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Authors: Mawi Asgedom

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Of Beetles and Angels

BOOK: Of Beetles and Angels
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Copyright © 2001, 2002 by Mawi Asgedom

Reading group guide copyright © 2002 by Mawi Asgedom

Photographs used by permission from Mawi Asgedom

Map copyright © 2002 by Little, Brown and Company

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Little, Brown and Company

Hachette Book Group

237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Visit our Web site at
www.HachetteBookGroup.com

The Little, Brown and Company name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

Originally published in hardcover by megadee books, 2001

First eBook Edition: September 2002

ISBN: 978-0-316-04822-4

Contents

PRAISE FOR

DEDICATION

AUTHOR’S NOTE

MEMORIES

THE CAMP

COMING TO AMERICA

A NEW LIFE

GOD’S ANGELS

PLAYGROUND WARFARE

DAYS OF MISCHIEF

LIBEE MIGBAR

COFFEE TALES

THE MAKING OF A MAN

THE UNMAKING OF A MAN

EYEING THE MOUNTAINTOP

FATHER HAILEAB

IZG1HARE YIHABKOOM

EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

MAMA TSEGE’S LEGENDARY HABESHA RECIPES

READING GROUP GUIDE:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

INTRODUCTION

Praise for
Of Beetles and Angels

“In this powerful and heartwarming book, Mawi Asgedom tells an old story and a new story. Our American dream stays alive in part because people like Mawi show up who believe in it.”

—Mary Pipher, author of
The Middle of Everywhere: The World’s Refugees Come to Our Town

“This earnest account of his life up to his graduation from Harvard is peppered with powerful moments.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Wry and tender… what stays with you is the quiet, honest drama of a family’s heartrending journey.”

—Booklist

“In an easy, straightforward style, this Harvard graduate recounts his amazing journey from refugee camp to Ivy League campus… The short length and simple, often humorous recollections of the people and places that inspired Mawi Asgedom will appeal to reluctant readers.”

— Voice of Youth Advocates

“Asgedom has taken the many disparate things life has given him up to now, bound them together to make them whole, and transformed his experience into something solid for the nourishment and use of others.”

—Harvard Magazine

To the true hero of this story,
my mother, Tsege

A
UTHOR’S
N
OTE

S
ince I have come to the United States, I have increasingly gone by the name Mawi Asgedom. But my true name is Selamawi Haileab Asgedom. Mawi is more convenient, but I can never abandon my full name, for my full name has meaning and connects me to my people. In my native language, “selam” means “peace.” “Selamawi” means “peaceful.” “Haileab” means “power from above.” And “Asgedom” means “he who makes others kneel before him.” So my full name means “peaceful power from above who makes others kneel before him.” (Don’t worry, you don’t have to read this book on your knees.)

This story is not just my story or my family’s story but the story of hundreds of thousands of Eritrean and Ethiopian refugees. Many of my refugee brothers and sisters experienced hardships much greater than those described in this book. Their courage has inspired me since childhood.

In the spirit of peace, I have taken great pains to leave politics out of this book. I pray that my brothers and sisters from Eritrea and Ethiopia will find no bias in my writings, for I love both countries equally.

My homelands of Eritrea and Ethiopia fought a deadly civil war from 961-1991. Eritrea became an independent nation in 1993.

1.) My birthplace; 2.) Haileab’s birthplace; 3) Tsege’s birthplace.

M
EMORIES

T
he desert, I remember. The shrieking hyenas, I remember. But beyond that, I cannot separate what I remember from what I have heard in stories.

I may or may not remember seeing my mother look at our house in Adi Wahla, Ethiopia, just before we left. Gazing at it as though it were a person whom she loved and cherished. Trance-walking to the house’s white exterior, laying her hands on it for a few moments, feeling its heartbeat — feeling her own heartbeat — then kissing it, knowing that she might never see it again.

I remember playing soccer with rocks, and a strange man telling me and my brother Tewolde that we had to go on a trip, and Tewolde refusing to go. The man took out a piece of gum, and Tewolde happily traded his homeland.

I remember our journey and the woman we met. Despite her fatigue, she walked and walked and walked, trying to limp her way to safety across miles of stones and rocks. She continued to limp, wanting to stop but knowing that if she did she wouldn’t move again.

She pressed on and on, and soon her limp became a crawl. And then I saw a sight that I would never forget — the soles of her naked feet melting away and then disappearing into the desert, leaving only her bloody, red flesh, mixed with brownish sand and dirt.

But still, she kept on crawling. For what choice does a refugee have?

We had no choice, either. We — my mother, my five-year-old brother, my baby sister, and I at age three — kept walking, hoping that we would make it to Sudan and find my father. He had fled our war-ravaged home a year earlier, driven away by the advancing Ethiopian army.

Even stories fail me as I try to recall the rest of our journey. I know only that the wilderness took its toll, that our young bodies gave way, and that we entered a more barren and deadly internal wilderness.

We crossed the Sudanese border and arrived at a city called Awad. A sign should have been posted at the city limits:
Awad, home of the exiled. Home of the hopeless. Home of the diseased.
A simple sign that would warn and welcome us all.

Welcome, all you refugees. All you psychologically tormented. All you physically malnourished. All you uprooted. Rest your burdens here, for you can rest them nowhere else. Rest your hopes here, for no other place will accept them.

But do not hope too much. For too much hope can lead to insanity.

Beware. We can ill treat your ailments. We have few pills here and little life. We have no guarantees that medicine, not flour, fills the pills. But you have no choice, and neither do we. For we give only that which we have.

Beware our fishermen. Where’s the water, you ask? There is no water. They fish for strangers, vagabonds, foreigners, refugees. They look for you even now; if they find you, they will drag you with their iron nets and abandon you in a wilderness hell.

Please do not blame us. What would you do if chaos approached you on the tortured feet of a million refugees? Could you handle so many?

Selamawi in Sudan at age six.

T
HE
C
AMP

I
don’t remember how we avoided the iron nets or reunited with my father. But I do remember seeking safety in a Sudanese refugee camp in Umsagata, a small dusty village of straw-and-mud adobes. Many of my people had gathered there, and for my family it became home from 1980 to 1983.

Most of our village survived on goat milk, eggs, U.N. rations, and whatever we could grow in our small gardens. A Swedish ministry provided health care, and about a mile away sat a schoolhouse.

We took some brutal beatings at the schoolhouse. But these didn’t come at the hands of bullies. Our kindergarten teachers were the ones dishing out the pain.

I still remember the jealous, one-armed math teacher, who beat me senseless with his good arm because I had more right answers than his son.

He and the other teachers could punish us for almost any reason. Whereas parents in the U.S. often defend their kids against the teacher, parents in Sudan took the teacher’s side.

With few checks on their power, the Sudanese teachers didn’t hesitate to pound us.

Get up! Hold your hands together! Now interlock your fingers so the knuckles are exposed.

Lifting the ruler high overhead, the teacher would unwind and slam torture into our naked knuckles, the ruler’s metal edge knifing deep into our flesh.
Quiet! Hold your mouth or you will get more.

Violence wasn’t restricted to the classroom, either. Some of the other kids tried to push us around, so Tewolde and I quickly mastered Sudanese-style fighting, where the only object was survival. You used whatever was within reach because you knew that your rival would. Sticks. Stones. Sand. You had to use it, and you had to win. I fought almost daily and still bear the scars. But I decorated a few bodies, too.

During some of the fights, we got help from our dog. I forget his name, but I think it started with an H.

H really made a difference one time, when Ahferom, the village bully, came looking for Tewolde and me. We tried to run. But it was too late — Ahferom had grabbed my shirt, and Tewolde had to stay to help me.

Before Ahferom could get started, though, we heard deep-throated snarling, the rapid tearing of fabric, a bloodcurdling human scream.

Ahferom hobbled off, crying all the way home. H had rescued us by biting through Ahferom’s pants, right into the dark flesh of his buttock.

We usually didn’t believe in pets. How could we feed pets when all around us our countrymen struggled to feed themselves?

No, all livestock — from the goat all the way down to the chicken — had to produce for their living. That’s why my father strung our first dog on the clothesline in our backyard. My father had caught him killing the chickens one night when he was supposed to be watching them.

After H saved us from Ahferom, though, he assumed near-pet status. We pampered him. We played games with him. We took him with us when we went hunting with our slingshots.

We didn’t use store-made, metal-and-elastic slingshots, either. No, we had the same kind of slingshot that David used to drop Goliath. Just a narrow strip of cloth, folded in half the long way, with a stone placed inside the fold. We’d spin the cloth so fast it blurred, and then at maximum centripetal force, we’d release the stone with a quick jerk of our wrist.

Hitting a stationary object, especially one as small as a bird, required skill. Hitting a moving one required tremendous skill and a good dose of luck. My brother had both.

One day he saw a bird flying and instantly let loose. Bird met ground. And then the pan. My mother cooked it up for us, and Tewolde, Mehret, and I gathered around to devour it. But Ahferom came and asked to taste just a little bit.

It is unheard of in our culture to refuse people food, so we invited him to join us. He grabbed the whole bird and ran. He ate our bird!

BOOK: Of Beetles and Angels
12.01Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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