a horse?’ The mobile network isn’t working here.

We ask an old man leading a donkey. A young man on his motorcycle stops. Some boys emerge from the trees lining the road, from among the hits and small plots of farmland we see through the leaves. There’s an old man with a naked infant on his hip. There are girls giggling at us. The boys peer into the car windows to stare at me. They whisper to each other, and they laugh.

Someone says Deresho. Look in Deresho. Where is that? It’s a village back up the road the way we came. The driver executes a laborious U-turn in the narrow road, and we’re driving again. We turn onto a smaller road, and we don’t go far before we arrive at the local schoolhouse, two mud and stick rooms alone in a small grassy field grass. We meet the teacher, young and shy, and we peek into the rooms, dark and empty. There is a warped blackboard on the wall, and a few long boards close to the ground for seats. They can accommodate only a fraction of the students. Fifty have to cram into each room.

Nearby is a clearing where the hundred or so young students have gathered to hear stories read by Mr. Ananu. Some elders have gathered, too, sitting in a row of chairs to one side. He has a book of children’s stories in Amharic. He has to translate as he reads into Tembarigna. The children are quiet, transfixed, by the story, by the occasion, by the strange-looking faranj.

I feel as though I’m being a distraction, so I take a walk. I find a small track through the trees, and I stroll slowly in the strong sunshine, by rough patches of ploughed earth, by huts. I am stopped by the decorations on one hut. It is the typical round hut with peaked thatched roof. Some of the huts around here are partially covered with smoothed mud and plaster, painted with designs and pictures. This one has two pictures outlined on either side of its doorway. One depicts a common theme, the roaring lion conquering the hyena, heavy paw on the creature’s head. It’s the other side that is surprising, dissonant: two men sitting in chairs, one with a guitar and the other with a keyboard. One wears little square glasses.

A little girl in rags comes up the path. She stands beside me and smiles. She whispers in reply to my greeting, in accented Amharic. When I pose a question, she answers the same way she did before. She just knows these few words in Amharic. We turn and walk together back toward the clearing.