Video: Ethiopian New Years

If you couldn’t tell already, Ethiopia tends to do things differently. Just about everything really. New Years, known by the names of Enkutash and Addis Ahmet, is no exception. It usually falls on Sept 11 here.

This holiday—or ba’al—started like Buhe a few weeks earlier: with unrestrained pyromania. “Get up!” was the alarm to my post-slumber nap. “It’s time for lighting the lights!” By lighting, I had known from the previous celebration, my grandfather meant prodding at a highly unstable kerosene stove. By lights, he meant long, haphazardly assembled bundles of sticks called chibo. By get up, he meant “Get your head out of the clouds, I don’t want you tripping over something and burning my damn house down!” Things turned out fine. We built a bonfire in the cobblestone street. My grandfather sang a few songs. The real celebration came in the morning.

After our regular breakfast of thick barley porridge—genfo—my cousins and I left for the Ethiopian Orthodox Church in the center of town. Here, we nearly lost ourselves in a sea of beautiful white dresses and robes; If not for the bearings provided by the priests’ soothing, monotonous chants and prayers, the experience would have been far to overwhelming for me. I’d been to Ethiopian Orthodox Church before, but not since the local chapter moved far away when I was 6 or so and my family settled on Lutheranism.  The services are simultaneously blissful and stoically sad, inspiring both awe and humbling fear. At least, such is the case for me, a half Ethiopian—kalis—with half an understanding of the culture and half of a half of a half of an understanding of the language.

Later in the evening—you won’t be surprised—my grandparents treated me to a (especially) huge dinner. If you’ve been reading my other entries, you know that they like to show their love with painfully large meals. Now multiply that by ten, many, many times over. Their goat, whom I had befriended as a substitute for my dogs at home, became dinner. I didn’t know that when I started shoveling food down my throat, but I suppose that if anybody had to eat the goat it might as well have been me, his friend. The result—a combination of my physical pain from eating too much meat and the feelings of guild derived from eating one’s essential pet—is that I will be spending a few days eating just vegetables. I’ll hopefully become a vegetarian some day, but it won’t be while I’m in Ethiopia. Grandma and Grandpa would be heartbroken.

Below: Video From Ethio-NYE and Ethio-NY Day