How close are Ethiopia and England? When Ethiopian Galit married British Eliyahu, they found that with rock-solid emunah and a generous dash of flexibility, the bridging of two very different cultures could become the adventure of a lifetime.
How close are Ethiopia and England? When Ethiopian Galit married British Eliyahu, they found that with rock-solid emunah and a generous dash of flexibility, the bridging of two very different cultures could become the adventure of a lifetime
“Life in a village in the mountains of north Ethiopia was only a little different from the kind of life that Avraham Avinu led,” Galit says from her apartment in Ramat Beit Shemesh. With gentle candor, she takes me back to her home, and the rock-solid faith she imbibed as a child. It was this emunah temimah that her husband was drawn to.
The simple homes in Avratensa, a tiny village near the city of Gonder, northwest Ethiopia, were set among hills of tawny grass dotted with tall trees. The round huts were constructed from a framework of branches, plastered with gray-green clay that the women prepared, and topped with a roof of straw. Beds lined the walls, with parents sleeping on the top bunks.
Men worked in fields an hour’s walk away, cultivating wheat, barley, and corn. Closer to home, the women tended vegetable patches filled with peas, beans, and pumpkins. “We also grew cotton, and my mother would roll it into threads that she’d weave on a simple wooden loom into cloth, which we then dyed and embroidered,” Galit recalls. “An industrious housewife would be up at five in the morning to join the group of women going to the river to fetch water in clay jugs that we had made.”
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