John Coyne Babbles

The Boys From Bati, Eleven

By eleven o'clock I was ready to leave Bati. I had made my courtesy calls, and I even stopped to see the Irish missionaries. The couple were not in town. I left my card and a note saying I was sorry to have missed them and that I would stop by on my next trip to Bati. Now, I was actually curious to see what their reaction was to Jack marrying the Muslim girl.

It was getting warm in Bati and I was anxious to get out of the desert heat and into the highlands. Two hours of steady driving up the road would have me in Dessie, at an altitude of 6,500 feet, and in among forests of eucalyptus that made this town green, wet, but not lovely.

The road winds through sharp curves all the way up the face of the escarpment. It is an Italian road built during the occupation. The drive is scenic, lined as it is with clumps of eucalyptus trees and cactus. The town of Dessie (meaning "My Joy" in Amharic) is not seen until the last few turns and then only glimpses of tin roofs flash through the thick eucalyptus. At the very crest of the rise, the road bursts into the piazza and into a small valley at the foot of Mt. Tassa.

I arrived during the midday lull and was able to cruise through the normally crowded piazza. Dessie has the feel and atmosphere of a western frontier town. There are wooden buildings, wooden porches, a steady flow of cattle, horses and riders, but more often, mules ridden by tilik sews (important men) wearing the traditional white shammas and jodhpurs of the Ethiopian national dress and, depending on the weather, heavy woolen burnooses.

The men on horseback are always shoeless. The large toe of each foot hooks into metal stirrups. Their shoes are carried by a small boy, a young son or relatives, or in some sections of Ethiopia, an indentured servant, who runs along side the trotting mule.

These tilik sews are often carrying money to the bank and they have hired men from their villages to guide them across the plateaus, which even today are as wild and dangerous as once was our own frontier.

Depending on how important the tilik sew is, or from how far a distance he has come, there'd be one or two and sometimes as many as a dozen armed guides, all carrying heavy old rifles left over from the Italian occupation of the early forties.

I stopped at the Telecommunications Office in the center of the piazza. At that time in the mid-Sixties phoning anywhere in Ethiopia was difficult. Telephoning Addis Ababa, I always made "lightning" calls, as they were called. They were more expensive, but also the only fast service and I had only to wait a half hour before a line was free and I dialed the Peace Corps Office.

Or the drive up the escarpment, I had phrased how I would break the news to Dave Berlew, the Peace Corps Director, and when he got on the line, he was buoyant and seemingly happy to hear from me, wanting to know what was the word from the boys in Bati. I let a moment pass before saying I had just come from Bati and told him matter-of-factly that one of the PCVs in Bati had over the summer married a thirteen or fourteen year old Galla girl in a Muslim ceremony.

The silence from Addis Ababa at the other end of the line was priceless.

Part Eleven

Standing on Line at Starbucks

Last week my friend Dave in Washington, D.C. emailed that he had met an Eritrean while standing on line at the Starbucks in the Adams Morgan section of the city. Dave then told me a story that stretches from Eritrea in the early '60s to the U.S. in 2008. It involves the Peace Corps, the famous Peace Corps book locker, and how time and distance changes all our lives, sometimes for the best.

Dave, who was in the Peace Corps in Morocco and now is with the State Department, didn't tell this stranger he met while standing on line that he had been an RPCV. Nonetheless, as the two men chatted, the conversation turned to the Peace Corps, and how Volunteers had saved the Eritrean's life over 40 years ago.

When he was in the fourth grade in a small village outside of Asmara, Eritrea, the man and his older brother, a sixth grader, met two new Peace Corps Volunteers and invited them to what he described as their "very humble home." The Volunteers came and ate the little food their mother had prepared while the whole village turned out to see these incredibly tall guys, a tall white man name Mike, and a black man named James.

A few days later, continued the Eritrean, the two Volunteers returned to his family's home and brought them, "a bushel basket" of books. (Remember the book locker?) This led, the man said, "to a lifetime of reading." After that, the PCVs helped an older brother in the family get a job at the military base located in Asmara.

The Starbucks line moved, coffee was ordered, and Dave and the Eritrean said goodbye and Dave emailed me about this chance encounter.

A few days later Dave was back with a second email. He had run into the Eritrean guy again at Starbucks and asked him if he knew the whereabouts of Mike and James, the PCVs who had so significantly impacted his family's life. The Eritrean said yes and as he began to tell his story, tears came to his eyes.

Somewhere back in the '80s, said the Eritrean, he got the phone number of Mike's mother in Califiornia from the organization of Returned Ethiopian & Eritrean PCVs. (Marian Beil, who runs our group, and publishes this website, remembers getting the call from an Eritrean and providing the number.)

The Eritrean called California and was told by Mike's mother that Mike was "sick" and not doing well. When the Eritrean recounted to her the contribution Mike had made back in his homeland, she was impresssed and surprised. Mike, she finally admitted, was now homeless on the streets of L.A.

The Eritrean continued his long-distance search and eventually found Mike in a homeless shelter. The first thing Mike asked him when they connected by phone was how his Eritrean mother in Eritrea was doing. Mike, he said, remembered names of all his family members. "It really touched my heart," the Eritrean said, especially since "Mike wasn't doing well."

At this point, Dave said, the Eritrean took off his glasses and dabbed his eyes. Speaking of his childhood he said, "Once I met them--Mike and James--I knew I had made it," he said, remembering back to his childhood in Eritrea. With help and inspiration from the PCVs, his older brother went on to become the manager of the Addis Hilton, but fled to Holland during the war years. He is now back in Asmara, running a Chinese restaurant that he opened. "There is something about Americans that gives you hope," the Eritrean said, summing up. "To this day, I still can't describe exactly what that 'something' is." When Dave complained about U.S. foreign policy, the Eritrean responded, "It is the Americans who are overly self-critical. While the American system isn't perfect. It is the best one in the world."

A chance meeting. A small story. A Peace Corps connection. Another example of how time and distance changes all our lives.

Almaz Sullivan Gets Married!

[Some of you may recall two of my earlier blogs about Almaz Sullivan and her journey to America, how PCV Robert Sullivan brought Almaz and her brother here in 1975...well, as they say on television, here's the rest of the story. Just before the New  Year, Almaz and Wim Hox were married in California. These three photos sum up the happy moment. All our blessings and good luck to Almaz and Wim.]

Almaz and Wim Hox with the Golden Gate Bridge behind them (and their golden future ahead). 

Wim is a Search Engine Marketing Specialist with Iprospect; Almaz is a Product Manager with Wells Fargo.

Almaz at home in their apartment after the ceremony at San Francisco City Hall. They will be married again in Ethiopia next summer.

Almaz's father, RPCV Robert Sullivan, Wim Hox, her new husband, Almaz, and her natural brother from Ethiopia, Tewodros Zewdu.

How Almaz Sullivan Got Her Visa

[Some of you may recall an earlier blog item [10/24/07]  entitled, "How Almaz Sullivan Got Her Amharic Back." Well, here is, as they say, the rest of the story. It is about how Robert Sullivan found the way to bring Almaz and her brother Tedesse to America.]

Robert Sullivan was a doctoral student at Penn State in 1975 when he adopted Almaz and Tedesse Zewdie, a process that involved dealing with the high court of Ethiopia. Getting the kids into America would, of course, prove more difficult.

Before heading to Addis Ababa in December 1976 to bring the children to America, Sullivan applied for visas for the children with the Immigration and Naturalization Service in San Antonio, Texas.

Sullivan, who was single at the time, was among the first to test a new immigration law that enabled single Americans to adopt foreign children. Despite the new law, the director of the INS in San Antonio decided not to issue visas for the children. His reason was that children from Africa wouldn’t be able to compete in the U.S. He also publicly said that if Sullivan had the time and money, he should hire a lawyer to challenge him. Upon returning to Austin where he was teaching and without visas, Sullivan wrote, he said, "an impassioned letter" to Senator Ted Kennedy describing the circumstances. [Sullivan was originally from Boston] Kennedy forwarded Sullivan's letter onto Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas and within 24 hours the visas were issued. Today, according to Robert Sullivan, that letter from Senator Bentsen "remains a family prized possession."

And as you know from reading my earlier account of how Almaz came to America, she was indeed able to 'compete' in America. She graduated from an ivy league college, served two years as a PCV in Ethiopia, then went ahead and earned a Masters in Business Administration from the University of Michigan. For the last five years she had been a Marketing/Product Manager at Wells Fargo in San Francisco. Her brother is in the export/import business.

One wonders what happened to the INS director in San Antonio.

Almaz Sullivan Checks In

[In case you missed it in 'comments,' Almaz Sullivan sent me a lovely note. I didn't do much more, however, than stand to the side as Almaz swept through the Peace Corps Recruitment Office on her way home to Ethiopia.]

Comment:
Even as a small child, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers. Meeting the RPCVs in the subway and meeting John Coyne were two defining moments in my life. Who would have known that with such chance encounters that I would be able to feel whole again – become reacquainted with my country, my family, and my mother language. Despite all the usual trials and tribulations of being a Peace Corps Volunteer this is one time in my life when I truly felt that I was in the right place at the right time – serving the two countries that make me, me. John Coyne gave me a way to reconnect with my past and create a path for my future that is my own and for that I can never thank him enough.

How Almaz Sullivan Got Her Amharic Back

Almaz Sullivan was riding the subway in downtown Philly in the fall of 1995 when she spotted two young Peace Corps recruiters down in the city from the New York Recruitment Office. The women were carrying bags full of recruitment paraphernalia, headed for an information session at the University of Pennsylvania. And Almaz leaned forward and introduced herself, saying how she was a recent graduate of Penn, working for the last year and a half years at Cigna, and that the man who had adopted her had been a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ethiopia in 1967. She said that she had always thought of joining the Peace Corps, and the year before she had returned to Ethiopia to see her mother and father for the first time since she was a child.

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While that was the beginning of Almaz Sullivan’s journey to become a PCV herself in Ethiopia, it was also the end of a long story that began in 1976 at the height of the overthrow of the Emperor when Almaz Zewdie was three years old, the child of Barharnesh, PCV Robert Sullivan’s cook, and the zabina (compound guard) Zewdu, when Sullivan was living in a small tukul house located near Sadist Kilo and the Haile Selassie University in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Sullivan had stayed on after his Peace Corps tour to teach Operations Management in the Business College. He was one of the last PCVs to serve with the Peace Corps in the early 70s, and had returned to the University and to his small tukul home, in the midst of the take over of the Empire by the Derg and Mengistu Haile-Marian.

-

It began as the 'silent' coup in Ethiopia as it was called in the Empire and the rise of the Derg and the dictator, Mengistu Haile-Mariam, a junior military officer who became chairmen of the Derg, the military junta that deposed Emperor Haile Selassie in 1975. The Derg was composed of 120 or so young military officers, none above the rank of major. Mengistu was the Ethiopian Head of State from 1976 until 1991. This time was also the period of the Red Terror, a campaign unleashed by the Derg in response to the urban guerrilla warfare of the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Party, and later of other leftist civilian opponents of the Derg, such as the All-Ethiopian Socialist Movement during which thousands of mostly young people were jailed, tortured, and killed. The Red Terror lasted from February 1977 until early 1978.]

-

Sullivan had to leave the University. It was, in effect, closed down, and Almaz's mother and father asked Robert to take their two young children, Almaz, and her brother, Tedesse, to America and safety. After a trip home to the U.S. to secure a job with the University of Texas at Austin, Robert returned to Addis Ababa and to rescue Almaz and her brother, Tedesse.

-

He would tell me when he met years later that it was only with the help of his graduate students that he was able to secure papers for the children, and that it was so dangerous moving about the city, that at times he was pinned down by fire fights at the height of the guerrilla warfare.

-

At the time, Robert was in his early thirties and he was fully responsible for two little kids who spoke Amharic and nothing else. He remembers leaving the kids at a daycare, going off to class, and then being summoned back to the daycare because Almaz was crying, upset, and unable to communicate.

-

Almaz and her brother would grow up to become regular American kids, teenagers, and then college students, and successful professionals.

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When I met Almaz she said she had returned to Ethiopia to met her mother. "I had to meet her. I had to look into her eyes." Now she wanted to join the Peace Corps and give back what had been given to her by Robert when he adopted her as a child. We were able to assign her to Ethiopia where she taught for two years. At the end of Training, her mother went up to the language instructor and thanked him for "giving my daughter back to me." Now Almaz could speak Amharic to her mother.

-

After serving for two years in Ethiopia, Almaz returned to get a Masters in Business Administration from the University of Michigan. For the last five years she had been a Marketing/Product Manager at Wells Fargo in San Francisco. Her brother is in the export/import business and returns frequently to Ethiopia, as does Almaz.

-

Robert went from teaching Operations Management at Texas to become the Associate Dean of the business school. As well, he has held the position of Dean at both Carnegie Mellon and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Schools of Business Administration. He is now in La Jolla, California establishing a new business school for the University of California at San Diego in La Jolla. Recently he was listed in Newsweek Magazine as one of the top business deans in America.

--

This is not only a Peace Corps success story. It is an American success story. It is also the story of how America has been fed off the tragedies in other lands. This is one tale of how immigrants come to America and find their lives and their futures far from home.

The Lion in the Garden of the Guenet Hotel

[I have gotten several emails over the last months from people asking about this 'lion story' so I'm reprinting it for them as they seem not to be able to find it on the blog. jc]

In the fall of 1962, in the final days of my group’s in-country Peace Corps training in Ethiopia, we had had a celebratory dinner at the Guenet Hotel in the Populari section of the capital, Addis Ababa.
            The Guenet Hotel, even in 1962, was one of the older hotels in Addis Ababa. It wasn’t in the center of town, but south of Smuts Street and down the hill from Mexico Square, several miles from where we were housed in the dormitories of Haile Selassie I University. While out of the way, this small, two story rambling hotel, nevertheless, had a two-lane, American-style bowling alley, tennis courts, and a most surprising of all, a real lion in its lush, tropical garden.
            Surprising, because at that time in the Empire no Ethiopian commoner was allowed to keep a lion, the symbol of His Imperial Majesty’s dynasty. The Emperor, Haile Selassie, whose full title was Lion of the Tribe of Judah, Elect of God, Emperor of Ethiopia, had a private collection of animals, including the Imperial lions, antelopes, monkeys, and cheetahs at Jubilee Palace, his royal residence.
            There was also a small government lion park near the campus of the University. This park had about twenty full-grown lions in a large circular cage and sometimes late at night we would hear them roaring in the distance.
            On a rare occasion a wild lion would wander down from nearby Mt.Entoto looking for food and be spotted by townspeople and that would create headlines and eye-witness accounts in the next day’s morning paper.
            So, seeing a lion up close and personal in the heart of Africa was something special for a group of young Americans new to Africa.We were 275 Peace Corps Volunteer teachers, the first to serve in Ethiopia, arrived in Addis Ababa in September at the end of the African Highland long rains. In our final days of training, before being dispatched to our teaching assignments throughout the Empire, we went off one evening to a farewell dinner at the Guenet Hotel. It was the first time any of us had been to the Populari section of the city or seen the lovely gardens of this hotel or seen their caged lion.
           Well, actually it was a caged lion and a large German shepherd dog.
            I recall that when I first saw the lion the German shepherd was stretched out comfortably between its paws, and both the dog and the lion were calmly gazing out through the bars of the small cage at the lot of us. The dog was able to come and go through the narrow bars but we were told by the hotel staff that he always spent the night sleeping inside the cage, curled up with the lion. As it turned out, I was assigned to teach at the Commercial Secondary School in Addis Ababa and in the early fall of that year was living in the Populari section near the Guenet Hotel.

            The Peace Corps had issued bicycles to whomever needed them to get to school and I had gotten into the routine of riding back and forth to classes, and also of stopping off at the Guenet for a coke or coffee after school and to correct my students’ homework while sitting in the gardens of the hotel surrounded by thick bougainvillaea bushes, wild roses and carnations, and gnarled eucalyptus draped with streamer-like leaves. It was here that I came to know the lion and the German shepherd, who often slipped out through the bars of their cage to beg food from me while his partner stood at attention inside the cage silently watching the transaction. They were quite an odd but wonderful couple.

            On one of my mid-day rides home for lunch I was tearing down a steep hill, and an American pulled his car up along side me and singled me to stop. He turned out to be a TWA pilot employed by Ethiopian Airlines who had been in-country for several years, and he invited me, and several others Volunteers, to a “home cooked” dinner that weekend. It was his way of welcoming the new Peace Corps to the Empire.During dinner I mentioned the lion and dog in the garden of the Guenet and the pilot asked me if I knew the story of how the they had gotten to the hotel.
            It seems that the first American TWA director in Ethiopia had raised the lion from a small cub in his home’s compound along with the family’s dog. The lion was such a household pet that everyone who visited the house treated it as such.
            But there was the time the CEO of TWA worldwide came to Ethiopia to meet the Emperor and visit his overseas operation. Trans World Air Lines had managed Ethiopian Airlines since 1946 and that relationship was one of the great early success stories of private development in Africa. In fact, by the time we reached the country in ’62 over a third of the trained pilots were Ethiopians.

The CEO arrived at dawn in Addis Ababa on an overnight flight from Europe and immediately took a morning nap at the managing director’s home. Later that afternoon, rested and revived, the CEO was sitting with a half dozen pilots who had stopped by for a drink and to meet their boss. The group was sitting in the livingroom and the the French doors were open to the garden so that they could watch the African sunset and enjoy the first cool breeze of evening.
            Sometime towards dusk, the full grown lion, who had been asleep in the sunny terrace beyond the French doors, woke up and ambled passed the open door, gazed in at the assembled group, and then ambled off.
            No one commented about the lion, as all the pilots knew about the animal. However, the visiting CEO had no idea that the enormous maned lion was a household pet and sat petrified at the sight of this legendary African beast — on the loose and just yards from him.
            He didn’t say anything until the next morning when he confessed to his host what he thought he had seen, thinking it must have been a frightening fantasy caused by his fear of being in Africa. The host explained the presence of the lion to him and the CEO’s mind was put somewhat at ease.

Some time later, the American manager's tour in Ethiopia was scheduled to come to an end and the family decided to give the lion to the nearby hotel as the tame animal could not be returned to the wild. The German shepherd, however, would go back to America with them.

In the weeks before their departure, the lion was successfully transferred, but when the family realized the German shepherd was so longely and unhappy with the loss of his companion they decided to leave the dog as well, giving both animals to the Guenet where they could live peacefully in the small cage in the hotel gardens.
            And it was there that I found them when I arrived in Addis Ababa.           

I left Ethiopia in the mid-sixties and did not return again until the early ’70s. While I had a short list of old friends in Addis I wanted to see, high on that list also were the lion and the German shepherd in the gardens of the Guenet.
            A day or so after arriving, I took a taxi to the hotel, which had thankfully not changed much in the years I had been away, and I walked into the garden to find the caged lion and the German shepherd.
            The cage was where I remembered it. However, the door was wide open and the lion was gone. Sitting alone in the middle of the empty concrete floor was the old German shepherd.
            I walked inside to the front desk of the hotel and asked about the lion and was told the animal had died only months before. It had been such a news event that a story was published about his death in the Ethiopian Herald, the English language newspaper in the country. The staff found a copy of the article that detailed the demise of the lion and I sat down in the lobby of the old hotel and read the account.
            Several months earlier when the lion was suffering from an infected tooth, doctors from the Pasteur Institute of Ethiopia decided to drug the animal so the tooth could be extracted. Unfortunately the dart of drugs was too much for the old animal and the lion died before it could be saved.
            The hotel had not yet decided what to do about the lion cage for the dog still lived there, spending his days waiting for his lifelong companion to return.
            I gave the article back to the receptionist, thanked him for the information, and then I went out into the garden and walked through the open gate and inside the cage. I knelt down beside the German shepherd and petted the old dog one last time, then I left Addis Ababa and Africa.
            I have never been back.

The House on Churchill Road, The Final Episode

The Headmaster at the Commerical School, Ato Seifu Felleke, was a man I deeply respected. All the PCVs who taught at the school had the greatest respect for this man. He was slight, like most Ethiopians, and underweight, like most Ethiopians, and seem to always be smoking two cigarettes at a time. He was not handsome in the way many Ethiopian men are, but he had a presence and a commend of situations that demanded our full attention.

He had been schooled in India, not Europe or America, but he had a wonderful no bullshit western approach that we liked. He didn't mess with our teaching, still he knew exactly how good or bad we were in the classroom, and over the years the Peace Corps administration in Ethiopia went to him for advice, to seek him out for his wise words, to ask for his help.

Several years ago when Harris Wofford, our first director, was going back to Ethiopia for the first time in many years he called me and asked about Seifu. Where could he find him, Harris wanted to know. By now, Seifu had retired from being a Headmaster but still at the American Embassy Harris asked about Seifu and the Ethiopians found him. Many of them, I'm sure, were students of the Commercial School. Everyone in Addis Ababa knew Ato Seifu. Harris was able to have breakfast with him years after being with the Peace Corps in Ethiopia, and shortly before Seifu's death in '02.

I am sorry to hear through the Ethiopian RPCV network of his death. One story of his later years came to me through the same Ethiopian RPCV network. Seifu was not a religious man but in the long years of the Derg he had begun to attend Coptic mass on Sunday mornings. It was a silent protest to the Derg, this sudden devotion to the church. Many Ethiopians showed their displeasure in the new government by finding religion.

That morning in early September in '62 in my classroom, Ato Seifu had not found religion and was headed for my classroom. He was pissed and I was terrified. I assumed he was upset with me. Here I was a young Peace Corps teacher, coming [at least my eyes] to bring Ethiopian students kicking and screaming into the modern age and I couldn't keep a mad man out of my classroom.

Arriving at the classroom door, Seifu couldn't have cared less about me. He glanced around to see that everything was in order and then addressed in Amharic the 2E class monitor, Abebe Kebede Muleta. They spoke quickly to each other, then Seifu turned and addressed the class, again in Amharic. His voice softened speaking to the students, and then he looked over at me. I had come to the front of the classroom, still clutching my composition books as if they were my only excuse for not handling this classroom drama. Seifu asked if I was okay and I must have nodded or said I was fine, or whatever, and he smiled, and then he said,and that is what we all liked him so, "Well, welcome to Africa." He turned and walked out of the classroom, lighting yet another cigarette as he went on his way.

I was unable to calm the class afer this outbreak. Instead of going on with a lesson on English prepositions, and they are incredible difficult to teach. [Remember the famous story attributed to Winston Churchill about the overzealous editor attempted to rearrange one of his sentences to avoid ending it in a preposition, and Churchill scribbled a single sentence in reply. "This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put.] I decided to dismiss the class, to let them go into the courtyard [how's that for taking charge of the situation?] and they all agree it was a very good idea and fled the room.

I stopped Abebe Kebede Muleta before he could leave and thanked him and I asked him how he managed to get the man out of the room.

"He is a mad, sir," Abebe said. I agreed with that. And then he said that the man thought I was the devil because of my white skin. He was embarrassed telling me that, and I asked him what he did to make the man flee. Again, the shy sweetness returned to the student's face and glancing away he said he told the "mad" that indeed I was the devil and that he should run from me before I sent him to hell.

Well, it worked, I said, and thanked Abebe for saving the day and he bowed in the polite way of all Ethiopians and followed the other students out into the courtyard of the school.

The next morning, and for several mornings after that, when I stepped throught the compound gate onto the sidewalk of Churchill Road to head down the street to the Commerical School the "mad" Rastafarian in leather skins and rags was back in the intersection battling cars. He always drew a crowd until the police arrived to chase him away. He did not, however, return to the Commercial School. Then just as suddenly as he arrived on Churchill Road he disappeared. I never saw him again in Addis Ababa. My guess is that finally the police had had enough of him and locked the poor man up.

I looked for him, however, when I returned to Ethiopia, years later, and when I went to call on Ato Seifu in his office at the Commercial School. We talked about the first Peace Corps teachers at his school and what had happened to them over the years, and also what had happened to him. [By then Seifu had been awarded a prize and a significant amount of money from the Emperor for his work as an educator.] We also talked about the time the 'mad' had come charging into my classroom in my first months of teaching. Seifu smiled remembering and shook his head and said, "John, I thought I might lose you that day as a Peace Corpse teacher. You were very frightened."

"I was?" I said. "I thought I was pretty cool," I added,trying after all these years to put a positive spin on what had happened. Seifu kept smiling and in that way he had of cutting through all our Peace Corps bullshit, added, "John, I never knew a white person could look so white."

[End of story]

The House on Churchill Road, Part 4

The Rastafarian in leather skins and rags had fixated on me, frozen me with his fierce eyes, and something told me that a friendly Tenyais tillin and Indeminadderu might not get me through this situation. What I remember most clearly was his bushy beard, the dreadlocks, and his overpowering smell. I had grown up on a farm and in the close confines of this classroom the wild man brought back to me all the barnyard smells of my youth.

I took another step closer, still clutching a handful of composition books, as if they were any sort of weapon to defend myself, and the man made a lunge, stopping me in my tracks. Two girls sitting in the front row screamed and knocked books to the floor. In the doorway the guard took another tentative step forward into the classroom. He raised his club as if to strike but didn't.

I kept thinking someone in the Headmaster's office must have dialed Addis Ababa's version of #911, but there were no police sirens wailing into the school's compound. No outside help was arriving at my classroom door. I might add that all my  romantic notions of the Noble Savage in the African bush swiftly slipped out of mind. There is something about the reality of a situation that focuses the mind.

Then from the back of the room, the 2E class monitor, Abebe Kebede Muleta, stood and spoke calmly to the man. All of us who taught in Ethiopia came to appreciate and respect the classroom monitor, the student selected by the others to represent them, to dole out punishment, to negotiate with the Headmaster.

I didn't know enough Amharic to know that Abebe Kebede wasn't speaking in Amharic. This student was from a rural village south of Addis. I did not know at the time that he was an Oromo who were then called Galla, and which is now a pejorative term. He was speaking calmly in Oromo to this man. The Oromo were [and are] the largest ethnic group in Ethiopia and have lived in the Horn of Africa as long as recorded history, but were considered second-class citizens by the ruling Amharas. They are hardly that. Abebe Bikila was an Oromo and the first African and Ethiopian to receive a gold medel in the Olympics, running the marathon barefoot through the streets of Rome. He was the first of many Oromos who have won medals at the Games.

I learned later that Abebe Kebede did not know the man, but he knew he was an Oromo, and he swiftly and unexpectantly took control of this classroom confrontation, which was all right with me. The Rastafarian was surprised, I guess, to hear his mother tongue. His eyes shifted from me to Abebe Kebede, then back to me. Abebe Kebede kept moving forward, still speaking softly to the man. I did not move. Abebe was a row over from me and moving slowly towards the front of the room. No one was else was moving. The classroom was silent, though out of the corner of my eye, I saw several boys rise in their seats. Boys really is the wrong term. These guys were in size and strength bigger than me. And they were also Oromos.

Abebe Kebede was about my height but twice my build. If he had been a boxer he would have been a natural light heavyweight. At the time, he was 18 or 19 years old, but had such a sweet nature he seemed much younger, more innocent. Yet on that day, and at that critical moment, none of his innocence was evident. He approached the man with the calmness of a hostage negotiator. Later I would be reminded of the old western, Whispering Smith, starring Alan Ladd as a soft-spoken railroad detective who goes up against his best friend Robert Preston.

Abebe had moved himself in front of me, blocking the wild man's view of me, protecting me, and the wild man had backed off, banged up into my desk. Several of the other students moved up their aisle, as if they had already worked out a plan to corner the stranger at the head of the class.

This he must have realized as he wheeled his sword to keep them back and then thrusted it in my direction one last time. Abebe Kebede raised his voice, said something urgently, gesturing towards me and waving his hand as if to dismiss whatever it was that the Rastafarian might be suggesting.

The wild man was up against the blackboard and the front of the aisles were blocked by a students. I was safely behind them all. Abebe spoke again, gestured with his chin that the Rastafarian should leave. He motioned towards the open door. The school guard, I saw now, had melted away.

Again, and unexpectantly, the Rastafarian made a lunge at me, then halted and turned and ran. He sprinted from the room, out the door and across the gravel compound, passed the bust of Haile Selassie and out the gates of the school. I reached the door to see him run into the traffic on Smuts Street and disappear from sight. Then I saw Ato Seifu, our Headmaster, rushing from his office and into the courtyard, followed by several other Ethiopian teachers. He was shouting in Amharic at the school guard, and heading straight for me. Now I was in trouble, I thought, first the Rastafarian, and now the Headmaster!

[To be continued]

Much more on Ethiopian writers

[The nice thing about the Peace Corps world is that there is always someone who knows more than I do about the topic, and in the case of Ethiopia, the person who knows a lot more than I do, is Shlomo Bachrach. Shlomo was a Fulbright Scholar in Ethiopia before joining the Peace Corps staff in Ethiopia and since then has been in and out of Addis Ababa for over forty years. He now has a wonderful service where he tracks what is in the news about Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa:

shlomo@eastafricaforum.net)

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Shlomo read my blog item on Ethiopian writers and was kind enough to write me and add to the discussion. Shlomo mentioned books by Nega Mezlekia. Nega published in 2000 Notes from the Hyena's Belly. This memoir won Canada's most prestigious literary prize, the Governor General's Award, then there was an outcry as Anne Stone, a Canadian novelist and freelance editor whom Ato Mezlekia hired as copy editor for his manuscript, said she was the book's true author, having written all but 20 pages of the completed book. She protested that Mezlekia did not acknowledge her work as he had promised.They went onto sue each other. I'm not sure how it all came out, but Nega, I know, then published a novel, The God Who Begat a Jackal in 2002.

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There are a few other 'modern' novels that focus on Ethiopia. I can thiking of Kulubi by Edmund Murray, published by Crown back in '73; A Cafe on the Nile by Bartle Bull, published in '98 by Carroll & Graf. Interesting for historical stuff and set in 1935. There is also the Canadian writer, Camilla Gibb, who wrote Sweetness in the Belly, published by Doubleday a few years back. But enough....onto Ethiopian writers.--jc]

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About Ethiopian fiction writes Shlomo Bachrach...

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"Literary fiction (as opposed to tales in the oral tradition) in Ethiopia is a recent development even though manuscripts (religious texts, lives of saints and kings, poetry, etc.) survive from centuries ago.

Poetry has always been considered the principal literary art form.  Many Ethiopian communities in the diaspora have active poetry groups where people (many in their 20s and 30s) gather regularly to read their latest work -- in Amharic -- to each other.  Poetry readings by established poets are often packed. 

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Ethiopia has not had a pool of writers in a western language until recently, in part a consequence of not having been colonized.

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Almost all Ethiopians who studied abroad returned to Ethiopia until the Derg came to power in 1974.  Mengistu is credited with having created the Ethiopian diaspora.

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Ethiopia has a small but growing number of fiction writers in Amharic, but little of their work has been translated, and not all of that into English.

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Ethiopia's best writer of fiction (I am told) is Sebhat Gebre Egziabher, who directed in-country Peace Corps training programs in 1970 and 1971, remained in Ethiopia during the Derg years and is still writing fiction in Addis.  A small but remarkable collection of short stories (5, in all) was published in English in Addis Ababa in 2003, "Retold by Wendy Kindred", from a literal translation made together with Sebhat.  (I have tried with limited success to sell copies in the US, copies available, $10, all proceeds to the publisher, who is still trying to recover his costs, and continues publishing.) 

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Do you know the short stories of Hama Tuma?  Also, Nega Mezlekia published a successful memoir-novel a few years ago in English, Notes from the Hyena's Belly, now has another book out. Amazon carries both writers.

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The place to start reading about Ethiopia's modern literature is Black Lions: The Creative Lives of Modern Ethiopia's Literary Giants and Pioneers by Reidulf K. Molvaer, published by Red Sea Press (NJ and Asmara) in 1997.  Amazon lists a hard-cover copy at $70, but I have a paperback that shows a $22 price.  Little of the work mentioned in the book is available in English, however."

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                                                                                                            Shlomo Bachrach