Jack of Harts

I have been a heavy kid my entire life. A bit overweight, yes, but a bit more than that as well. Even when working out and as slim as I ever get, I’m always going to be one of the heavy kids. I am righteously heavy boned, and I come by that naturally. I sink in water and have all my life. There have been two times in my life when I’ve been what I would consider truly fit. First when I was a kid and I was on my town’s Junior Olympics racing walking team. I worked out every day, and I made State Champion, but couldn’t beat the other State Champions in Regionals. The second was in college. I worked out every day, lifted weights, and did all the things young adults are supposed to do to be healthy.

I was two hundred and twenty pounds.

I’ve gained a pound or two a year over the last thirty years. Just a slow trend towards being a bit heavier each year. I never really noticed it. I was wearing XL shirts in high school, so wearing double XL shirts in adulthood didn’t seem odd. And I never outgrew my clothing. I wore it until I wore it out and then got new clothing. And if I had to pick a new size of pants each time it didn’t really click you know. It was only an inch or two at a time every few years.

But at the beginning of this year I was over two hundred seventy pounds and that is not good. Even for someone blessed with a heavy frame. Ideally I should be two twenty or under. Like I was as a young adult. The good news is I’ve lost twelve pounds in the last seven months. I actually saw two sixty two on the scale last week. And I just lost twelve in seven months. If I lose forty two more pounds, that’s two twenty.

So my goal is to lose forty two pounds in two years. I want to be two twenty at fifty two. That’s my goal and I know I can do it. I just have to do it a day at a time.

Ethiopia is one of the oldest civilizations in Africa. Whether you call it Abyssinia, D’mt, Aksum, Ethiopia, or one of the many other names littered through history, civilization in what we now call the Ethiopian Highlands stretches back thousands of years, and was famous all over the world. It never fell under the direct power of Rome, but its ships and ports traded with Rome and all of the other great empires of the day. And it was one of the first nations to convert to Christianity. The later Arab invasion that shattered the eastern and southern Roman Empire cut Ethiopia off from the rest of the Christian nations.

It became a hidden empire of lost Africa, and many Europeans forgot it even existed. It may have been forgotten, but Ethiopia did not die. It continued to survive in the forested and mountainous region often called the Roof of Africa, even as the Arabs and later the Ottomans invaded and took control of Ethiopia’s rugged coastal regions. The Ottomans even drove into the Ethiopian Highlands to kill every Christian they could find in time, but the Ethiopians and their allies drove the invaders out. Fighting would continue over the centuries that followed as the Ottomans, the Sudanese, the Egyptians, and numerous others fought with Ethiopia and various European powers over control of the coasts.

The Ethiopian civilization has jealously guarded their access to the ports they have used to trade with the world for thousands of years. And of course everybody else wants those same ports as well, because they are rich ports all around the Horn of Africa. But the various invasions and wars were accompanied by mass migrations of people from modern day Arabia, Sudan, Egypt, and many other nations. Ethnic Ethiopians were largely driven out of their coastal regions, and though Ethiopia has fought many wars over the last several centuries to regain control of them, they have been driven back out each time.

The coastal regions of Ethiopia are now officially known as Eritrea and Somalia. They are the product of over one thousand years of mass migration that drove the indigenous African civilization out of their traditional trading ports and replaced it with a traditionally Arabian culture that has been trying to eradicate them ever since. That is mass migration at work.