The Road to Gimbie Letters

09/25/01

Dear Family and Friends,

We are here in Addis for just a couple of days to pick up a visting Dr. Saunders and his wife. They will be out to Gimbie for just a few days. We are also here picking up two other doctors who are volunteering at our hospital for a couple of months. One of them is Ob/Gyn and the other is internal medicine. It will be great to have them all out here. We are also here to pick up our plane tickets for our vacation in November. We are hoping that our flights will not be cancelled since so many flights have been cancelled to America.

We left Gimbie at 5:00 a.m. to come to Addis. It was cold, dark and everything was dripping wet from the rain the night before and all was enveloped in a thin layer of fog. As we bounced our way up the main street of Gimbie toward going out of town, the only thing on the streets were a few dogs. We didn't see any hyenas this time. The next two hours went smoothly as the sky slowly began to lighten straight ahead. We go straight east as we travel from Gimbie to Addis. When the sun finally peeked its rays over the hills ahead, the road shimmered as the ruts down the middle were filled with rain from the night before. The road is very hilly, and as we descended into each misty, fog-blanketed valley, we felt as if we were entering into another world. As the sun came up, we noticed smoke rising through the grass-roofed round huts as people were about cooking their morning breakfast inside their single-roomed houses. Since the fog and mist were so thick, it seemed as it was arising from the roofs of the huts. The sweet smell of eucalyptus wood burning began to replace the smell of the rain-soaked leafy smell that was present when we first left Gimbie.

Suddenly the 10-year-old Land Cruiser that we had swerved and we came to a sudden stop: a blown tire. As we put the spare on, which happened to be larger than the other tires, we began to hope that this bald piece of rubber would last the next hour until we reached the nearest town where we could get the tire repaired.

By this time we began to see glimpses of people out in the misty fields, boys tightly wrapped in their gabis trying to ward off the morning chill, as they nudged their herds of long-horned cows out into the fields to eat grass. Women, on their way to unseen markets, bent double with their heavy burdens on their backs, sometimes with fruit or vegetables, often with huge loads of firewood on their backs. These women walking slowly, women of all ages from seven to seventy with bundles of sticks, faces looking uncomfortable with strain of their heavy loads.

There were very few other vehicles other than our car at first. Later we were joined by an occasional overloaded, lumbering, snorting bus with black smoke billowing out of the exhaust pipe. As we neared the first major town, we then saw strings of heavily loaded donkeys trotting along the side of the road followed by young men with sticks, keeping them moving. Out in the now more frequent fields on either side of the road we began to see farmers with their plows being pulled through the moist earth by the same type of long-horned cows that dominate the life of farmers here. Occasional troupes of monkeys would scatter as they saw our truck come thundering down the road.

We were almost to the nearst town, Nekempte, when the truck swerved and skidded to a stop. The spare had blown. Fortunately there was a taxi that had come out to this place, just having dropped off a person on his way to work at a factory that was on the outskirts of Nekempte. We hailed the rattly little car and it came over. We took off the punctured tire, put it in the trunk of the taxi and then the driver of our truck went into town to have the tire repaired while my wife, our two boys and I stayed in the truck to wait his return. We soon attracted a friendly crowd of curious children on their way to school. I used my extremely limited vocabulary in the Oromo language to greet some of them. This sent whispers and titters through the crowd of kids, and as each new child arrived to peek into the car at us and the other children would tell these newcomers word-for-word what the faranji (foreigner) said. Finally, our driver came back with the repaired tire. We then drove into town and had the other tire repaired while we went to a hotel to have our stretched bladders relieved. There are only two or three places along this twelve-hour journey where toilets exist. Stopping by the side of the road is what the local people do when they need to use the toilet, but the sight of a faranji stopped by the side of the road draws a crowd within minutes, a difficult environment in which to relieve one's self. We have been traveling for 4 1/2 hours now and we have finally reached paved road. The road will be paved all the way to Addis now. A good thing, too, as the car keeps pulling to the right and we see the reason why. We have broken two of the three leaf springs on the front right side of the car due to the jouncing and bouncing. The road to Gimbie is not always an easy one for vehicles or back sides.

Along the road we catch glimpses of other things as we thunder along the now paved section of road. Road kill here is different than would be seen where I grew up in LA. Here we see a Cerval cat, there a mongoose. We slow frequently along our journey to wind our way through herds of cattle, goats, donkeys and people, all of whom use the road more frequently than cars and buses. None of these obstacles has the least fear of the cars and trucks that come banging down the road. We come upon a family of baboons leisurely ambling across the road, the huge dominant male eyeing us sullenly as we edge our way by his family.

The hours blend into each other as hill after hill and field after field arise beside us and disappear in the rearview mirror. Sprinkled along the road are small villages consisting of five or six buildings along the side of the road, naked little children standing out in front of some of them waving at our car as we pass, excited to see our pale Caucasian faces as we stare back at them through the dust dimmed windows of our car. Here and there we see the remains of Soviet tanks that have broken down by the side of the road in some previous conflict in this country, rusting quietly, never to be moved again, as they are just too heavy.

Finally, we begin to see more frequent villages and then towns as we near the end our our twelve-hour journey to Addis, and then finally we have reached the outskirts of Addis itself. A sea of humanity, walking, flagging down the mini buses that are everywhere, taxis and large buses mix with heavy lorries stacked to the sky with bags of tef or wheat on their way to market. Diesel smoke mixes with dust, horns with screeching brakes and shouting vendors along the sides of the roads. Twelve hours of riding for this.

In three days we will return and appreciate our quiet, albeit isolated, town of Gimbie in rural Ethiopia where the nights are so dark you can touch the stars in the sky and noises you hear are the twitter of birds, braying of donkeys, lowing of cattle and the odd belching croak of the thick billed ravens.

I hope this paints a bit of a verbal picture of the Road to Gimbie. There is more to tell, but it is late and tomorrow is a long day.

Sincerely in Christ,

Nick, Phosfe, Christopher and Ian Walters