A blog in conjunction with Osprey Packs and Outside Television.

Let’s get this out of the way. I was 8. I made bad choices like singing Don’t Fence Me In at my father’s second wedding and lying down on the carpet in the school loft; I had bad choices foisted upon me, like a two-inch buzz cut—billed as a smart fashion move with the added benefit of being easier to treat lice (the loft). No wonder I felt sorry for the people in Ethiopia.

   My older sister terrorized me, I had a boy hair cut, and glasses. They were starving, being relocated 400 miles away from their families and heritage, and in the middle of one of the most militaristic regimes in modern Africa called The Red Terror. I did what any person feeling a great sense of connected persecution would do. I wrote a ballad.

   Listen along with me (click play on the photo above) Or if you can’t bear it, here is the chorus: “People in Ethiopia, want to have some food and love.” Although what I am really singing is peee-pole in Eeethiooopia, want to have some foooooood and lo-uv-uv. Remember, think ballad. Either way you write it, it went on, passionately. 

The half completed Laelay Weste Community School   I sang about helping the children, holding the children, as if I was not a child myself while singing. There are three minutes and thirty-five seconds of my most heartfelt worries about a place and people I only knew from grainy BBC imagery of utter desolation and haunted skeletal women, men, and children, always too many children.

Over a million people died in the 1984 famine. In Minnesota, our school lives revolved around it with full student body renditions of "We Are the World" at every assembly. It is that song I remember. I forgot my own.

25 years later, I went to Ethiopia for a story about coffee. I entered a country of extreme duality--both the poverty I expected, and bounty--agricultural, spiritual, and human--unlike I have ever known. It was supposed to be a three-week trip. Instead I followed a trajectory from coffee to a climbing trip for first ascents on sandstone towers and cracks, to a book that asked how adventure offers a lens for a deeper understanding of culture. I then got up in front of groups of six people to six hundred and tried out answers. I learned, and re-learned, how to ask the questions. And then, my mother found the ballad.

   I had one lecture left for the Vertical Ethiopia tour when she sent me an email. “Did you know you wrote a song about Ethiopia? I have it.”

A young student showing off his artistic side with the rest of his class at one of imagine1day's schoolsMaybe we all know who we will become as adults when we are eight years old. Maybe I am just lucky. Maybe I had to forget to remember. I cringe at my warbling 8-year old voice. At one point I surmise, in song: “They don’t even have a turkey.” To be fair, twenty five-years and five months of time in Ethiopia later, I was pretty dead on about the lack of turkeys. I was also pretty dead on about how much a person can care.           

   Six weeks from today, Imagine Ethiopia 2010 kicks off.  We’re heading to Tigray, the Ethiopian region at the heart of the 1984 famine.  That is where I climbed, where imagine1day is building their schools, where together we will create a new school. I will, undoubtedly see a lot of eight year olds. I might even see myself.

See the new children of Tigray in imagine1day's video trailer: This is Our Story.

Photo By Gabe RogelFrom OutsideTV.com.

I have no idea who the people are who will change my life in the next two years. I had no idea, two years ago, that a woman making a spontaneous stop in a Patagonia store in California would change mine now. Susanne Conrad caught a glimpse of a tall hardbound book called Vertical Ethiopia. I’d written it, but that didn’t matter to her, then. Ethiopia mattered.

A few months later, a random email appeared in my inbox. Sapna Dayal introduced herself and suggested that we might have much in common. She was the executive director of imagine1day, a non-profit dedicated to changing the world’s future via building schools in Ethiopia. We spent following winter months talking. I’d come home from ice climbing in New Hampshire and watch it get dark and cold in New England as Sapna would pause her afternoon in a rainy Vancouver for us to brainstorm about how to work together in the high desert in the Horn of Africa.

This September 23^rd marks the start of our answer. Sapna, Susanne and I, along with Shannon Wilson, are leading a group on a three-week journey of adventure, global stewardship, and scared connection.  Together, we’re raising enough money to build a new school—imagine1day’s 7^th primary school in Ethiopia. We’re going rock climbing, visiting ancient churches, hiking to schools imagine1day built where the wells that broke ground were often the first ever in a three-mile radius, and more. 

Photo by Gabe RogelRemember when you were a kid and you’d connect the dots on cheap piece of paper to make the Little Engine that Could or Strawberry Shortcake? Remember when you were young enough to not know what you were connecting until it was done? I have no idea what we are all drawing together. I am just one of the dots. I’m a leader dot-- the Ethiopia and adventure expert on the trip, but I still have no idea what our picture will look like.

Today I’m kicking off a pre-trip series of etchings via blogs. Come back. Every other week I’ll tell you more about what we’re doing. I’ll post up an audio clip of 1984 ballad about Ethiopia—that I wrote, when I was eight. It’s bad. It’s a ballad. (It was the 80’s).

Learn more, get involved, become a dot:

Imagine Ethiopia 2010 the Trip

Who’s Coming With Us

How Ethiopia Started

*Additive Adventure, the New Sub Blog on The Liminal Line (or, what happened to the poodles?)

• I launched the new Additive Adventure Blog today on OutsideTV.com. We're teaming up with Ospreypacks.com to co-host/house the blogs.

• What is additive adventure? Majka Burhardt made it up. But she's betting you might live your life in a quest for the same--when adventure goes beyond exploration and toward cultural and environmental connection. "Additive Adventure" tracks Majka's forays into the greater world while she asks for the linkages between...everything. Read Majka's stories of the far afield and track how she brings them close to home every other Friday.

• Don't worry. I'll still be talking about poodles and life and how to navigate choice. How could I not?