Ethiopia
He would often disappear on a track, only to resurface two or three days later saying nothing of where he had been. That road connected him to his youth, leading to the country he had fought against in the civil war during the early 1990’s. He was shot in the face and bared the scar of that time, a harsh reminder of his earlier life and the absurdity of politics. Later, I would watch him climb into dense riverine forest after a wounded buffalo, in bush so thick that it required crawling on all fours. At one point he came face to face with the wounded animal and they locked eyes, each unable to move and in that moment he and the animal were one being and I knew that he looked at them not as some other creature but as a part of himself and that he saw things that were not of this world. That’s not to say that they weren’t real, but they were hidden to those not open to the idea of their existence.