March 22 2009

Purim in Gondar was an interesting experience. Yet again; we realisedhow much we take for granted in England, and how much fun can be had with really very little. In England, shelach manot – the custom of giving food to friends is often a case of prettily arranged little treats on a plate. A sweet custom but one quite impractical in a country like Ethiopia. Last year someone came up with the idea that the children at their meal time, should each give their banana to another child and receive one from them in return. We bought mango juice and ‘sambosas’ for the teachers – these are large samosas filled with lentils. They make for a substantial meal and have the advantage of being triangular in shape. Hamantaschen are beyond their imagination.

We had spent the week making masks for all the 900 children in the school. These masks had the habit of disappearing, and the teachers asked us to make more. We decorated them in class with the children and with the teachers – and then coloured pens we had brought with us also started to disappear…. On Purim, however, the place was full of masks.

We showed the teachers how to make simple rashanim - noise makers out of an old plastic bottle and some stones. We demonstrated how to blot our the name of Amalek by shaking them everytime Haman’s name is mentioned in the megillah – the scroll of Esther. The hazzanim asked us not to use them as it would distract them from their reading and we told the teachers this fact. Nevertheless the practice had already trickled through to the children, and at the first mention of Haman during the megillah reading, the place erupted. Luckily the lay reader who was reading the story of Esther in Amharic, thought surprised; took it in good part. Just as well because try telling 900 children (and a good many of the few hundred adults there) that they can’t play with their new toy! A compromise was reached. They would shake their rashanim a certain number of times and then keep absolutely quiet until the next mention of Haman. It worked beautifully and everyone was in hight spirits when; after Shacharit and the megillah reading we performed our Purim play.

This had been an interesting exercise. My friend Hila was directing; thought the play was in Amharic so of course she had no idea what anyone was saying. Maybe it didn’t matter as she had a cast of about fifteen – each one of whom seemed to see themselves as the real director of the piece. Various people insisted on demonstrating to others how they should perform their role so we had instances of people leaping about the stage playing multiple roles while the real actors for those particular parts looked bored or bemused. I had a part, albeit a silent part - I was the horse.

On the day, we set out, ready to begin. No one had costumes, of course; but Hila had made various crowns out of cardboard and a splendid green three-cornered hat for Haman. Someone had found a roving microphone as opposed to the one on a long lead we had used in rehearsal. In comparison to this mike, believe me, Wimbledon’s roving mike is the pinnacle of reliability. Whenever it failed, which was approximately every time it was handed to another character to speak their lines, about five men from the audience and about three men on stage rushed over to the amplifier and fiddled with it for some minutes to get the sound back. After about two scenes we abandoned it in favour of the regular mike. Not that this was any great improvement and each character insisted on blowing into it before starting their lines to check that it was still working. Thus every speech began with a raspberry. Nevertheless, the play went well. Vashti looked truculent, Esther looked beautiful, Haman strutted the stage with obvious evil intent, Ahashverosh thought he was playing Shakespeare and Mordechai refused to give anyone else the last line. The audience – children and adult alike loved it and we ended up singing Purim songs after which sweets were distributed and the children went off to their secular lessons.

Meanwhile, the Jewish studies teachers had the day off. There was one mitzvah for Purim still to perform; that of matanot le’evionim or gifts to the poor. I had pondered about this. You can’t give to beggars in Gondar, there simply are too many. From the old and crippled that line the streets to the young boys – sometimes as young as three or four – who want to sell you tissues and chewing gum. There is a café where you can buy tickets that entitle the bearer to two small loaves of bread from certain bakeries and I thought I would purchase a bundle and distribute them. In the event, a better idea occurred. We discovered that not one of the teachers had seen the famed Gondar Castle. Not surprising when a ticket costs a quarter of the daily salary, so we decided to take them on a ‘school trip’. It was a great occasion. We commandeered a bus and piled in. Twenty two of us into a minibus built for twelve. Whenever the driver saw traffic police ahead, the vehicle offloaded the excess people and drove past the warden and round the bend in the road out of sight. There it waited for the other people who walked past the warden and on to where the bus was waiting to pick them up. We sang Purim songs all the way.

Gondar Castle is known in the tourist brochures as the ‘African Camelot’ it is a large walled compound with a series of palaces built in the 17th and 18th centuries. With all the pomp and luxury you would expect form an oriental potentate. For some of the teachers this was their first lesson in Ethiopian history. Many had left school with only a few grades completed. For us it wa an education to learn the official version of the treatment of Ethiopias Jews. How kind a certain king was, we were told, to the Jews by giving them land in a village six kilometres away. The guide failed to mention that they had been banned from living in Gondar itself, but the King wanted them near enough that they could use their artisan skills on the building of his palaces.

We were back in the synagogue in time for minchah and ma’ariv where more sweets were distributed and the day thus finished with a flourish.