such great heights…

everything looks perfect from far away.

i’d heard about a church that sat several hundred metres above town, near the top of the highest visible peak.  i hired a local guide, and hiked from high lalibella, higher.  the city sounds faded as we ascended on a rough dirt path.  we passed people moving the other way, their backs laden with dried wood to sell in town.  we stopped, halfway, at a flat plateau, and stood among the whispering wheat, looking at the patchwork of farmed fields thousands of feet below.

we climbed on.  on a long narrow traverse, we met a man who closed the wooden door of a small house carved into the rock wall, and turned towards us.  “old church,” my guide said, “but not the one we seek”.  the man pushed past.

at the top, we shared a church with a priest.  as we left it to start our descent, my young guide kissed the cool stone wall.  we returned to the flat plateau, and  passed a woman sitting outside of her tukul beside her two small children and quarreling with a woman far across the valley.  you could hear the shrill retorts. it must be difficult to get the last word in when you can’t hang up the phone.  the best you could do is to shout some great rejoinder, plug your ears, retreat into  straw walls and smugly lie down.

i am glad i came here, got out of addis.  it made my life larger not just because i got to witness lalibella’s great wonders, on equal footing with siem riep or macchu picchu or  even more since it is still used for its original purpose,  but because i got a chance to see the countryside.  people there are have as little as anywhere else where a large part of the population lacks agency, as in sudan, as in cambodia.  children wearing their only clothes walk thin through their fields, but when they see the dust of a car, they run their  hearts out to get to the road so that they can wave, faces stretched into the widest smiles.

as the land whizzed past our truck, i studied it.  i thought about how these people so far from resources  would make the transition to a future where they would have the machinery to participate in their own future; enough money for food, water, shelter, and medicines to prevent premature infectious morbidity.    field after field with wheat or barley or tef and a man whipping his two oxen to stay in straight lines, a sharp plow furrowing the ground, a continent away a population debating whether twitter was enhancing discourse, or diminishing it.  as far as i could see, my eye could see, there was no industry, no ore or petroleum nearby that could be pulled up, its energy magnified with ours to twenty times its worth.

every scrap of land was used, the ground clean of dried wood even high into the mountains.   the mountains, though, were dotted with green.  it is forbidden to chop a tree down for fuel.  one has to use only the dead wood, what the ground provides.  when one flies over british columbia’s shorn mountains, or alberta’s tar sands with a million gallons of fresh water flowing in and coming out dirty, one wonders whether there is a wisdom in the enunciation of ife i saw passing so quickly by, one that was once ours, and might be ours again to learn.

***

i encourage you to read an article by george monbiot, and published in the guardian.  i think there is a subtle shift in the psychology of many in the high income world with their responsibility to those who are born into poverty.  a decade ago, there was a belief that spending oceans of money would allow some of it to trickle down and float boats for even the poorest.  it was easy.  business as usual.  we’re doing something by doing nothing.   now with the wisdom of overconsumption in question, i sense a change in belief, one that allows us to keep our actions unexamined, to conduct business as usual, to ignore a true responsibity to those who suffer, then die young.  it is this:  does the world really need any more humans?

there is much to say about the moral corruption of this logic, not least that its primary purpose seems to be to avoid any introspection about one’s own role in climate change, or perpetuating poverty.  but there is more than an ethical argument for understanding one’s place.  as monbiot says that its not the many farmers in the ethiopia who are turning up the heat so rapidly, but it’s actually the rich guy who just fired up his yacht in st. maarten to keep his hottub warm in case he wants to use it later.  in other words it’s not sex, it’s money.  at least that’s good news.   and if we can’t expect to win the ethical argument that amelioriating suffering is a good in itself, at least we can point ourselves towards the real problem: the appetite of those of us at the table who have already have more than enough.    check it here.

patchwork fields

met a man who closed the wooden door of a small house carved into the rock wall, and pushed past us

..at the top we shared the church with a priest...