Millennium Village: Koraro
Mekelle, Ethiopia. I am blown away by this country. Easily the most beautiful place I’ve been in Africa. Mekelle is an hour’s flight north, northeast of Addis, in the highlands. The terrain is jagged, with giant red rocks – like the landscape in Moab; the fields are green and lush from a month of rain. There are stone walls everywhere: around growing fields and along the sides of the mountains. Retaining walls to halt erosion. The rounder hills are terraced and although some in our group insisted that the terracing was natural, it seemed man made, and a combination of ancient and more recent stones placed by people with a great appreciation for beauty and symmetry. I feel such an affinity for this place. It seems mystical.
The people are beautiful and decorated with beads and silver amulets, woven shawls, hairbands that look to be of feathers but are really dyed wool. There are sheep, cows, camels, donkeys and miniature ponys ambling about. And there are runners. Serious runners training in the highlands. We saw several racing by as we made the 3-hour trek to our lodge. It was pouring rain for the first hour and our driver was speeding along around switchbacks, veering into the left lane, passing on blind curves. Portia screamed a couple of times. I was sitting side-saddle in the overcrowded jeep and couldn’t see the danger. The Chinese professor, sitting in the front seat, admonished Portia, noting that in his country people don’t complain about a situation unless they are ready to fix it themselves. I said, in my country when my life is in danger I scream like a maniac.
None of the cars have seatbelts, it seems. And we were packed in – with two in the front, 3 in the back seat and 4 of us twisted around on the bench-like seats in the very back. When we stopped for something – don’t remember what, I found a car with just slightly more room – only two people (both women) in the back bench section, so I joined them. It was a long trek to the lodge – a kind of eco-tourism place with beautiful stone out-buildings where the sleeping quarters were. Several were round; I was a little disappointed that mine wasn’t. But it was so completely charming. A desk (really just a wooden shelf with a chair, facing out the screened window onto the rocky cliffs, a bed done in white and yellow striped duvet, and a low wicker easy chair that was really more like a sideways basked on the floor.
The Koraro cluster is an hour away from our hotel along a very bumpy, muddy road. Lots of very large puddles and mud patches and one of our SUVs got completely stuck and had to be dug out.
The people were beautiful; the intensity of their gaze, almost hypnotizing. Kids crowded around us, seemingly comfortable with strangers. It was frustrating not to be able to communicate with them. We saw a number of big projects there – irrigation, walls to prevent erosion, water collection. The area is drought prone but they’ve made great strides in maintaining year-round access to water. And the land that was a moonscape at one time, as I recall from Sonia’s pictures when she went to Koraro in 2005 or maybe 2006. But dramatic, mystically beautiful. The huge red rocks and natural arches and turrets remind you of Sedona. And in many ways, the way of life – goat herding, teraced farming, making buildings out of stone, painting symbols on their foreheads – seems as if it hasn’t changed.
The little boys had most of their head shaved except for a little round or square patch right on top. The shaving is apparently to get rid of lice; the patch of hair is because in their mythology when angels come to take them to heaven, the angels grab them by the hair on top of their heads.
