Chapter Eighteen
The Ethiopian farmers basically have only two tools to work with, a wooden plow pulled by oxen and a hand scythe to cut the crops.
Once the grain was cut, the stalks were gathered together and spread out about one foot deep on a circle of hard-packed level ground. A team of oxen was hitched to a pole in the center of the circle, where their job was to walk over the grain stalks, packing down the pile so that the kernels of grain broke away from the straw. The oxen walked around and around until their job was done.
Now, these oxen weren’t, of course, housebroken so as they circled, they simply did what came naturally to them. One of the lucky farm assistants was assigned the critical job of throwing the fresh manure, with his bare hands, out of the threshing circle. Since it was virtually impossible to clean out the urine, it was simply left in the circle. Eventually the straw, along with the grain, soaked it up.
The farmers removed the piles of grain and straw from the oxen’s circle and threw each one high into the air, further separating the grain from the chaff, then scooped it into bags with their hands. From there it was carried to a storage area, usually heavily infested with rats, until they took it to the mill to be ground into flour.
One afternoon I climbed into the Land Rover and drove to Selek-Leka to buy a few supplies that the farmers needed. The store was a small, one-room building with a tile floor, sitting in front of the storekeeper’s home and the various livestock that he owned. While I was browsing through the store, a small calf wandered in, entering from an open door connected to the back yard. Before the storekeeper noticed the adorable little visitor and had a chance to remove him, the calf left a steaming pile of manure in the middle of the floor. Cursing the calf as he led the bellering animal back outside, the storekeeper grabbed a broom and swept the manure out the back door, leaving behind a dark, moist trail on the floor.
Seconds later, a woman entered the store to buy some salt. In Selek-Leka, the customary way of measuring dry goods was to throw some on the floor and then scoop up the required amount by hand into the buyer’s container. The storekeeper didn’t give it a second thought as he poured some salt on the floor, in exactly the same place where the calf had left his mark, and scooped the appropriate amount of salt into her goat skin bag with his hands. I have a feeling the salt she bought that day may have been a little extra spicy.
The food in Ethiopia may have tasted good but I’ll never know because I never ate it. I was too leery of getting violently ill from the way the food was prepared. One of their most popular dishes, a staple of their diet, was enjara. It looked pretty much like a large, dirty sponge shaped like a pancake.
It’s made from tef, a cereal grain that is very high in nutrients. To make the enjara dough, women collected water from a stagnant pond in the cattle pasture then added in a sourdough started and the tef which had been ground into flour. It formed a thick batter that was allowed to sit so the yeast from the sourdough starter would become active and work its magic.
When everything was ripe and ready to cook, the women used a flat woven basket to gather dry oxen dung, placing the pieces inside the stove and lighting them on fire. Once the dung heated up the stove to the right temperature, they baked the enjara on the stove’s clay top. The batter was poured out, similar to how pancake batter is poured, and covered with a domed lid made from cow manure, clay and straw, to form a make-shift oven.
The bottom edge of the cover flaked off manure into the batter and the droplets of steam collected on the inside of the lid, dripping down and landing back onto the baking enjara. Once properly cooked, the women stacked the enjara onto the same woven basket that they had used to gather the cow dung for the fire. When it came time to eat, a highly spiced stew was ladled onto the center of the enjara and they ripped off pieces from the edge, dipped it into the center mixture and ate it with their fingers. It smelled heavenly. The delicious aroma certainly tempted me, but I held my ground and refused to eat any.
One simmering, Saturday afternoon, my interpreter Waldo Michael wanted to treat me to a drink of homemade beer called tulla. We walked together over to the local refreshment stand, a building built of sticks plastered together with cow manure and straw. We made ourselves comfortable, seated on top of a log. Waldo Michael ordered his tulla and, since I don’t drink beer, I ordered a bottle of Coke. I’m not sure what formula the company uses in the Coke they ship to Africa, but it tastes nothing like the tasty, sugary recipe they use in America. The tulla didn’t look particularly appetizing either. Large particles of something were floating on the drink’s surface and large particles of something else were drifting off toward the bottom of the cup.
I felt pretty safe deciding on a bottled Coke until I saw what came next. The Coke sat in a tub of water scooped from a stagnant pond where cattle had walked and dirty clothes were washed. The water didn’t do much to keep the Coke cold since it sat at room temperature. And that hovered around 105 degrees. This water, too, had large particles of something floating in it. But I had a pretty good idea where those pieces came from.
The storekeeper pulled the Coke bottle out of that tepid bacteria bath and popped the cap off. She wiped the top of the bottle dry with her shama, a long scarf that all the women wear and hardly ever wash. It comes in handy on many occasions; for wiping their hands, blowing their nose, and cleaning their baby’s bottoms. Then she handed the bottle to me.
I had no idea what to do with the Coke. Waldo Michael was watching me so I could not just dump it out. Anyway the dry dirt floor would show exactly where I had poured it. I didn’t want to hurt Waldo Michael’s feelings by not drinking it so, under the circumstances, I did the best I could. I drank the coke without touching the bottle to my mouth. If you think that is easy to do, I challenge you to try it sometime. Waldo Michael kept staring at me until he finally said, “I can’t believe an American doesn’t know how to drink from a bottle.” He had no idea.
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