Born into the Ethiopian Orthodox faith and brought up in the ancient city of Gondar, Yètèmegnu Mèkonnèn was married at the age of eight to a priest 22 years her senior. Illiterate for much of her life, and by Western standards superstitious and uneducated, she bore her husband 10 children and endured an existence of blameless piety and dignity during which the fight for survival was seldom distant. “All of my life is painted in tears,” she says.