Weren't You Afraid

Following the graduation ceremony, we spent some time with the particular graduate who had invited us (more on him later) and then continued our journey north. The next stop was the most famous tourist spot in all of Ethiopia – the rock hewn churches of Lalibela (Google/Wikipedia it if you want to check them out).

In general, the roads thus far in the trip had been very nice, that is, recently paved and not too many potholes yet. However, given that the “leader” of the trip optimistically underestimated the travel time, it became apparent that we were not going to make it to our destination before sundown (it is much more dangerous to drive in the countryside after dark because you can’t see the people, animals, obstacles or road conditions very well). So, while driving through the mountains, we began looking for a random place to camp.

After finding a perfect place near the road, a crowd of curious Ethiopians quickly gathered. We hired one teenager to be our guard for the night (with the promise of payment in the morning). He was very helpful to us, such as bringing us a couple burning sticks from his village’s fire so that we could cook our dinner. Word spread of the strange foreigners who set up these brightly colored houses in so-and-so’s land. The place was beautiful, looking down into the valley, right next to a stream with the sound of a very nice waterfall to lull us to sleep.

We all slept well, occasionally waking up to the sound of the rain that passed in the middle of the night. All in all, it was a pretty uneventful camping experience, though that may be attributed to God’s grace. For in the morning, our friend Nate crawled out of his tent first to find a crowd having already gathered as spectators. The very first question he was asked was “Weren’t you afraid of the hyenas that live down by the stream?” Hmmmm…now is a fine time to make us aware of the fact that we set up our camp right next to the local hyena home! I really would like to see a live hyena (we saw one that was road kill), but I would rather not have them poking their hungry teeth through my nylon tent. Nevertheless, God protected us from the hyena family, maybe they were on vacation too…hopefully far away.