KRIS SWALES
THERE COMES A TIME, WHEN WE HEED A CERTAIN CALL...
If you were to sum up my life with a Hall & Oates song right now, it'd be Out Of Touch. I'm bang on six weeks into a stint of overseas travel, comfortably ensconced in my own life's travails and not much else since somewhere around Day Five.
As far as world events go, I know that Margaret Thatcher died, Christopher Pyne wants to rebrand Australian History text books as the White Pages, Terry Campese is finally back from a knee injury for the Canberra Raiders, and Daft Punk weren't really trolling the world when they announced that their new album would be launched in Wee Waa. (Though Human After All was surely a troll, right guys?)
As for music + finger + pulse? Forget about it. I slept on the release of Underworld frontman Karl Hyde's (actually quite decent) solo album by a week - unthinkable in the real world. Then I lost my iPhone (Contents: 149 albums, including more Fiona Apple and Todd Rundgren than can possibly be good for you) in a crowd surge at a football match in Casablanca, so it's now just me and my internal monologue. Terrifying stuff, I assure you.
There is a point here, and it begins in Africa - Ethiopia, to be precise. After interviewing refugees from Eritrea and Sudan at a Swiss asylum seeker centre a couple of years back, I got it in my head that I wanted to see the places these people had fled from. Given the Smart Traveller website had them on the Do Not Travel list when the time came, and bordering Ethiopia offered a visa on arrival, it seemed the next logical choice.
Disclosure: my knowledge of the country before landing didn't go far beyond South Park's Starvin' Marvin and the tattered 45 of We Are The World that I've had in my collection since 1985.
That clip had a profound effect on me as a seven-year-old burgeoning music nerd, trying to ID all of the singers whenever it screened on TV. And footage of starving Ethiopian children, my age and younger, was a staple part of the evening news diet for months before and many months after. It was probably the first time I became aware that not everywhere was like Australia, and that life in green, leafy Woodridge was actually pretty damn sweet.
I landed in Addis Ababa with a vague plan of finding rappers or street artists who were born during the famines of the '80s; to ask them how that had influenced their work. Vague plan, sadly, was a little too vague.
What I did find, however, was a super-educated middle class living in a city with new buildings spewing out of the ground everywhere you turn, and abject poverty never far from view.
I also found the green, leafy substance known as chat.
My first encounter occurred in the passenger seat of a mini-bus making its way south from Gonder, 550km north of Addis, to the lakeside town of Bahir Dar. At one of our last stops, a tout with terrible teeth tried to sell me a bag of said substance, helpfully informing me that it was "food". The driver shook his head: "Drug."
This, of course, was the same driver who an hour earlier had been picking the stems off the very same leaves before chewing on them. Considering that in a previous life I'd held the steering wheel from the passenger side while my driver pulled bongs on the Toowoomba to Brisbane run, I still felt I was in the safe hands of a trained professional.
A chat crop being tended next door to a heritage-listed 17th century monastery.
The next day, I was schlepping around the Blue Nile Falls area under the harsh midday sun and quizzed my guide, Kassa, about the chat crops we walked through.
The way he described its effects, I can only conclude that chat is the trucker's speed of Ethiopia, with trace elements of cocaine for good measure. It makes you more confident; it makes you sweat; it's useful for studying and slimming; it makes you want to drink your bodyweight in beer and dribble bullshit with your friends.
It also makes you think about God too much if you take a lot, which is one of the reasons why the forty-something Kassa hung up his chatting boots. He got that same slightly wistful, slightly haunted look talking about getting on the chat as I do when I recall my long distant days of getting on the chomp.
Solidarity brother - what doesn't kill you only makes you stronger. Eventually.
Given the size of nearby Lake Tana, which feeds into the Blue Nile Falls, and the general richness of the farmland in the area, I asked Kassa about the famines in the 1980s - specifically, whether this area was hit hard as well. He says it wasn't, and that they were lucky, but that many people made the pilgrimage here by foot from the drought-stricken areas to the north.
He was only a boy when it happened, but remembers it well. Impossibly skinny people dropping dead as they walked. Left to rot where they fell because their families had no means of giving them a proper burial. Carrion birds feasting on the remains. Some of the refugees couldn't see when they arrived, blinded by the desert heat, and even when fed and watered they didn't survive.
Kassa's family took three children into their straw and mud brick home, where they stayed for a year until foreign aid money finally arrived and conditions in the north had improved. It was in his family's Christian nature to help, he said. "If I had three shirts, I'd give away two."
All of this was delivered with the same fire that we'd have talking about a defining life moment, like finally getting the girl or being at the ground when our team won the premiership. Then he stopped suddenly, laid down a thousand mile stare for a few seconds, said "come on", and motioned for us to continue.
Three days later, I was lunching in a seafood restaurant just north of Tangier, looking across the Mediterranean as storm clouds gathered over the Rock of Gibraltar. In one of those coincidences that you probably think writers make up because it's convenient (Disclaimer: I'm totally not making this up), the restaurant's playlist jumped from Elton John's Sacrifice to George Michael's Faith... to We Are The World.
After that reminder from The Universe that I'm not just an arsehole, but an extremely lucky one, I forced down every last piece of pasta in my oversized bowl.
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