Ethiopia | Raw and ready

The final streaks of sunlight are fading on a warm summer Sunday, but instead of flipping hamburgers in my Federal Way backyard, I am standing in the backyard of a man flipping shanks of raw meat to a dozen wild hyenas.

Ethiopia's famous "hyena man" beckons me. Moments later, I am crouching on the ground, cheek-to-cheek with Derge (pronounced "de-REG-eh"). He grabs a hunk of meat from a basket and places it on the edge of his lips. Within seconds, a wolf-size blur of brown fur and fangs approaches hesitantly from about 6 feet away, then lunges toward us. The hyena sinks its teeth into the food, tearing it from Derge's lips — 8 inches from my face.

I gasp for breath as my guide, Endale Teffra, a native of this 1,000-year-old walled city of Harar, chuckles. I met this "hyena man" — a butcher who feeds his spoils to the wild animals — during a 10-day trip through Ethiopia, a cultural, religious and historic crossroads unlike any other in Africa. Take the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, an ancient Christian church founded in the early fourth century; add in the Queen of Sheba and the ruins of her reservoir-size bath from the 10th century B.C.; top them off with the modern capital, Addis Ababa, its squalid slums within sight of the only five-star hotel in the country, and you begin to glimpse the depth and diversity of Ethiopia.

Moving forward

Ethiopia, a sub-Saharan African nation almost three times the size of California and with a population of about 70 million, has taken conspicuous strides toward modernization, at least in the capital of Addis Ababa.

Yet for many people, Ethiopia conjures up images of sad-eyed children with stick-thin limbs, distended stomachs and flies in their eyes, images from the nation's 1984-85 famine that killed more than 1 million people.

"When drought and famine struck Ethiopia, Americans were the first to arrive with relief aid as the great contributors and lifesavers," said Hapte-Selassie Tafesse, who in the 1960s and early '70s was the nation's first minister of tourism. "They should come and see that all that has not been without gratitude or in vain."

Information

Ethiopia tourist office: www.tourismethiopia.org

One does not vacation in Ethiopia to see lions and elephants or to enjoy Western-style comforts. Those interested in such vacations should go to Kenya or one of the other African countries that offer safaris and luxury resorts. The resort approach to travel through East Africa does spare a visitor from children haranguing for ballpoint pens (a valuable school supply) or disfigured adults begging for spare change. But you also miss experiencing the sights, sounds and tastes of a place like Ethiopia.

I was introduced to one such taste — both familiar and foreign — the moment I arrived in Aksum, the former Ethiopian capital. At the hotel, I was greeted with an invitation from the owner to a traditional coffee ceremony. For the next 90 minutes, I savored a potent, rich brew. Beans are roasted, then ground by hand and brewed in a decorative pot over a small charcoal burner. It was a wonderful way to relax and discuss with my guide our plans for the next few days.

Reflecting the past

Aksum, with its downtrodden hotels, shops and bars, doesn't reveal much religious or cultural heritage. But imagining the past is not difficult at the Northern Stelae Park, a collection of ancient obelisks about a half-mile from the center of town.

Each obelisk is constructed from a single piece of granite and symbolizes the power and authority of one of the country's many past rulers. Some are more than 70 feet tall and around 1,700 years old; some are carved with impressions of windows, doors, even doorknockers.

Adjoining the obelisk park, near the Church of St. Mary of Zion, is a small chapel surrounded by a tall wire fence and a locked gate. While about half of Ethiopians are Muslim, roughly a third follow the Ethiopian Orthodox church, with many of its beliefs and rituals linked to the Old Testament. And legend holds that this chapel contains the original Ark of the Covenant, which, according to the Old Testament, was built to hold the tablets of law that God gave to Moses.

However, only local holy men are allowed inside the courtyard and the chapel, raising the question: Is the Ark really there?

An inquiry to a priest receives a terse response: "Yes, it is inside."

Foreign scholars may doubt the claim. But the message is clear: Don't annoy him or embarrass yourself by asking to see it.

Faith built of stone

If Aksum has a history shrouded in mystery and folklore, then Lalibela is a breath of fresh air for visitors, figuratively and literally. This community of about 9,000, perched at 8,000 feet in the rugged Lasta Mountains, is home to what many believe is one of Africa's most extraordinary man-made creations: 11 churches carved out of bedrock in the 12th century. According to folklore, King Lalibela, after whom the area is named, was directed by God in a dream to construct the churches, hewing them by hand out of solid rock. Each church is unique and offers visitors a glimpse into rules and rituals of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.

Amid high ceilings and murals filled with artists' renditions of wide-eyed icons, priests and parishioners sing and chant to music provided by drums and sistrums (rattle-like noisemakers with loosely held rods). Priests periodically step out from the "Holy of Holies," a special room only they can enter, to walk among the faithful with candles and burning incense, or to read from a holy book. At the conclusion, priests stand at the doorway and bid the faithful goodbye, touching each person's head and heart with an ornate cross.

The most moving experience of my three days in Lalibela was thumbing through an 800-year-old Ethiopian Orthodox book. Brightly painted images of the Christ child, the Virgin Mary and various saints and angels adorn the left-hand pages; small, hand-written script in Ethiopic (also known as Ge'ez), an ancient language still spoken by priests and holy men, fills the right.

Cut from goatskin parchment, the pages are slightly uneven, emitting a faint aroma of incense mixed with a musty odor of sweat and dust. The edges are worn and blackened from daily use by the priest and his countless predecessors at the 12th-century Na'akuto La'ab church, on the outskirts of Lalibela.

A river and religion

I traveled onward to Bahar Dar, a city of about 100,000 on the southern shore of the 1,400-square- mile Lake Tana. On my hotel veranda, weaver birds — known for their basketball-size nests — dart between tables, looking for leftover crumbs from freshly baked rolls. Later that day, during a seven-hour excursion on the lake to visit 16th- through 18th-century monasteries, the pilot steered our small motorboat toward a river whose muddy banks sloped down several feet into dense reeds. That tributary, about 50 yards wide, is the source of the Blue Nile, which flows several hundred miles to the city of Khartoum in Sudan, merges with the White Nile and then flows through Sudan and Egypt, finally spilling into the Mediterranean Sea.

The pilot cut the engine and the noise suddenly gave way to serene silence. "Look, right there," he said in deeply accented English. Barely 10 yards away were seven hippopotamuses, including what appeared to be a newborn.

A walled city

Traveling onward to eastern Ethiopia, the country's past and present became even clearer for me in the thousand-year-old walled city of Harar, a place rich in Islamic culture.

Travel writer Paul Theroux, in his book "Dark Star Safari: Overland From Cairo to Cape Town," described Harar as "one of the great destinations in Africa, for its exoticism, its special kind of fanaticism and its remoteness ... unique in its languages and customs."

Exotic? Certainly. Fanatic people? Some. Remote? Absolutely. Worth the hassle? Definitely.

It's easy to believe local claims that Harar is the fourth holiest Muslim city after Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem. It has the most mosques per square mile of any city in the world — 99 within the 1-½ square miles of the walled town — and eight more in the sprawling community outside the wall.

My guide, Endale, led me through narrow alleys to a Koranic school. Children, seated three or four to a desk, were exuberantly singing songs. Their instructor, a bearded man in his 60s, used a wooden tablet, probably like that of his predecessors during the last 1,000 years.

At Ras Tafari House, I saw the home of the former Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, who ruled until 1974. It's now occupied by a holy man who doubles as a healer, sleeping by day and, according to a hand-scrawled sign out front, curing by night anything from cancer to hemorrhoids to mental illness.

As I left Harar, I wondered how an estimated 130,000 Muslims and Christians in this city have peacefully lived side-by-side for generations.

Back home, I'm still grappling with that question and many others about Ethiopia. Does the Ark of the Covenant still exist? If so, was I only mere yards from it? And why does that man risk his life every night to feed wild hyenas?

The answers to those and many other questions, as Tafesse, the former national tourism minister, says, lie somewhere in Ethiopia's "checkered, illustrious and tumultuous history."

Dean R. Owen is a freelance writer and works for Federal Way-based World Vision.