Yesterday’s People

Abstract

It would take a detailed map of Ethiopia to help one locate the village of Lalibela more than four hundred miles north of Addis Ababa. Save for a lyrically beautiful name, there is little to distinguish this place except that it contains some of the world's most amazing monuments to religious devotion--the "mysterious subterranean, monolithic rock hewn churches," as one travel guide describes them. Some eight centuries ago at a time when Ethiopia exercised a power felt throughout much of northern Africa, a Zagwe ruler dreamed of a series of churches carved from a seam of solid rock. They stand today, eleven of them, still being used for Eastern Orthodox religious ceremonies dating back to the beginning of Christianity and protected as an international historical treasure by the United Nations. Here, Huxford narrates his experience visiting the village of Lalibela near the end of their missionary stint in Ethiopia where he experienced an epiphany.