Happy New Year!

Everyone else is acting like it’s the middle of September, but our Ethiopian friends are celebrating New Year's Day, Meskerem 1, this weekend, on the day we know as September 11. Meskerem is the first of thirteen months in the Ethiopian calendar year – there are twelve months of exactly thirty days each, and a thirteenth month of five days (or six, for Leap Years) to make up the difference at the end of the year. This calendar is the basis for Ethiopia’s uniquely charming tourism slogan, “Thirteen Months of Sunshine”. Ironically, Meskerem marks the end of the long rainy season, at least in the central highlands.

This Sunday marks the beginning of the year 2009 in Ethiopia, a little time warp that’s based upon some arcane early Christian scholarship. Back in the day, circa 400 AD to be somewhat more precise, an Egyptian monk named Annianus of Alexandria determined the date of Creation – the exact date of “In the beginning…” – to be March 25, 5492 BC, and established an Anno Mundi calendar system based on the number of years since that date, “in the year of the world.” About a hundred years later, another monk known as Dionysius the Humble introduced a new system of dating called Anno Domini, “in the year of the Lord,” which should sound somewhat familiar to you. Dionysius thought it would be way cool if the Incarnation of Christ (the Annunciation) took place exactly 5,500 years after the date of Creation, so his system starts eight years before Annianus’ system. As you may already have guessed, the Western world eventually adopted Dionysius’ system, while Ethiopia still uses Annianus’ calculations, which accounts for the discrepancy.

As an aside, Internet research tells me that the name of the New Year’s Day holiday in Amharic is “Enkutatash,” which is a word I cannot ever recall having heard while we were in the country. But I do remember learning about the Meskel flowers, bright yellow like tiny daisies, that bloomed everywhere at the end of the rainy season; it was traditional to gather a bouquet of Meskel flowers to welcome the new year.

Twenty-one years ago, it was 1988 in Ethiopia and we were making the transition from six weeks of language school back to working at the FH office on a full-time basis. Or were we…?