Entoto Mountain

by Jennifer Dickinson
Tuesday, August 18, 2008

After lunch, we headed up Entoto mountain. The people we worked with minister to the people on the mountain who have HIV and who have gone to live up on the mountain because they believe drinking from the lake will cure their sickness. The project works with them, tricking them into taking their antivirals by having them swallow their pills with the “healing water.” The goal is to keep these people alive.

A light rain had begun to fall after we made our first stop and by the time we got further up the mountain, it was a typical Ethiopian deluge-- the kind that makes you wish you were huddled under a mountain of blankets in a fire-warmed cabin. Instead, we were eight women trudging up a mountain covered by brightly-colored umbrellas, holding the hands of our guides so as not to slip down the muddy mountain.

There’s no way to prepare for what we would see. No Oprah special or Anderson Cooper hour, no book that details poverty in excruciating detail. We stopped in on a family in a two room hut. Their child had a runny nose and was barefoot and smiling. They invited us in and asked for prayer for the older woman in the 2nd room. She was very sick. They slept on the ground, under a few blankets. No running water, no place to eat, no sight of food at all. No electricity. We gave the little girl a lollipop and she stared up at us with wide, curious eyes. As with every child we’d made contact with in Ethiopia, I wanted to scoop her up and take her home.

The next stop was a hut that’s the size of my living room in my apartment which, by the way, I regularly lament is way to small. There was only one woman in the hut and she explained that ten people pay $1.50 a month to sleep there. It was dark and like the hut we’d seen before, had a tin roof and the ground was covered in blanketed pallets. The woman had a bright smile. She looked to be in her fifties, but could have easily been in her thirties as the combination of HIV and never having food is good at aging a person.
This is when I lost it. If anyone knows me, they know that when I cry, it’s usually never just a few tears spilling down my cheeks. My chin quivers, and well, I sob.

I fought hard not to do this and the awesome news is, I won. I thought: “Jennifer, how would you feel if someone came inside your apartment in Silver Lake and started sobbing because it was small and depressing?” I bit my tongue. I pushed my eyebrows up my forehead, a trick that I discovered in Ethiopia is very good at sending tears away. I hugged the woman. We thanked her for letting us come in her house. She said she didn’t need prayer because she is doing well. God is good. We moved on to the next place.