Baggage

By 3:00 a.m., I was staring out the window that overlooked the still-dark capital’s streets. I was surprised by the ghost-like processional moving stealthily below, a sea of women wrapped in gauze. Others were wound in patterned skirts, their colors lost in the grip of dark. Intrigued, I squinted harder between the dusty curtains, the cool night air brushing my unwashed face, the exotic smells of spice and grime rousing my nose. Mostly women padded softy by, leaving only their scuffled footprints in the dirt of the hotel’s scant glow.

I couldn’t figure out where they were going – so many, so early. Mosque, perhaps, in this country at the crossroads of Islam and Christianity. I’d taught Cultural Geography for years, but still could not identify the various walkers in this captivating cortege. My curiosity piqued, I slid my feet into my shoes. In less than a minute, I was sweeping past a startled hotel guard and slipping amidst the processional of women.

I caught their stride. Muffled conversations permeated the air and heads nodded subtly my way. Do they think me rude … arrogant … curious? Twice I caught a whispered faranji. Yes, I was a blue-eyed foreigner, marching in some parade for which I knew neither cause nor destination, my multi-pocketed travel shirt an incongruency in the entourage. My impulsive dash out the hotel had caught even me by surprise. But, as always, I was here to witness, to momentarily weave myself into a foreign tapestry in an effort to understand the many threads that made the whole. How shallow that all sounds, I thought, as I brushed my bangs out of my eyes. Whose brochure am I living?

I continued, nevertheless, to walk amongst them. Dogs darted and yelped, the still-dark streets no longer theirs alone. Poverty hung in the air, held in place by yesterday’s trash still littering the streets and walks. Donkeys, called into early morning duty, were already piled too high. Dim light and uneven streets, pocked with holes and gutters, kept my eyes focused downward, robbing me of chances to steal glances at dark faces made darker by the night.

Look at all these feet, I thought, intrigued by the display that escaped from under skirts lightly flipping back and forth with each stride. The stories they must tell. Yellow and white shoes flashed in moments of dull light, unyielding in their plasticity, too stiff to caress the feet that asked so little of them. Other shoeless feet padded soundlessly. I followed them, melding with their tempo.

Lost in the sway of hips in front of me, my jet-lagged mind wandered to the globe on my desk – one I had explored with my fingers to experience the tiny relief of mountains in their countries of blues and pinks and greens. How big and out of place I felt walking across this globe of mine, the world so small underfoot. Carefully stepping over tiny black lines, I wondered what borders I had just crossed and what politics or clerics might send me scurrying to the next black line of my mind. Years of immersing myself in countries and their stories, with their strongmen and their monks, their guns and their rice, had organized my mental maps – half made real by the pages in the passport hidden safely at my waist, the other half puzzled together by thoughts and ideas not my own. Will I ever make sense of this world I teach about? I pondered. My feet moved mindlessly, brailing their way in search of hazards, guided by the cadence of others around me, my mind left to its own journeys on my globe.

A car sputtered to life, shaking night’s slumber slowly off its metallic frame as it added to the growing din of a city slowly coming to life. A skinny cow walked in the middle divider, no man or child with a stick in sight. Then suddenly we were flooded with headlights of a too-fast truck, careening our way. Its ghastly, drunken eyes spotlighted an array of prismatic skirts that scurried around me to safety.

Spun off my globe, I and the women to my left landed hard against an old stone wall. Curses and murmurs spit out of startled mouths. A small stack of dirty straw dislodged from the wall, tumbling down upon us, sticking with its little bits of muck in my uncovered hair. Moron, I thought, hating the tapestry. But to my astonishment, the globe eased its spin and everyone regained their stride, with little amiss but two onions still rolling on the ground. A baby cried and a mother’s dirty finger found the mouth wrapped inside the folds of her shawl. We walked on.

Soon, women with burlap bags and bulging shawls left one by one, slipping into still-dark streets and alleys toward what would be bustling markets where they would squat for hours behind the small piles of whatever lay hidden in their bags and tucked in their shawls. There’s a beauty in this poverty – maybe just because it’s different or maybe because life exists in spite of it.

After twenty minutes of maneuvering alleys and streets, I was jostled by cloaked bodies disentangling from the group. They moved silently up a dirt hill towards a hexagonal building adorned with a cross. Not a mosque, after all, I realized, my brief fantasy of having walked the city amidst Muslim women dashed by the glaring cross. Two unmarked doorways separated the men from the women. With my exposed head, I went only so far as the door, where I glimpsed a sea of gauzy-white filling right-side benches while a scattering of men in dark coats took to the left. I chaffed momentarily at the gendering and departed to the rhythmic sounds of a priest guiding his masses into God’s waiting arms. Prayers in the dark, I thought. That’s commitment.

Making my way back to the street, I rejoined the steady march of the remaining women, their ranks now thinner and their shabbiness more apparent at the edge of dawn. Those left seemed to carry nothing but weariness, their empty hands pumping at their sides, as if attempting to take the burden from tired feet. I felt less welcomed by this bunch; they carried no anticipation of church or market in their demeanor. I had long given up on awkward smiles offered as meager explanation for my presence. I didn’t even know why I was there myself.

We trudged on, but the women spoke little amongst themselves, their eyes averted and some distance amongst them. No one engaged with them. We turned up a dusky path, beginning a climb up a hillside that challenged my clogs. In the budding light, I noticed worn bands tied loosely around their waists or draped over their shoulders. I could not guess what in the shadows still beckoned the women onward. The women’s bodies seemed more tired than the straps that hung like sad jewelry across torn and dirtied shirts.

The grade steepened and I found myself embarrassed at an inner dialog in which I was already complaining about bad hillsides and a now-bruised left arm. I was worn and hungry, growing angry at a country that sent women young and old up hillsides in the dark and a bit irritated at myself for thinking I needed to follow them. What am I trying to prove? I can’t ask them to stop so I can hear their stories; I’m muted by lack of language. I barely exist to them. What began in the dark was still obscured by the light of day.

I finally succumbed to a rock, pretending to dislodge a stone from a shoe that, upon further thought, I wished not to draw attention to. Did I just see or imagine smirks from their silent mouths? I gave up. My downward retreat gave me the first chance to glimpse the faces of women climbing upward. Their eyes rarely met mine. Look at me. You’re my tapestry, remember. I can’t understand you if I can’t see you. My own angry feet slipped on the dirt that had tried to grab my clogs out from under me on the journey up.

At the base of the hill, I was absorbed again by a city now fully alive with honking traffic and busses that could care less about the faranji with angry feet making their way toward a hotel with no elevator and a door lock that dangled from one screw on its hinge. When I finally entered the room, I collapsed on a bed that rolled me toward its center hole, as if sucking me into an Africa that might never let me go.

I slept an hour and then stood under the hot water longer than ever before, feeling selfish for stealing Africa’s water for my already-clean skin. I wanted to wash away the smells that had caught in my hair and dislodge the emptiness I felt at the only thing the women and I had shared – our mutual invisibility.

My mouth dry, I wandered down stairs, seating myself in the dining area under a TV blaring some version of CNN. A family at a nearby table sat chatting awkwardly, the woman holding a baby in her arms, the man staring at the soundless bundle. A tiny, dark curl peeked out from the blanket swaddling the child. It was a curl quite different from the blonde of the couple holding what now seemed to be a child not of their own making. I stole glances, realizing that Africa, the source of humanity, was sending yet another human to people the world.

I ordered what ended up being a smoothie of mango, avocado, and papaya. Mulling over my mixed feelings of such adoptions, I dipped a piece of bread in my drink; a drop of smoothie landed above the upper right pocket of my only shirt.

In less than fifteen minutes, I would meet the guide and driver who would shuttle me up and down the highlands and lowlands of this country at the crossroads of ancient civilizations. I hoped that the feebleness of my morning walk would be short-lived and that my guide could give me voice.

We were soon driving about streets more foreign to me now in their sunlight than they had been when I’d walked them hours before. We passed a market place with its piles of grain and tire shreds and plastic, all choreographed by men and women in now-brilliant colors. It was a vibrant scene, one I truly loved. Dogs sprinted about and small children clung to skirts or wandered aimlessly through the hub of people and piles. A knot tightened in my throat, part of the experience of again accepting the unattended roaming of children and animals amidst a world of things all bigger than they were. I swallowed, finally acquiescing to the noises and smells that would shape my month.

We headed toward a museum atop a hill, chugging up the incline filled with people on foot guiding struggling donkeys with a twiggy branch. Then my eyes landed on two women, walking single file downhill along the edge of the road. A child was strapped to the front of one; the other was wearing a pattern I knew well. Cars brushed them onto the narrow dirt strip that separated asphalt from a long drop; the women never raised their heads, bent and partially obscured by the bundle on their backs. I watched them, my mind piecing together the story my guide sketched out. More women followed, all carrying 6- to 8-foot bundles of leafy or bare tree limbs, strapped onto their backs with thin strips of bark or rope that cut into shoulder skin exposed through torn shirts. These were just like the women I had followed earlier.

The women had climbed deep into the forests, gathering or cutting limbs into lengths they would strap onto their bare backs in 75-pound bundles, carrying them down the hillsides that had borne them upward, into markets or roadside stands, where they would offer their wood to a city without any other source of fuel. They might earn a dollar before they would climb again for a second trip of the day up a mountain to face the guards that roamed to protect the forests, guards that would beat and rape them for doing the task the country demanded of their tired backs. No wonder they don’t smile. They can’t risk looking at anything that would deter them from another climb up tomorrow’s mountain.

I’d seen similar elsewhere in my travels – women shouldering the world. I loved them and hated them.

A day of exploring Addis Ababa returned me back to the same darkness that had begun my day. As we rounded a curve on the road, our headlights caught a woman in a brief burst of light. She carried nothing but a handful of spinach, the rewards of her day. I noticed a thin strap draped across her shoulders and then the woman was lost into the dark.

The hotel clerk handed me a note. Lufthansa had found my luggage.