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Language of God tough to negotiate
Experience in Ethiopia changes course of Millboro man's life
BY CYNTHIA COLEMAN • STAFF WRITER
 | | Brian Gilchrest left his hometown in Bath County for work in a country full of civil unrest, and in need of peaceful leadership. (Recorder photo by Cynthia Coleman) |
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MILLBORO - "I stood out as a white man, and as an ignorant white man who didn't know much," said Millboro native Brian Gilchrist about the first time he traveled to Ethiopia. "I felt a deep sense of genuine dependence on those around me."
He was surrounded by strange smells, clothing and sounds. He felt "nervous and foolish" hearing different languages he could not understand or speak. Even more unsettling was the sight of men with assault weapons guarding doorways or standing on street corners. "I realized my small town roots required me to relearn how to live in a society," he said.
That was Gilchrist in 1994, a Radford University junior who traveled to Ethiopia as a Shenandoah Presbytery representative. The college student came back to the partying ways of his university buddies and realized he had changed. The world looked different though African-shaded lenses, and the experience set the course for his future.
 | | Brian Gilchrest (center) met his parents, Betty and Cliff Gilchrest of Millboro (at left), and was joined by his wife, Zed, and her daughter, Elena, in the airport at Addis Adbaba in Ethiopia, near where Brian made his home. The couple met after Brian returned to Ethiopia to work in 2005, and she was the real estate agent who found him a home. (Photo courtesy the Gilchrest family) |
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The Brian Gilchrist of 2007 came home this summer to prepare for his third Ethiopian career. Beginning mid-August, he began work for United States Agency for International Development (USAID), overseeing conflict prevention programs. "It's been busy," Gilchrist said in an email from Ethiopia. "The new job is a challenge, but I am blessed to have this opportunity."
In addition to trips to Washington, D.C. for visa paperwork, he visited his parents, Clifford and Betty Gilchrest, in Millboro for three weeks in July.
"It's nice to come back home," he said, after striding into the fellowship hall of Hot Springs Presbyterian Church, which once sponsored him as its missionary. Dressed in a white Polo shirt and khaki shorts, wearing sandals and a large toothy grin, Gilchrist looked every bit the ordinary all-American young man in his early 30s. There was no hint of African expatriate, no wooden beads or colorful dashiki. Neither was there a hint left of his small town roots.
 | | Zed and Brian Gilchrest had more than the average set of cultural challenges to overcome when they married. The Millboro native and African business woman different languages, and have varying religions background. |
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"Now I live in a city," he said, referring to Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa, a city of over two million people. "It's polluted, yet I love the city, but it definitely takes its toll on you. I feel it after a while. I was ready to come back here after a bit."
For Gilchrist, coming home, in one way, means reliving activities of his youth. After visiting familiar haunts, he stopped at Goshen Pass for a swim. "I jumped in the river and hung out there for a couple hours just looking around and recalled growing up there," he said. "That kind of stuff I very much enjoy, getting back, spending at least a day doing that."
As a man who works to transform conflict, whether in the church or government, carefree days of doing nothing are long past. After graduating from Radford in 1995, Gilchrist worked various jobs before revisiting Ethiopia in 1997.
The next year he returned with a job in hand; the Shenandoah Presbytery created a job for him at Gore Bethel Home for Children in southwestern Ethiopia. He worked there for five years as a social-work advisor. The first two years, Gilchrist was an unpaid volunteer at the home, but during the third, he earned a position as a salaried employee.
The Gore Bethel Home houses children who are either orphans or whose families are too poor to support them or send them to school. Many of the children are at the home because of Ethiopia's political unrest and violence.
Gilchrist has previous experience working with children under stress due to family or violent circumstances. Before moving to Africa, he was a counselor at a home in Maryland, a peer mentor for a Virginia family preservation service, and even worked as a juvenile prison guard. Yet these experiences did not completely equip him for what lay ahead in Ethiopia.
"I remember the initial months and years were both fascinating and challenging," Gilchrist recalled. During the first two years, he had to adjust to living without electricity, indoor plumbing or running water.
Growing up in Millboro's rural setting with long, lonely stretches of country roads did not prepare him for the roads of Ethiopia. "I had to adjust to the challenging road system in rural Ethiopia," Gilchrist said, "first as a passenger in a bus or a taxi and later as a driver of a four-wheel-drive pickup."
Gilchrist had to learn how to greet people - the Ethiopian way - and how to leave properly. He even had to learn how to eat as Ethiopians do, which often involves scooping out food with a piece of bread from a common bowl.
The food, while tasty, gave Gilchrist trouble for a long time. "Ethiopian food is a combination of red-hot spicy and oily sauces eaten with a pancake shaped sponge bread," he said, "and this food often did my stomach in." But that was not his only problem. "I also enjoyed numerous bouts of parasites, as well as amoebas, giardia, shigella, typhoid fever and pulmonary tuberculosis."
He explained, "I say 'enjoy' because I honestly did." While he never enjoyed the physical manifestations of these diseases, with each occurrence he told himself, "I can't wait to tell my friends what I got this time!"
After awhile, his body adjusted to a different level of sanitation. He become more cautious and now deals with only periodic colds and the occasional flu.
Gilchrist also had to learn how to communicate with people in Ethiopia. In and around the children's home, people do not speak English, but their African language, Oromiffa, and Gilchrist become fluent in the native dialect.
But there was more to it than just learning to communicate. Gilchrist also had to bridge the culture gap. "It was through my willingness to learn and make myself humble or more truthful," he said, "and admit to myself and everyone else around me that I needed them, that relationships were truly developed and trust began to take root."
His willing spirit was coupled with the accommodating nature of those around him, as they helped him understand the subtleties of their culture. "I found that most people were willing and happy to be of assistance to me," he said. "People were pleased to help me pick up new words and phrases, especially children."
As kind as the people were at the children's home and the surrounding community, not all was well in Ethiopia. During his first five years, Gilchrist witnessed occasions of civil unrest and violence as the country went through turbulent political turmoil.
"Several years before I moved here," he said, "Ethiopia wrote a new constitution."
Ethiopia, the only Africa country never to be colonized, is a nation of many different ethnic groups. The new constitution divided the country into nine states along ethnicmajority lines.
"The government was de-centralized, with the government saying to the people, 'You states will run yourselves and be autonomous from the center, the national government,'" he explained.
The new constitution stipulated that a state's majority ethnic group has the right to self-rule. "States have the right to be self-governing, up to the point of succeeding from the country," he said.
By doing so, the Ethiopian government encouraged states to "lift up" a particular language and culture endemic to the state. "Some people saw this as positive," Gilchrist said, "while others viewed it as divisive, breaking up the nation of Ethiopia."
Ethiopia had been divided when the northern state of Eritrea seceded and became a new country in 1993. Many Ethiopian leaders were put on trial for genocide and crimes against humanity. The new constitution was written as a reaction of Eritrea's independence and the ensuing violence.
Yet Ethiopia continued to experience unrest. During the turbulence of 2002, Gilchrist tried to help a local student movement better organize itself. He suggested they be more proactive than reactive toward the violence directed against them during their protests. Citing Mahatma Gandhi, Gilchrist advised them to find non-violent ways to express their dissatisfaction with Ethiopia's political instability.
"My efforts backfired," Gilchrist said. The students and other local people no longer communicated with him. "They were curious about this American who chose to speak the local language and identified himself with those who held no political power."
The national government wanted individual ethnic groups to have the freedom to speak their own language and practice their own culture, in the hopes to stem the civil unrest, but it didn't work.
The barriers were enormous. For example, Gilchrist had learned the language of the orphanage, Oromiffa. This is the language of the Oromo people, who are the largest ethnic group in Ethiopia. But their language is not the national language, Amharic, which most Oromos cannot speak.
Amharic belongs to a smaller ethnic group, the Amharas, who are the political and cultural elite. Their language is the language of government, military and the state church, which is Ethiopian Orthodox. They may speak English or a European language, but they do not learn to speak the other languages of their country. Only 30 percent of Ethiopians speak Amharic.
The result was a modern-day story of the tower of Babel. Once people could no longer communicate with one another, they could not work together. In Ethiopia today, language is a religious and political barrier between ethnic groups.
Gilchrist recalled a wedding that was to take place in the capital city. "A couple went to a church to get married. As they entered the compound's gates, the wedding party was stopped," he said. "They wanted the ceremony to be done in Oromiffa, the language they spoke." But that was not the language of the church. The couple and the wedding party were refused entry. Arguments arose and violence ensued, with many of the wedding party injured.
Many members of the Orthodox Church consider their language to be language of God. "It has become a heated issue as Ethiopians ask themselves, is there a language of God?" Gilchrest explained.
One day in 2003, he drove to out to a region where there was civil unrest. "There was a local election that turned ugly where a large number of people lost their lives," he said. He brought a video recorder and camera, and spoke with many people. "I attempted to interview people in government offices, with no success," he said.
Fortunately nothing happened to him; no one tried to stop him. He continued, "I wasn't trying to do it to see if something would happen. I was just doing it, out of ignorance, thinking I had so many friends here, people would warn me if something's to take place."
When the violence began to occur in his "neck of the woods," Gilchrist began to question his presence and role in Ethiopia, and the country's people and their actions.
He asked himself, "What is the psychology of individuals that lead them to be able to be neighbors one day and go to the point where they are willing to kill one another the next?"
Foreshadowing his education and work in conflict transformation, Gilchrist further wondered, "What drives people to those points and what are the things we can do in our own lives to minimize, prevent those types of violence?"
He also wondered what people can do "after the fact, in terms of trying to heal, in terms of bringing people back together again."
His ties to home helped him find answers to these questions, in part. "In that search," he said, "I found a local pastor, Bill Cox (a Presbyterian minister in Highland County), who mentioned Eastern Mennonite University's Conflict Transformation program."
While leaving the orphanage was difficult, emotional decision, he nonetheless applied and was accepted into EMU's master program, graduating in 2005.
Of his time at EMU, Gilchrist said, "It was a really neat experience to study with people from all over the world, all coming primarily from hot spots, so they bring a great deal of theoretical but also very practical, lived experience and knowledge of the very questions I was trying to understand."
After graduation, he had hoped to return to Ethiopia. "The idea was to turn around and go back to Ethiopia and re-engage with some of those questions on the ground, through the church."
He was given the opportunity to do that. The Presbyterian Church, PC(USA has a relationship with a denomination in Ethiopia and arranged for Gilchrist to work with them.
"The church that I was working for is called the Ethiopian Evangelical Church Mekane Yesus, and they created a peace office in 1993. In 2005, I was appointed as an advisor to the Peace Commission Office, in Addis Ababa."
Though this was a new position for EECMY, Gilchrist's role in the peace office fitted with the denomination's teachings. "The church has a holistic ministry approach to serve the whole person spiritually, emotionally, physically, and thereby comes well-being," he explained.
Gilchrist worked with EECMY for two years training people in ways to support peace in Ethiopia. He used interfaith networking, the Internet, modern electronic media and people in other peace-making agencies - in and out of the country - to help with his efforts.
As the denomination's peace advisor, Gilchrist had to listen to some tough questions about the church and its desire for peace in Ethiopia. "What is the role of the church," he was asked, "in a land where tension, mistrust and suspicion grows on occasion erupting into violence between peoples of differing ethnic groups or clans?"
In a letter on the PC(USA) web site, Gilchrist wrote about EECMY's struggles with creating and supporting peace. In it, he tells how questions are asked about the church's role with those of other faiths and the rising tensions between them, about the disparity between the rich and poor, and the divisions in the "Body of Christ," found not only in EECMY, but also in other denominations.
Gilchrist found some joy in the difficult questions. People did not ask why the rich western nations or the Ethiopian government were not solving their problems. They wanted to know what the church could do. "The church," he said, "found itself smack dab in the middle of it, as a microcosm of the broader society."
Most EECMY churches hold services in either Oromiffa or Amharic. There is not a unified language of the EECMY.
Gilchrist explained. "Historically, the EECMY has been Oromo in language and leadership. It was a place where the Oromo people found a level of recognition and place, which they were not finding in the broader political structures."
The EECMY church decided to settle this language question by allowing congregations to decide what language is spoken in individual churches. In the church Gilchrist attends, an attempt to better mediate this dilemma was made. Several services are held each Sunday, offering them in either language. During special occasions, a service is held in both Oromiffa and Amharic. If a prayer is made in Oromiffa, it is translated, sentence-by-sentence, through someone speaking Amharic, and vice versa.
The EECMY believes this to be a positive action, and hopes its peaceful solution will spread to the whole country, since the problem exists not only between these two languages. In Ethiopia, 80 languages are spoken, though the main languages are Amharic, Oromiffa, and Tigrigna, with 72 percent of Ethiopians speaking one of these three.
The question of language has become political. "People say, 'We should be Ethiopian, with one language, but it doesn't mean we forget our own language,'" Gilchrest said.
Political suggestions are thrown on to those who attend either an Oromiffa-speaking church or an Amharic one. For those who attend an Oromo church, they are pointed out as being nationalistic. "But nationalistic to the Oromo cause," said Gilchrist, "not to the broader Ethiopian cause."
For those attending an Amharic speaking church, they are thought to be Ethiopiaist, even if they are Oromo. "They are Oromo who have succumbed," Gilchrist said, "who have been Ethiopianized or Amharicerized. These are the types of arguments that are ongoing."
Oromiffa and Amharic are not dialects of one language, but completely separate languages, coming from different roots. The Amharas claim the Queen of Sheba was Amharic, and that King Solomon gave the Ark of Covenant to her to keep safe.
"The Ethiopian Orthodox Church claims the Ark is hidden in one of the outlying churches and only a few know where it is kept," Gilchrest said.
For Gilchrist, the dilemma of the various languages is not just in the country, the cities, or the church. The problems are found at home, as well.
When Gilchrist returned to Ethiopia in 2005, he needed to find a place to live and wanted to rent a home in Addis Ababa. He met a real estate agent, a young woman whose uncle lives in Texas, but who owns a home in the capital. Through the agent, Gilchrist found his new home. And his wife.
Her name is Zedwinesh Mengistu, but she goes by the nickname, Zed. Gilchrist found they had many things in common and they began to see one another. "We became friends fairly quickly thereafter, spending an increasing amount of time with one another," he said. "During this same time, her then nine-year-old daughter, Elena, and I were getting to know one another. Long story short, the three of us fell in love."
Gilchrist's and Zed's love story is not easily told. He is Presbyte- rian, a protestant; Zed is Ethiopian Orthodox. To further complicate the matter, daughter Elena's father is Italian, and he wants her to be raised as a Roman Catholic.
Zed is Amhara and speaks the national language, and many other languages, but not Oromiffa. While she is modern woman, college educated and a businesswoman who owns an art gallery, she still carries some elitist views held by Amharas toward other ethnic groups.
When asked about the variety religions in the family, Gilchrist said, "In my personal definition, the Christian church is the Christian church. Zed and I do happen to come from different members of this church, but it is the same Body. Our families simply wish us to be happy."
Still, Gilchrist had a hard time proposing to his wife. "I was nervous about how to actually propose," he said. It turned out young Elena had a hand in getting the two married.
"Elena helped me make that decision," he explained. "I was washing dishes after dinner one night when Elena came in the kitchen and stood beside me. She said I had taken enough time and when was I going to ask."
Gilchrist told her he needed help. "So the two of us went into Zed's bedroom," he said. "I sat down beside Zed and Elena crawled up beside me. Then, we asked together." They were married soon afterward, in Ethiopia.
The couple is expecting their first child, a son, in mid-September. When asked what language this child will speak, Gilchrist said, "I hope that our child will be fluent in Amharic, English, French and Oromiffa. As a family, I hope we have some time to work on Spanish and a level of Arabic and Swahili. At home right now, we hear a mix of English, Amharic and French."
Perhaps the role of the Gilchrist family is to set an example of how a blended family can work, for Ethiopians and Americans alike. Perhaps they will show how love, kindness and understanding can conqueror many differences. Perhaps, they have found the language of God is love.
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