Ethiopia

May 26 to June 10, 2008

Ethiopia was one of the hardest trips I've done, just because of the language barrier. I did my best to learn a bit of Amharic before leaving, but I was basically capable of baby talk: "Yes, food, please." "Coffee delicious, thank you!"

I went for the wedding of a friend of mine, Tigist, who was one of my ESL students in Minneapolis back in 2005. I was in Addis Ababa, the capital city, for about two weeks; I had planned to travel around the country a bit, but I ran out of time. First there were wedding preparations, then the church ceremony, the bride's family's celebration, the traditional ceremony, and finally the post-wedding dinner. Getting married in Ethiopia is a serious business.

I don't have a lot of insight to offer about everything I saw; often I wasn't with anyone I could communicate with well enough to ask for an explanation. But it was an interesting place.

Addis is huge - about 3 million people, thought estimates vary. Beggars mingled with well-dressed shoppers in pretty much every neighborhood, and I saw people in everything from full hijab to tank tops with tight jeans. The poverty was worse than anywhere I've ever been, at least on the surface - mostly because there were so many people out on the street with open sores, swollen limbs and other visible health problems that looked like they should be curable, if there were only more medical resources.

My favorite fact about Ethiopia is that it has its own timekeeping systems. Like it's the year 2000 according to the Ethiopian calendar, so there were signs everywhere announcing the new millennium.

Then their clock is six hours off from the rest of the world. They start the day at 6am, when the sun rises, and call it 12:00. When the sun sets at 6pm, it's 12:00 again.

It's actually a perfectly logical and sensible system, though it wouldn't work quite as well once you moved away from the equator and lost that perfect twelve-hour division between "day" and "night."

And it made people think really hard whenever I would ask what time something was, since they would usually try to convert it into non-Ethiopian time. Occasionally they would make a mistake, like when someone told me the church ceremony would start at 2am. In fact, it started at 4am - not too much of an improvement, but at least it was something.

Photographs

Miscellaneous photos

Different scenes from around Addis Ababa.

Church Wedding

This was the first of four ceremonies, the one that began at 4am. It lasted about four hours and involved a lot of incense, a lot of kissing and touching of holy objects, and a lot of chanting in Amharic. The women sat on one side of the church, the men sat on the other, and everyone was dressed in the ghostly traditional white garb that, as far as I know, is common only in Ethiopia.

Gurage ceremony

Even after the church wedding, the bride and the groom continued to stay in separate houses. This was a party for the bride's friends and family only, featuring music and dancing from the Gurage tradition, one of the many ethnic groups in Ethiopia.

Main wedding ceremony and dinner

This one felt the most like a U.S. ceremony, with the traditional white wedding dress, the endless photographs, and the intertwining of arms to feed each other cake. Still, there were some surprises - like the ritual parading of the food through the dinner hall, and the option of raw meat...

Final dinner

Just a few photos from this one, mostly to show the outfits the bride and groom were wearing, which I thought made them look like royalty.

And this one had a different color scheme... If anyone ever asks you to be a bridesmaid or groomsman in an Ethiopian wedding, keep in mind that it requires buying not one outfit, but three.

Disclaimer: I would like to reiterate that I am not a professional photographer, by any means. To be perfectly honest, a few of these shots were taken through bus windows. I post these not because they are brilliant art, but because they are things people might not otherwise get to see. Please keep that in mind, and don't judge me too harshly!