Our mules grunted and clattered across Ethiopia's rumpled highlands, staggering beneath heavy rafts and two months of expedition food. The land was awash in green following the rainy season; tender shoots of teff (the national grain) carpeted muddy hillsides like a million emerald pipe cleaners. Daytime humidity was crushing. At night, insects descended in biblical profusion, their writhing bodies dousing campfires and covering the ground like snow.
Nerves were raw. To reach the banks of the Blue Nile, we had to first traverse the dominion of the Shifta, east Africa's notorious highwaymen. To make matters worse, on the third morning, a flash flood swept away several of our muleteers and armed guards. (All were swiftly recovered.) That night, gunfire rocked the darkness; the muzzle flashes illuminating my tent wall seemed so close I imagined I could touch them. Our guards, naked and drunk on local firewater, were sprinting about with Kalashnikovs, firing randomly into the darkness.
It was amid this topsy-turvy world that I met Abush.
We were nibbling oatmeal beside a smouldering fire, when something darted through nearby shrubs. A stray dog? Eventually a timid young boy inched forward. There was a wild look in his eye, and raw cuts covered the back of both legs. Instinctively I held my bowl of oats toward him, but he remained frozen, cowering in the undergrowth.
Placing the bowl on the open grass between us, I retreated. Soon the boy darted out and devoured the porridge. We prepared a second, linebacker-size portion heaped with honey, almonds and cranberries, which he quickly inhaled.
Before long, the boy was sitting by the fire, cavorting with our armed guards, tousling their beards and laughing. Most notably, when the boy spoke – and he spoke with a confidence and assurance uncanny for one so young – the group of rough men fell silent. While they conversed in Amharic, an interpreter whispered the details in my ear.
Abush was 12, or so he thought. He was 10 when both his parents died. Having no aunts or uncles, and with no one in his village able to take him in, he was forced to leave. That village, we discovered on a map, sat 600 kilometres away.
Ever since, he had wandered the countryside, begging for food and stealing from farmer's fields (it had been dogs, protecting crops, that ravaged his legs). He slept in the open at night; his only possessions were a tattered pair of shorts and a stained blanket. He had been on his own for two rainy seasons.
My mind reeled. Travellers often encounter such heart-wrenching dilemmas; the instinct to “fix” much of what they find, then rationalizing the indulgence of their personal voyage against the suffering exposed en route.
Teno, the leader of our guards, spoke up. “Abush, in a few days we'll leave these foreigners at the river. If you like, you can return home with me, and live in my house. I have two boys. You can go to school with them, eat with them, play with them. My wife will take care of you.”
Essentially, this man of meagre means was suggesting he adopt Abush, an offer of dumbfounding generosity. I felt a tingle across my scalp. Abush froze everyone with his next words: “Thank you, but my destiny is to be a wanderer.”
What? Abush declared he would visit each of Ethiopia's 13 provinces by foot, eventually finishing his journey in the capital, Addis Abba, where he would become a shoe shiner. He would save every penny, he promised, until he could afford his own tin-roofed hut.
The guards threw their heads back, and howled. “Abush, you are an orphan. You will never have a home! And what do you know of Addis?” With rampant drug use, disease and child prostitution, the city was a world removed from these country fields.
