Yesterday was New Years Eve in the Ethiopian Orthodox calendar, which means today is the national holiday known as Enkutatash, the first day of the new year. Last night we stayed up late and rang in Ethiopian 2007. It's also part of the reason this week has been so quiet, since many of the staff took the week off.
I wasn't quite sure what to expect in terms of a celebration for the new year, but my roommates assured me we would do something fun. As a result, I was really disappointed to wake up yesterday morning with a terrible stomach ache. I ended up spending most of the morning in bed and was feeling better enough by the afternoon to do some of the reading up on local teff management techniques and general agronomy. By early evening I'd had enough and I clocked out to spend some time with Brendan and Greg. I'm still waiting for word on the bag containing all of my shirts, so Brendan was kind enough to let me borrow one of his for the night. After discussing our options, we went for dinner and then headed to an asmari bet, an Ethiopian traditional bar. We'd discussed the fact that since it was new years we ran the risk that everyone might be home with their families, celebrating quietly. We were wrong.
An asmari bet is a bar with traditional dancers and a band playing live traditional music. People sit on chairs and benches while hired male and female dancers alternate between dancing in front of everyone on stage, and cruising through the crowd dancing with patrons. People also dance on their own and in groups. I'm told this is also one of the only places women will go out at night, as most regular bars are patronized almost exclusively by men. It's difficult to describe what Ethiopian traditional dancing looks like, but it's difficult and looks really cool. Keep in mind that the steps vary from place to place throughout the country, but here in the North it seems it's mostly in the shoulders and upper body. There's also jumping involved. All the dancers at this spot were incredibly good. I'm still working on my shoulder and footwork.
We hadn't been there more than five minutes before one of the men danced over, took my hand and dragged me up on stage in front of everyone. They then began demonstrating their incredibly fast dance moves, and motioning that I should follow along. Some of the dancers looked like they were trying to dislocate their shoulders in the coolest possible way. Anyway, while we were dancing, the emcees kept up a continuous stream of banter in Amharic, which had the crowd laughing uproariously and clapping. I think I did okay dance-wise but it was definitely a trial by fire initiation to the world of Northern Ethiopian traditional dance. After about 5 minutes I was allowed to go back and sit down, but the dancing continued long into the night. As midnight neared, people seemed to get more and more excited and the tempo began to increase. At about ten to twelve, the dancers on stage started going around and handing everyone lit candles. I briefly considered the fire hazard presented by a hundred and fifty tipsy celebrating young people all waving candles, dancing and jumping in a wooden bar before grabbing my candle and joining in the fun.
A comically large pan with a loaf of bread on it was brought out on stage and cut up and distributed among the dancers who were packing the stage at this point, and then they brought out huge trays of popcorn and turned off the lights so room was dark except for the glow of a hundred candles. The countdown to midnight took the form of a call and response song, and then it was new years! Dancers showered the frenzied sweaty, shoulder-gyrating crowd with popcorn for a few songs, and then the celebrations seemed to be dying down. It was about quarter after midnight, so we switched locations until we found ourselves in another, much smaller asmari bet. There was one musician, a drummer and a singer whose job seemed to be to freestyle traditional songs about different members of the crowd as they were called up to dance. It really made me wish I could understand Amharic because from the way people were laughing I could tell the songs were hilarious. After a while though, we'd had enough and decided it was time to head home, so we tracked down a bijaj, the three wheeled scooters that serve as the local taxi fleet, and called it a night.
I really wished I'd had my camera with me, but regardless I will cherish the memory of my first Ethiopian new year for a long, long time.
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