The Carpet

One of our jobs as Country Reps for Ethiopia is to make sure that our service workers’ needs are taken care of. This means that I spend significant time getting apartments and houses set up for our workers. This doesn’t sound like a big deal and generally something I would enjoy. However, this is Ethiopia. Let me tell you about the day we went to look for carpet.

Ethiopia is home to Africa’s largest outdoor market called Merkato. Merkato stretches for kilometres and one can find almost anything here if one has the time and the patience. Each section of Merkato houses the same type of thing so there is the hardware section, the fabric section, the rubber boot section, the clothes section and …the carpet section.

The streets are narrow and crowded. Assefa, our driver, can barely make his way through the sea of people to get to the part of town we need. We finally arrive at the carpet stores. Now, don’t think North American carpet stores. No such thing here. Each carpet “store” is about 1.5 x 3 meters (4 ½ x 9 feet). There are gigantic roles of carpet stacked horizontally leaving only enough space for one person to squeeze in to take a look.

We go to three stalls before we find someone who actually has the type of carpet we are looking for. He pulls out a sample pallet with twelve beautiful little swatches of carpet and asks, “Which one do you like.” I have been down this road before. I have been in Ethiopia long enough now to know that it doesn’t really matter which one I like because, almost certainly, the one I like will not be available. I learned this much shopping for ceramic tiles for my kitchen last year.

So, before I even think about which one I may like, I say “which ones do you have?” Sure enough, he has about five of the twelve. But, not really the one we like the best so we move on.

Keeping a close eye on each other so as not to get separated, we make our way across the street to another merchant. He has some but not the one we like. So back, across the street, once more. Again the pallet of samples gets pulled out for us. We point at the green one, “Do you have this one?” He points at three large rolls of green carpet.

Yes, the sweet taste of success. Then the question “sinteno” (how much is it)? The price quoted is higher than all the others. Then comes the game of showing enough interest to keep the conversation going but not too much interest so there is no incentive to bargain. With a little coaxing the man agrees to our price. The room measurements are given and two young men hoist the gigantic carpet rolls on their shoulders and take them out into the street.

There is our newly paid for carpet being unrolled in the middle of the sidewalk, with people coming from both directions walking on our carpet, some carefully and others not so carefully. As they make the measurements and start cutting the carpet I keep my eyes both on the skies, which are threatening, and on a very persistent beggar I am trying to stave off. “Please let it not rain.” becomes my mantra.

All of a sudden we are aware that our surroundings have changed dramatically. The streets have swelled with people. Men are everywhere. We realize that we are straight across from a mosque and it’s time for Friday prayers. Wave after wave of Muslim men descend upon the street, their carpets or papers in hand and start to kneel down. Everywhere, in the street, on the sidewalk, in the allies, in the gullies, there are kneeling Muslim men. We realize that our window of escape is narrowing. We make arrangements to pick up the carpet in a couple of hours.

It’s a sea of Muslims now. Wave upon wave continues to break upon the street. We start to make our way quickly through the crowd trying to find even a small pathway that will lead us out. Just as we make our way to the truck parked on a side street we see wave upon wave of Muslim women descending upon us. We are parked in the area where the women pray! We quickly jump into the vehicle and Assefa begins to make his way painstakingly through the waves of women. Thankfully we make it to a main road where it’s open and the car to able to make it’s way out of the Muslim ocean. We can breathe again.

The carpet is retrieved a couple of hours later and even though there was a downpour on the way home the carpet makes it to the MCC compound safely and is now in the new house where our service workers, Krista and Megan, will be living. It’s never easy, but what we set out to do was done successfully. We never take that for granted here.

Note: Krista Allen begins a new term with the MKC Peace Office writing a childrens’ Sunday School peace curriculum for the MKC church and Megan Weemes continues her assignment working with a local NGO on HIV/AIDS and peace related work.