Religion, photography, and sleep patterns

5:30 am. I'm up - not my customary schedule at home, but increasingly normal here. With all due respect to early the risers I know (Daniel, Jill, Sean), my morning routine is designed to let me get up as close to when I need to leave the house as possible and still get my bowl of cereal eaten and be on time to work. Here, a combination of factors is getting me up -without an alarm - by 6:00 on most days. One factor is that the sun goes down relatively early here, setting by 7:00 most evenings. The evenings are dark (even more so when the power goes out - although it's been quite reliable for a few days...) and relatively quiet.

Another factor getting me up early is the noise from the low-flying jets who pass over on their way into Bole Airport. I've given up trying to determine a set pattern, but there always seems to be a cluster of 3-5 flights arriving between 5:30 and 6:30 am, sometime in surprisingly quick succession. (My brother's used mini van came with an "I Love Airplane Noise" bumper sticker. I'm not there yet, but I have gotten used to it enough that I don't jump at the sudden deep rumble anymore and can even sleep through the din if I'm tired enough.) There goes another one...

My most conspicuous encouragement to wake early is the amplified religious chanting that echoes daily from two nearby churches, starting about 5 am.

Since this is Easter weekend here (see Sunday, April 28th post for a calendar explanation), I have yet to find out if this is a year-round custom or something special for the period of Lent (observed here for the 8 weeks prior to Easter). I have met many Orthodox Christians (the majority religion in Ethiopia) who have been fasting during this build-up to Easter, avoiding meat and dairy. The markets have also been full of chickens, sheep, and goats - all candidates for the fast-breaking feast menus. Religion infuses this society in both overt and subtle ways that I have noticed but am still sorting out.

I'd love to be documenting so much of what I see here, such as the daily stream of religious worshippers and pilgrims heading to the nearby church out on the main road, but it feels obtrusive and disrespectful to turn their piety in an object of curiosity for my camera. Or, in other cases, their culture, customs, or poverty. This reluctance keeps my camera in my pocket a lot - or limits me to taking rushed photos from a moving car. I was quite conflicted, for example, about trying to take a photo of the fuel wood carriers on the way down from En Toto (see last Wednesday's post). This has become a common refrain among the Westerners I've spent time with here; we find a person or scene compelling and want to capture it for memory and sharing, but what right do we have to do so? It also doesn't help that we are so often experiencing street scenes from a moving car, yet another barrier (along with our obvious foreignness) between us and the people we're observing.