Sunrises in Ethiopia

We have seen so many sunrises this trip. Every one is unique, often their setting tells a new story. One thing new that we have gained from sunrises of Asia and Africa is a desire to live life near a mosque - to hear daily the Muslim ‘call to prayer.’ Sunrise, sunset and prayer fit. Song and chant, bellow and howl fit the breaking and closing of day.

People are pious here in Ethiopia. Calls to prayer last a long time.

Most places, the singing verse and howls of prayer signify day break and the waking of a city or town. There are few other sound save the crow of the cocks and the blurting of donkeys. Addis Ababa if different. Addis mixes prayer with the end of night.

If my hometown, New Orleans, was half Muslim like Addis, it would likely wake up the same as this city does - mixing Imens’ howls with a muffled drone of fading dancehalls and occasional street crackles from the last patrons’ revelry. As night haunts wind down, mixing pulses quietly provoke the early dawn light along with mosques and church bells, nudging ladies and gentlemen of the night back into the wastes of last night’s streets. They spill out in conversations where fear of the brightening sun sends them scurrying home toward their private shadows at a crack of dawn.
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As I write this, I am reminding myself what a city person I am. I have loved being in small towns. I love other places, rural places, too, where morning prayers wake up first roosters, rising cantonances with the holy sounds until the mutual efforts of guarding the earth sweep out above the mountains and across valleys in dulling muted harmonies. Cadences when so muted, whisper of our lot shared together. Why does the image of Jesus on a cross have this rooster crowing? What about our rooster causes no alarm?
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Here in Addis, in the heart of this Ancient country’s hundred year capital, as the prayers whirl into a morning din that is mixing bus engines, wild birds, rising human movements, and early conversation, I am always being reminded of my natural embrace of urbanity.

This morning, like most mornings, I think of other people like me. I remember friends and family when it occurs to me what they might like, what they would want to see, how differently we might approach a place. One of my favorite people to think of these past months as we pass through all these capitals of human urbanity is David, my stepfather.

David and my Mom would both wake up like me before sunrise, before the call to prayer. My mother would wake, greet anyone else awake, then energetically push off for one or two hours of hiking the cities. She would go everywhere and greet anyone - up the hills, around the ports and seashores. David would sit here in this bench seat - observing, smiling, watching and listening.

Public sound, public actions, public behaviors - for society we should engage fully and heartily in each. When night people and church people, roosters and donkeys, bird song and tree breeze come together as public routine the world is happier and peace is more easily achievable. Work for peace.