Read Online Of Beetles and Angels by Mawi Asgedom - Free Book Online Page B

became famous among village folks.
    Haileab, the son of Zedengel. Birthplace: Seraye, Eritrea. Now living in Tigray, Ethiopia. Deliverer of babies. Stitcher of the bloody. Mender of the broken.
    He would travel any distance. On foot. On mule. At night. By day. In the blistering heat of summer. In the flash floods and deep mud of winter.
    One day he would drink thirty cups of
sewa,
or
habesha
beer. The next he would trek six hours to a remote village to save someone’s life. One moment he would captivate an entire crowd, pumping his arms to drive home a humorous point. The next he would raise his shoe in anger and rifle it across the room at someone’s head.
    When did he have his first child? Sixteen? Eighteen? Twenty? I have many half siblings that I don’t know and never will. Most of them have already died.
    Haileab, the son of Zedengel, rarely cried. But he always cried when he thought of his lost children, knowing, perhaps, that he had created his own childhood nightmare in their lives: Y OU CANNOT KNOW HOW IT FEELS TO KNOW THAT YOU BROUGHT CHILDREN INTO THIS WORLD AND ABANDONED THEM. A BANDONED YOUR OWN BLOOD TO THIS HARSH WORLD.
    He married my mother. He was much older than her, maybe twenty years older. But that was the way of our people.A younger man had nothing to offer a woman’s parents. He had to accumulate many years’ wealth to convince the bride-to-be’s family that he could provide for the daughter
and
the parents.
    Several years after they were married, my brother Tewolde was born, and then me, and then my sister, Mehret. All three of us born in Adi Wahla, Ethiopia, not far from the Eritrean border. All three of us cultural wholes but political half-breeds, with our father from Eritrea and our mother from Ethiopia.
    We are the same people. Same language. Same food. Same culture. We even share the same genes. We, the Tigrynia-speaking people. But somehow, we have formed separate identities, and more recently, have become bitter enemies.
    Some say our division started centuries ago. Many others say it started with the Italians — that when they colonized us in the late nineteenth century, they separated my father’s people from the rest of Ethiopia. With the end of World War II, the colonizers departed. But they left us to fight through our differences, differences that they had amplified.
    For thirty years, we fought against each other and alongside each other. We took a little break to catch our breath and have resumed fighting now.
    Many of my father’s and mother’s people now hate each other. But they did not hate each other in my father’s day. How else could my father, an Eritrean, live among my mother’s people for almost three decades? How else could he nurse so many of her people back to life? How else could he marry my mother?
    My father grew wealthy. He had his own pharmacy, his own general store, and he ran his own clinic. He had livestock by the hundreds and was known to all in the area.
    He had many friends, but he also had many enemies. Powerful enemies. They came uninvited and threatened him:
    “Do not treat this patient. He killed my brother. Didn’t you hear me, you son of a woman? I said do not treat him!
    “You won’t stop? Okay. Just wait then. I will show you your work. Just wait. We’ll see how long your clinic stays open.”
    My father, a healer, had been robbed of his power to heal. Soon he began to think about leaving.…
    “They have broken into my clinic and destroyed all of my supplies. They have threatened to do worse.
    “Tigray does not have the medicine that I need, and I fear to go deeper into Ethiopia. My friends warn me not to report to headquarters for more supplies; they say the ruthless Dergue regime will kill or imprison me.
    “Gathering the provisions that I will need, I pack my mules and head across the border to Sudan. I purchase the supplies — thank God for the black market, I get them for half the price. Let’s just pray that these pills are