Yip yip. Duuuu-op. Snarlyip! "If you lose your hand to this, I'll never forgive you!" I think to myself just before the hyena lunges forward and takes the strip of beef off the short stick I'm holding at about eye-level. Juice from the meat runs down my hand and worries me. I don't want the dogthings to get confused. I'm crouched on a tablecloth-like fabric next to the Christian Hyenaman of Harar. He pulls another piece of meat out of a gory wicker basket and holds it over my shoulder. Two full-grown hyenas lunge at it and ram into my collarbone. It's like being hit with two, heavy, hairy, sides of beef. Under their rough coats, the hyenas are solid muscle. Oddly, the don't smell nearly as much as I thought they would.
I stand and the animals circle around me, nonthreateningly. I watch the juvenile. He's even stranger looking than the others. His upper lip curls back and he "sings" constantly as the older ones inevitably fight their way to more of the food. He sounds almost like a baby shrilly cooing.
"This girl sing like that lady!" My friend Bethlehem says to the men laying in her living room. "Sing that lady!" Bethlehem says so I sing a few bars of a very popular, considered "new" here, Celine Dion song that she dared me to learn. I receive a spattering applause and two offers of chat. We drink strong coffee. Then one of the men that I thought had dozed off turns towards us and asks, "Sing again maybe?" and I get Bethlehem to sing an Oromo song instead. We sit there in the incense-filled air and clap along.
"We want to sing out there but we don't want to." One of my "unofficial choir" members says. I ask for a show of hands and everyone agrees. There are about twenty of us. Most of the choir consists of young women who have never done any kind of performance in public. In fact, it's probably pretty fair to say that many of the people in front of me have been given that old "seen not heard" line pretty effectively throughout their lives.
An idea, perhaps the Spirit's, comes to me and I smile. "Well I'm On My Way!" I sing. It is the first line of a call and response song that I taught them. They sing the line back with gusto. "Off to Canaan Land!" I sing back, moving towards the door. Soon we are marching towards the center of campus. People join in just to see what we are doing. We sing carols in front of the campus fountain. I direct them with a pen I had in my pocket.
A policeman comes and stands behind us, just watching. They keep singing. Class is dismissed and hundreds of people walk by. They keep singing. A whistle blows. And we stop along with everyone else while the flags are lowered. A whistle blows again and motion resumes. I realize that it is twilight. They still want to sing. I feel so proud of them, it's ridiculous. I can't wait to take them to sing for the nuns and patients in Dire Dawa on the 24th.
Children in Batti and the orphanage know my name now and they know it because I sing. I sing to shut them up when they keep asking for money. I sing with them because I have nothing else to do. When I hear them call "ee-i-ee-i-oh" from "Old McDonald Had a Zoo" ("farm" didn't really work here) to each other I hope that maybe I even managed to teach them an English word or two. Sometimes they beg for song now instead of candy or birr. It is an odd sort of begging, but I don't mind it. I'm just glad I got a chance to be part of all of the music. It's nice and it's maybe even something to write a blog entry about.
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