Orthodoxy and Coffee

Megaphone prayers wake roosters in Yirga Cheffe. The roosters wake the sleeping farmers in their mud-walled houses or stick-sided round huts with thatch roofs that meet at a pointed tip like the pinch of a soft-serve cone. In the whitening light of morning, the air still clear, the farmers shuffle barefoot to add just enough dry wood to the still-warm embers. Another fire, another day.

As the metallic droning beats its clumsy fist against the new morning, the blue smoke builds against the thatch roofs’ crispy layers, spiraling to the apex, then back down until the hut cannot hold it and the exhale seeps through cracks and beneath the overhang of stick wall and roof. This initial, reliable first breath rises, almost simultaneously with the thousands of other huts and, along with the prayers like moans from a wounded deaf priest, fill the valley space between steep ridges patterned in heavy banana leaves, flowering coffee branches, eucalyptus, mango, avocado, and hardwoods. By the time the sun peels open the white sky behind the straight ridge-line, the air is blue and the ground coffee has been dropped into the boiling water of the black kettle set directly onto smoking coals, and the people, covered against the 2000-meter chill by white shawls and sweatshirts, have drank their cups with sugar and now move into the day.

I came here to see the source of coffee, the backyard gardens where families tend a few coffee trees on their property, a parcel that, throughout the nation, averages about 0.1 hectare in size. But on my first morning here, I follow the nerve-spiking voice. It takes me up a small hill, through a gate where forms covered in white shawls kneel, faces to the ground at the base of the compound’s fence or beside eucalyptus roots. Like piles of white sheets left out for laundry collection, the worshippers curl over themselves throughout the compound and up to the edges of the round ornate temple.

At an open door I stop. A man stands covered in a white robe from neck to feet, a similarly dressed assistant beside him holding an oversized book open at chest level. The first man’s mouth moves in unison with the now deafening noise coming from the megaphones wired to the temple’s eaves. The man seems too small, thin, and soft to be the source of such mind-numbing, mechanical, and almost inhuman emanations.

The next night I wake in the early morning covered in silence. I have to listen to it through the darkness to make sure it is silence and to remember what it sounds like and that it exists. Noise means life and happiness here so only at the deepest point of sleep, when the day’s fire has retreated into a core heat incubated by ash and before it is fanned back to life with the new day’s wood, is silence permitted.

Now I imagine the coffee trees beneath the curving false banana leaves. The cherries have been picked - harvest season was last month - and they now sit, dried, in sacks. The farmers wait for the price to rise one birr (10 cents) per kilo. This is the rich time of year when 100 kilo sacks sit like bank accounts surrounded by fallen, rotting mangos, and still-sleeping roosters, subdued by silence.