A Time To...

by Ronald Louis Peterson

  Tadesse looked at Al and then Gebremedin, hesitating before answering Al’s simple question. “I don’t want to lie to you, but I don’t want to hurt you, either,” Tadesse finally said.

  “Hurt me? You’re laying there with two gunshot wounds. I want to know what caused you to be shot, since it apparently has something to do with me.”

  “OK. Maybe it is good for you to know, so you can be careful about where you go, what you say, and what you do.”

  After reflecting for a minute, Tadesse told Al what had happened at Ephram’s. “I had been sitting with Tewelde at a table next to this university student who had just returned to his home from Addis Ababa. He was alone and drinking beer after beer. He had three empty bottles on his table when he started talking to us about the university and all public schools being on strike. ‘The strike was just the beginning,’ he had told us and everybody else who was nearby. ‘Ethiopia will always be a third-world country unless we do something to change the course it is on,’ he had proclaimed. ‘The answers to all our problems were all right here in Ethiopia,’ he had said.

  “‘Problems? We have problems? Here in Ethiopia?’ I had asked just to play with him.”

  “‘Yes, we have lots of problems, big problems,’ he had said in a way that let me know he did not like my questions, or maybe it was because I smiled at him while I had asked them. Then he snarled, ‘And people like you, who don’t take our problems seriously, are one of our biggest problems.’”

  “‘My friend, please don’t misunderstand me. I know we have problems. We all live with them every day. But I don’t have any answers. So when I joke about what you are saying, please don’t take me seriously. I’m just trying to live with the sad realities,’ I had said to him.”

  “‘Oh, so you want answers. Here is one for you. Send all foreigngees back to their own countries. We don’t need them. They don’t know or care anything about us. They are just getting in the way, especially Peace Corps. They aren’t here to help us. They are taking jobs away from me and my friends who will be graduating soon and looking for teaching jobs,’ the university student had said as he sipped his fourth beer.”

  “‘No. No. You are wrong,’ I had told him. ‘I work with a Peace Corps teacher at the high school. He does care. He was helping to make our class sizes smaller because our government couldn’t afford to pay for more teachers.’”

  “‘Our government would have to find the money to hire more teachers if there were no Peace Corps. Besides, government officials are pocketing school money for themselves instead of paying teachers with it. Corruption, that’s what Peace Corps teachers have given us,’ the university student had said with conviction.”

  “‘You’re crazy or just drunk,’ I had joked,” Tadesse told Al.

  “That’s when I saw you come into Ephram’s and waved to you, but you didn’t see me and Tewelde. You rushed through to the back of Ephram’s like you had diarrhea, or something,” Tadesse chuckled. “When I turned back around to continue my conversation with the radical student, he was standing up, shouting, ‘Ethiopia first,’ at me. His eyes glowed. The gun he had pointing at me went off twice. I don’t remember much after that.”

  “Why do you think he shot you? Was it because you’re a friend of a Peace Corps Volunteer, or because you said he was crazy?” Al wondered.

  “Honestly, I really don’t know. Maybe both, but you must be careful because he is probably speaking for others who feel the same way about foreigngees and the Peace Corps,” Tadesse advised Al. “I haven’t heard that here in Nekempte, but in Addis Ababa it could be true. As you know, Addis is a different world. News, politics, and ideas spread to the outlying areas like ripples in a lake from Addis, the point of impact.”

  CHAPTER 49

  The Shoeshine Boy

  They could have called it New Rome, because like Rome, all roads led to it—at least Ethiopia’s four major roads running north, south, east, and west through the city. Some Italians had called it New Rome when Italy had occupied Ethiopia from 1936 to 1941 and Emperor Haile Selassie had lived in exile. And because the city was located in the center of the country and the roads stretched like arteries virtually the entire length and width of the country, they could have called it Heartland. But because it was the capital city of Ethiopia, they called it New Flower, which spoke to the poetic and agrarian soul of Ethiopians.

  And Addis Ababa spoke to Al. It said, “Mister! Mister! Shoe shine! Good shoe shine, best shoe shine for you.” Actually, these were the words of the twelve-year-old shoeshine boy who chased down Al, who was looking for a taxi to take him to the Peace Corps office. But in a way, he did speak for Addis Ababa. The city was home to an army of street-wise, hustling shoeshine boys, eager to earn money to help put food in their stomachs, and if they were lucky, their family’s stomachs. They were everywhere in the city. Addis wouldn’t be Addis without them.

  Ironically, most of them didn’t have shoes themselves. The bottoms of their feet were tough as leather from walking on the city’s hot concrete sidewalks, its black-topped streets, and the stony dirt side streets where the shoeshine boys lived. But this shoeshine boy was different. He wore shoes, a little oversized and in need of repair. His shoes gleamed from daily shoe shines that made the tears in the leather and the heelless, holey soles more obvious. His baggy pants and colorful striped sweater were equally distressed, which made his smile and gregarious personality even more engaging. Al couldn’t say no to this walking contradiction.

  But before Al could say a word, the boy had his well-worn, homemade wooden shoebox resting on the sidewalk in front of Al. So Al put his right foot on its footrest, and the boy began working on his shoes. After about a minute of intense shoe washing with a water bottle and a dirty rag, the boy looked up at Al and smiled, “Hey, mister.” After getting Al’s attention, he said profoundly, “Tarzan no live here.”

  “I didn’t say he did,” Al replied. “So where does Tarzan live?” Al asked, hoping to get some idea about the point he was trying to make, or even if there was a point. “Somalia? Sudan? Kenya?” Al offered.

  “No. No. America. Tarzan lives in America,” he proclaimed.

  “I don’t think so,” Al said. “No jungles, no roaming elephants and other wild animals, no African villages in America.”

  “In films ... he lives in American films. Not real,” the shoeshine boy clarified.

  “Oh, now I understand. Tarzan is just a story. He is not a real person,” Al confirmed.

  “Yes. America tells many stories, like man walking on moon,” the boy added.

  “That’s not a story. An American did walk on the moon,” Al corrected him.

  “No, a film ... not real,” the boy proclaimed with an incredulous look that said, “How stupid do you think I am?”

  “Why would America lie about that?” Al asked.

  “Because it can. Because it likes to tell stories,” the boy offered as he spit on Al’s shoes before wiping it off with his polish-stained rag to put the finishing touch on Al’s dazzling shoes.

  “So American news reports are not true? They are all lies?” Al asked.

  “Watergate is true,” the shoeshine boy replied with equal amounts of conviction and sympathy.

  Al smiled and shook his head in amazement at how America was regarded by this boy and other Ethiopians, like Tadesse’s assailant. But then he balanced this thought with the ones he had after seeing a photo of President Kennedy hanging in the home of an Ethiopian teaching colleague in Nekempte and after seeing Kennedy photos being sold in Addis Ababa souvenir shops. Diversity of thought was alive and well in Ethiopia; Al just needed to be careful when he spoke to people he didn’t know to avoid potential problems.

  “I can see you are not fooled by American propaganda and that you probably know a lot about what is happening around Addis,” Al, with tongue in cheek, told the shoeshine boy after paying him twice the normal cost of a shoeshine. “I’ll pay you one dollar if you t
ell me about places in Addis where I shouldn’t go, places where Americans can get hurt,” Al told him.

  The shoeshine boy looked at Al with a puzzled expression on his face, as if he didn’t understand. Then he said, “Habashah hurt you ... Peace Corps?”

  “Yes,” Al said softly.

  “Ha ha ha, you no worry. Nobody hurt you in Addis. Habashah like Peace Corps,” the shoeshine boy assured Al.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Sure. Sure. Come. I show you,” the gregarious entrepreneur told Al as he packed all his supplies into his box, strapped it on his shoulder, and stood up.

  The shoeshine boy led the way, a few blocks over to Churchill Boulevard, the city’s largest road, a massive eight-lane street that joined Addis’s northern and southern sections. Lining the streets were sidewalks filled with people coming and going, and small retail businesses. The shoe-shine boy ushered Al past several coffeehouses, bars, restaurants, a couple handicrafts shops, and a store that sold cassettes of music it dubbed from record company recordings. He stopped in front of a goldsmith’s shop.

  The sign above the store window said, in both Amharic and English, “Affork’s Gold.” In the window, next to the entry door, were about two dozen pieces of assorted gold jewelry, a simple gold goblet, and several large gold crosses decorated with intricate patterns of gold filigree.

  “Why are you stopping here?” Al asked.

  “Affork tell you about Peace Corps.”

  CHAPTER 50

  Cross-Cultural Training

  Inside, sitting at a workbench behind the display case, was a young man a few years older than Al. He was hammering impressions into a thin, flat gold band. As he gently tapped the tool making the embossed designs, he listened to a nearby radio that was playing a newscast broadcast in Amharic. Completely absorbed in the moment, he didn’t notice as Al and the shoeshine boy entered the shop. The expression on his face and the tisk, tisk, tisk sounds he made with his tongue told them something was wrong.

  The shoeshine boy walked over to the goldsmith and greeted him in Amharic. After chatting for a minute, the goldsmith stood up and walked over to Al.

  “Hello. I’m Affork. Bekele tells me you are Peace Corps. What do you do? Where do you live?” Affork asked.

  “Nice to meet you, Affork. My name is Al. I teach tenth grade English at the high school in Nekempte.”

  “Why are you afraid for your safety? Did somebody say or do something to you?”

  “I’m not really afraid. I just want to be careful and avoid unnecessary risks,” Al told Affork before summarizing Tadesse’s incident at Ephram’s.

  “I see. Yes, there are radicals, so-called intellectuals, at the university. I was one of them eight years ago before I dropped out. But it is different there now. There are more of them, and they are bolder. They say, ‘Ethiopia first! Ethiopia first!’ in response to the age-old Ethiopian question, ‘Min yee shallal?’ or ‘What is better?’ But all they are really saying is that they want things to change. They don’t know how things should change, because they don’t really know what is better themselves.”

  “What happened to you? Why did you drop out of the university?”

  Affork stared out the window into the street, past Al’s face, before answering, “My father was dying and he asked me to come home.”

  “To take care of him?”

  “No. To take over this family business.”

  “So you couldn’t finish your business degree.”

  “I wasn’t taking business courses. I wasn’t going to continue doing what my father did, what his father did, and so on. He didn’t want me to attend the university, but I wanted to work with my mind, not my hands. He couldn’t understand why. We hadn’t spoken to each other for more than a year. Then he wrote me a letter, asking me to leave the university to become his partner. He didn’t tell me he was dying, but he was dying.”

  “What changed your mind?” Al wondered.

  “A letter from a teacher friend. I was going through a box of papers and books that I had taken with me when I had left home and entered the university. I hadn’t looked at any of it for years. In it was the last letter I received from an old teacher. He was a friend and mentor. His letter ended with, ‘The key to your success is how well you learn from your past. You’ll succeed because your father will make your past a friend,’” Affork said with a smile.

  “It made me rethink things. Carrying on my family’s trade suddenly wasn’t a curse anymore. It made me happy to know who I was and what I’d be doing for a living at a time when so many changes were on the horizon. It was also good to reconcile with my father and to learn the fine points of gold-smithing from a master before he died the next year. I owe a lot to my teacher friend. All this would probably not have happened without his letter.”

  Affork then walked to the back room of his shop and returned with a photo. “This is the teacher,” Affork said as he handed Al the photo. “He was a Peace Corps. Todd gave this to me the day before he returned to the States.”

  “Wow. That’s good to hear. Sometimes we wonder what good Peace Corps really does. Maybe it’s things like this, not the actual jobs we do, that make a difference. Did you ever tell him about this?”

  “No. I sent him a letter to the last address I had for him, to thank him, but I never heard back. He probably moved,” said a disappointed Affork.

  “You say the university students are bolder now. What do you mean?”

  “They talk more, but that’s all, except for a crazy handful, like the one who shot your friend in Nekempte. They talk more because the military lets them. The military must like to have the students making noise in the streets and in the news. I just heard a radio report about another demonstration to protest Haile Selassie’s government. The military is no friend of Haile Selassie. All these protests would have been stopped before they got started when I was at the university,” Affork said as he nodded.

  “So you think Haile Selassie’s days are numbered?”

  “His government is now like an empty bottle,” Affork said as he glanced over to his workroom. “Come, let me show you something.”

  Inside Affork’s workroom, on a large, well-worn wooden table, were a few scattered hand tools, a container of bee’s wax and something that looked like a wafer of wax, about two inches in diameter. Affork picked it up and showed it to Al.

  “What do you see?” Affork asked Al.

  Al studied the wafer in the palm of Affork’s hand. “A coin or medallion with an embossed image of Ethiopia covering most of it,” Al replied after a few seconds.

  “Yes. Now look closer,” Affork said as he pointed to the center with one of the tools from the table.

  “A lion with something in its claws, and above the lion, a cross,” Al said as he looked at it from several angles to get a better view as the light hit it from the single, bare light bulb that hung on a wire from the ceiling.

  “The lion is Haile Selassie, the Lion of Judah. He is holding a scepter, a symbol of his authority. He rules from the center, Addis Ababa. The cross above him symbolizes Lalibela, the holy city to the north, representing the church. Together they have ruled the hearts and souls of Ethiopians for generations,” Affork said as he placed it in an empty, blackened metal box.

  “I will fill this box with special clay that hardens around the wax mold. Think of the wax as Haile Selassie’s government. When the metal box is heated in the furnace, the wax will melt and drain out from this hole in the box. Good-bye, Lion of Judah and church. Then I will pour molten gold into the same hole and it will fill the space where the wax medallion had been. Once it cools and becomes solid, I’ll open the box and take out the hardened clay. When I hit the clay a few times with a hammer, it will crumble, leaving a gold medallion the same size and shape of the wax mold. The gold, the new Ethiopian government, will have replaced the wax, the Haile Selassie government. But unlike the medallion, the new government won’t look the same as
the old one ... no emperor with ties to the church. That’s my guess about what will happen. Who knows what symbols will replace the lion and the cross. Perhaps it will be a gun,” Affork said with some sadness.

  “So why are you making this medallion?”

  “A rich man is paying me to make it. I think he believes that by having this gold medallion, he can help keep things as they are.”

  “Are you worried about the changes?”

  “Why? Should I worry about the stars falling from the sky? I will survive. I can make medallions with anything on them: lions, crosses, guns, flowers. It would be nice if the new rich and powerful ask me to make some with a dove on them because they value peace.”

  “Thank you. I have learned a lot ... about making gold and about Haile Selassie. And it is good to know that foreigngees, Peace Corps in particular, can go about their business without too much concern while all this political stuff is happening. Sometimes it is easy to believe that all Ethiopians think the same way,” Al told Affork.

  “I understand. I have been surprised myself to learn that Americans don’t all think and act the same way.”

  “Your story about the medallion reminds me of something we learned in Peace Corps training. A college professor wrote a book that we had to read so we’d know how to relate better with Ethiopians. The professor claims that when Ethiopians talk, what they say often has double meanings. One is the obvious. He calls this the wax, but it is not the real intended meaning. The other meaning is hidden and requires more thought to understand it. He calls this the gold, because it has all the value of what is said.

  “His metaphor makes more sense to me now. Like the wax mold, the one meaning is just a temporary shell, but it is needed to create the lasting, precious gold or true meaning.”

  “That is very interesting. I didn’t know; some people live life and some spend their lives watching other people live. I promise you, an Ethiopian would never have written a book about Ethiopians’ speaking habits. Nobody would buy it because nobody would care. It would be like an American writing a book about why Americans like capitalism and expecting other Americans to buy it. They wouldn’t care. They’re too busy making lots of money. Ethiopians are too busy trying to do what they are told and to put food in their stomachs to wonder why they speak so carefully,” Affork concluded.