Meskerem
September used to be one of my favorite months. I associate it with the smell of fresh cut grass, sweaty leather, team bonding, clean notebooks, crisp air, excitement over the new (scholastic) year, and reuniting with friends. Strangely, this pattern did not end after graduation. Fall has always been a time of new beginnings for me; a time for travel, sports, new places and friends.Since 2001, of course, September has had more melancholy and troubling associations. It's strange to think that of the first 4 anniversaries of 9.11.01, I have been out of the country for 2 (Australia in 2002 and now Ethiopia.) Stranger still has been the notable compassion I've encountered from people while travelling, in Australia and already in Ethiopia, on the commemoration of this tragic date.
There was--and continues to be--such an outpouring of compassion and sympathy from the international community towards us, while like a spoilt child, our nation acts as if we have been the only ones so wronged in history and goes to beat up on old enemies and create new holes of despair, as if to complement, nurse and isolate our pain.
It has come up in conversation here because the Ethiopian New Year is September 11th. Meskerem is a common female name here; it means September, a month of celebration and renewal. It is also the end of the rainy season, when Ethiopia explodes in flowers and new growth. Ethiopia has its own dating system, as it never switched to the Georgian calendar. Today in Ethiopia it is August (or Month 12) 26th, 1997. September 1st (11th) is their New Year and a major celebration. By their reckoning, I'm still in high school! God help me...
People have taken the initiative to come up to me and ask me what I will be doing that day, and how sorry they are that their day of celebration is also a day of mourning (as if this were something under their control!) Each one told me what exactly they were doing when they first heard of the 9.11 attacks. Z. said, "I was lifting food into my mouth when I saw the plane on TV; and I stopped, and thought that it was the end of civilization."
And I thought, me too, not only because of the attacks, but because of what I and many others feared would follow in their wake (and we were not, sadly, wrong thus far.)
posted by Margot @ 2:47 AM
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