Bet Giorgis (St George's Church)




The priest in most of the churches was happy to pose. "Elvis" here insisted on wearing sunglasses to protect his eyes from the flash.


From the plane back to Gondar

An indication of how underemployed at work I am is that I have nothing really to say about it. I’m still waiting for the college to select the instructors who will work with the Cluster Unit on the in-service programme, and keep getting told that it will be “soon”.

Gill and I have used some of the slack time to get serious about what we will do when we return to the UK. We spent most of a day working on our CVs, have signed up for various automatic email education job alerts and looked carefully at a few advertised education-related jobs on the internet.

If we can’t work because there’s little of value to do then we might as well do something for ourselves. We went to the town of Lalibela over the weekend; flying there on Friday morning and returning on Sunday afternoon. Vincent, a visiting lecturer in Physics from UMIST who is spending a couple of weeks at Gondar University, came with us. Lalibela has been described as one of the wonders of the world, and the most remarkable thing about it is that it is almost completely unknown by most people outside of Ethiopia. What Lalibela is famous for is its rock-hewn churches. Created sometime around the 11^th century the churches are the most important site in Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity and one of the most important in all of Christianity. The churches were carved from the bedrock using simple hand tools, probably taking around 25 years and involving 40,000 people. These churches were not built out of blocks of quarried stone, like European cathedrals, but were actually carved as one block from the rock and then hollowed out. To walk around them is really quite amazing. But what really is amazing about Lalibela is that it is a living place of worship. It is not deserted ruins or preserved like a museum, the churches are still operational in a way that hasn’t really changed for hundreds of years. UNESCO are busy constructing a canopy over each cluster of churches to protect them from weathering which meant clambering at times around ugly scaffolding.

We stayed in a cheapish (for Lalibela) hotel after a 40 min flight from Gondar. As long as you know in advance that the prices will all be inflated tourist prices then that’s not so bad, but some of the prices really were silly, especially for Ethiopian food which wasn’t really up to much compared to what we know is good. We joined a group of Ferenji tourists with an official guide, Berhan, and went round two clusters of churches on the Friday afternoon and the remaining cluster on Saturday morning. The sense of awe I had about the churches was a bit dampened by having to pick our way around poor Ethiopians who were attending services or trying to pray. The tourism brings in much needed money, but as far as I could find out local people don’t benefit directly which surely has to be sorted out. Why can’t some of the entrance fee for the churches (200 birr per person!) go directly to organizations or activities which benefit local people instead of all going to the church?

Lalibela is one of those places that you “must” visit if you are in Ethiopia. My preference is always for wild places, natural history, etc but it has been a very interesting experience to wander round Lalibela. It’s certainly impressive, but somehow not quite as impressive as I imagined. After living and working here for a year and a half the Ethiopian setting, the poverty and the traditional way of life held no novelty value for me, which would be a big factor in the overall Lalibela experience for any tourist. Developing a cold (yes, a cold) while I was there didn’t help. Vincent was good company and had some interesting views from his perspective as a short-stay visitor.