Moving Mountains by Claire Bertschinger

Author:Claire Bertschinger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Ethiopia
Publisher: For the Benefit of Mr. Kite
Published: 2004-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

11

Epidemic

For the six months I was in Maichew we stayed in a hostelry in the village. It was a single-storey building with walls made from mud, dung and straw, and painted white on the outside. It was used mostly by truck drivers and I was fascinated to see the local girls enter one room at night and leave another in the morning. ‘Comforting the drivers’ was accepted as completely normal. Our rooms were each the size of a horsebox, with the doors opening on to the outside courtyard. They were just big enough for a bed, chair and bedside table – there were no cupboards or shelves. I kept most of my things in a suitcase, although I banged a nail into the door for my toilet bag and hung a small mirror beside it. There was no glass in the window, just an ill-fitting wooden shutter. A lone 15-watt light bulb lit my surroundings, but when the generator failed (which it did frequently), or once when I changed it for a 60-watt bulb and fused the entire hotel, three candles worked almost as well. I regularly sprayed the vivid green walls with insecticide but apparently without effect, largely I suspect because I was being bitten by fleas that I picked up in the centre.

A woman collected the water for the hostelry from a well in town and carried it in a big earthenware container on her back. Water for washing in my room was brought in a bucket by the cook, and the supply was irregular. Sometimes we got what looked like ditch water to wash in and sometimes nothing at all. When the supply ran out, we’d bring water in jerry cans from the feeding centre. I became used to standing in a small washing-up bowl filled with cold water and, if I was lucky, a splash of the cook’s water which he kept on the boil for tea. I soon worked out an efficient strip-wash routine using minimum water. However the other hostelry in town boasted ‘hot shower for fifty cents’. We’d warn the owner that we were coming the day before so that he could buy wood, and then Helen, Max and I would all go over together to drink sweet tea and play Yahtzee, cards or I-Spy while taking it in turns to shower. It was the highlight of the week. Just the pull of a string made the hot water fall from the tank into the tiny, smelly wooden cubicle alive with spiders. Mmm, it was good.

The smell of ammonia from our hostelry’s latrines was so pungent that my eyes watered and smarted whenever I went near them. The locals didn’t always use the hole, so you’d have to negotiate turds in the dark, careful not to touch the shit-smeared wall. When Hans-Peter and I both got severe food poisoning, using those latrines was no joke. It happened one night when we were offered tripe instead of the usual goat meat with our nightly injera.

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