The Curse That Shoes Can Break

Mintamir makes sure all five of her children wear shoes, so that they don’t share her fate. She wants to protect their feet from magic.

She lives in the corner of a cornfield in Northern Ethiopia, in a straw-thatched hut. The walls are framed with eucalyptus branches, plastered over with layers of mud and dung. Inside the hut, pasted on one of the walls, there is an old calendar, with a photograph pinned in the upper left corner.

The photograph shows Mintamir holding a child. She wears a faded blue dress and a black headscarf. A second scarf, with hues of red, green, and blue, is tied around her waist. An intricately fashioned crescent tattoo runs across her lower jaw and over her chin, stopping right below her earlobes. She looks away from the camera. Her face is expressionless.

Two men stand beside her, looking into the camera. Their faces are also expressionless. The man on her left is her brother, dressed in a light brown shirt and trousers. The man next to him has the upright posture of a soldier. He is Mintamir’s husband, bald, in army khakis, with a black belt and a green coat. Palm trees against a blue sky make the background.

There is something unusual in the photograph, but easy to miss at a quick glance: Mintamir’s legs.

Mintamir was in her mid-20s, and a mother of two kids, when the studio photograph was taken, one evening, 14 years ago. Her brother had insisted that they must take a family photograph. He was afraid that Mintamir was about to die. Mintamir’s feet and lower legs were swelling and gradually disfiguring. The day after the photograph was taken, the family reached a church in Gondar city in northern Ethiopia. Mintamir’s brother had heard from someone in his village that the church had holy water that might be of help. A priest at the church took water from a nearby stream, said to be holy, and sprinkled it over Mintamir’s feet while praying. They returned home to the village of Gumbi in the town of Finote Selam.

Time passed. Mintamir’s feet kept swelling. They reached double their normal girth, with some roughening of the skin, and they started to smell bad. Her husband, who had just returned from the war between Ethiopia and its northern neighbor Eretria, started to spend more nights away from home. Mintamir heard from neighbors that he was living with another woman. Some nights he came home, slept with her, and left early in the morning. She let him. She hoped that he might just come back. Mintamir had three more children with him. He might stay for the sake of the children, she hoped. She was no longer attractive to him, she thought.

One day, he just stopped coming. It’s now been five years since Mintamir has seen him. He has remarried, she has heard. He has children with his new wife, she has heard.

Mintamir is suffering from a disease that few people have heard of, called podoconiosis. A less known form of elephantiasis, it is not caused by bacteria, or viruses, or parasites, but by walking barefoot in red clay soil. It is completely preventable and curable. Its treatment requires just clean water and soap to wash the feet, bandages to compress the swelling, and shoes for protection.

When she was growing up, Mintamir hardly wore shoes, nor did anybody else in her family. Most people walk barefoot in rural Ethiopia. Some communities are so poor that they cannot afford shoes. Even if someone manages to buy a pair, the shoes are kept