A Culture to be Learned: A Personal Journey through Ambiguity

March 2002

As Ethiopian-American youth, many of us have experienced the same joys and pains of bi-culturalism. We can look into each other's Semitic eye and cry about such an experience; we can laugh with our brown, violet-tinted thick lips and laugh about such an experience; we can sing and dance eskista together in celebration of the joys and pains of living between cross-cultural boundaries.

We know there is something about us-our perception, our language, our modern views-that separates us from our parents, the traditions, and the old, old country they speak of nostalgically as "back home." 

My Father's memory, aged photos from family albums and traditional Ethiopian cultural pieces used to decor my house, are the only concrete elements I have contributing to my own notions of a country, which, seems both so distant, yet so intrinsically a part of me. 

My role as an Ethiopian-American is so ambiguous at times.  The images I know of Ethiopia are at once vague yet at once, so grandiose, for it exists for me essentially as an object of my imagination. Therefore, isn't part of my identity also a vague my imagination; open for interpretation?

When one looks at me, Ethiopians or Americans, I'm sure they are baffled.  Being an artist, I've always equated the way I am perceived by others, similarly to the way one interprets an abstract work of art: the beholder is confused, entranced and struck with the sudden question of whether the image is something with which they can identify or rather, must work to figure out.

Being of both mixed race and culture, I have deduced that it is hard for many Ethiopian-Americans to identify with me, call me one of their own reflect of culture with me.

Just as being an Ethiopian immigrant is a separate experience than being an Ethiopian born American, being an Ethiopian / white/American is a completely separate experience than being just an Ethiopian born American.  As the Ethiopian community, now comes the question of who can be considered truly Ethiopian? 

Must they possess fluency in the native language, being able to conjugate Amharic verbs, communicate with the elders in the sacred language, and carry the rhythmic flow of conversation-skillfully rolling the tongue in sounds unique to Ethiopia? Or, must they be able to cook authentically -being able to name Ethiopian spices correctly, make decent wat, and roast coffe beans without burning them? Or, must they look Ethiopian -possessing light brown skin with a gray tone, thick and beautiful purple tinted lips, and a large forehead covered in curly, dark and soft

hair that is not typical of many Africans?

Or must they be proud- possessing so much faith in their history, culture and people that it extends into an air of superiority, debasing the validity of other people's pride

May be, I've come to learn a true Ethiopian must not need to question such things. If one knows who he or she and he/she is comfortable in his/her identity, it does not need to be worn in the form of pride.  I will admit that my Amharic is rusty, my wat is not the best tasting, and yes I've have burnt my Buna beans on several occasions.

 But the fact remains that I am Ethiopian. 5o%. 100%. Whatever. Maybe my children will be 25%Ethiopian or may be more, depending on whom I choose to marry. When I meet other Ethiopian-Americans I wonder if they feel a sense of pity for me-some sympathy for a poor mixed girl who does not know herself.  Perhaps, to them I am a misunderstood abstract piece of art.  However, contrary to popular belief, I do very much know my self and my culture. 

 Becoming comfortable in my identity came after I had stopped searching for definitions of a true Ethiopian, of a true anything.  As Ethiopian-Americans, this is a factor I would like to point out to those raising children in an American Society:

   We must be aware of what it means to be American, and what it means to be Ethiopian.  This applies to everyone, whether or not you are mixed and whether or not you are a full blood. I feel there need to be an acceptance among the community, a decreased emphasis on expected standards, and an embracing of many types of Ethiopians and cultures.

Yes, Ethiopians are a very proud people but we (that includes my self) must also

be open to learning, shifting, adapting, and thriving as Ethiopian-American culture. 

This means that when you confront someone like me a "half-breed", you are not tempted to respond with the need to teach me so much about my culture, my language -myself.  Rather, you will look at this abstract piece of art and say, "How much I have to Learn."

My father was the first of our family to migrate from Ethiopia to America-and there are many who share and have voiced a similar experience.  We know this because they are our parents.  Or, perhaps you are an Ethiopian immigrant yourself and know of this experience first hand. But I know this: my lack of knowledge in language and international experience no less decreases my substance as person of culture. 

I have a country to visit, an extended family to meet, and a language to become more proficient in-but this, is a personal experience I must fulfill myself.  Look at this piece of art, and become excited in its ambiguity-its inability to be defined. 

Look at it and ask of its culture, its experience its wanting to know more. Look, ask, but don't assume. Perhaps you too, will have much to learn: my culture is currently under going its evolution and my journey, which, is yet to be completed, still carries a story-maybe not as impressive, but holding the same impact as the physical journey of an Ethiopian immigrant from one country to another.

My Trip to the South

June 2002

 

This past summer was mind boggling. I packed my bags from the comfort of "small quiet liberal town" USA too literally cramming myself into one of three vans to travel 5,000 miles though the harsh reality of life. 

For nineteen days, I along with fifteen other teenagers from the Greater Boston Area, on a Civil Rights tour which was called Project Hip-Hop (Highways Into the Past History Organization and Power).  This opportunity gave me a first hand experience of history and reality that has been blatantly ignored, forgotten and

mistold  in history book classes.

 We made several stops, from, West Virginia to the Mississippi Delta, learning from active veterans of the movement who inspired, touched, and enlightened me with true-life stories of their struggle. 

I learned about many heroes from Fannie Lou Hammer and James Chaney to the devastating problems that face the South today carrying the torch of the struggle of freedom forward,  I believe that it is the responsibility of my generation of shining the light into the darkness of America history.

Jonnie Carr, Cleveland Sellers, and Hollies Watkins became my teacher of life, telling about the struggles and horror they were forced to face at a young age.  For them history is second nature, it pumps in their veins, I learned about the past and learned about what people were people were doing to solve today's problems. 

I also met with youth of my age, that are active in changing their society for the better, and my friends are watching Dawson's Creek sitting in Martin Luther King's church and standing at James Chaney's grave, talking to people who were there and help start a lot of the grass-root organization was amazing. 

This trip was filled with excitement and shock and an under current of sadness. In about twenty years all these veterans will be dead.  With their struggles and our society watches WWF and idolizes Britney Spears.  I ended up believing that the torch of freedom has to be passed and the cause for which thousands sacrificed for their lives should be carried to its goal by my generation.

But the real wakeup call hit me on the twelve-hour ride to carefree home, when I was immersed with the thought that I have to carry the struggle forward and came out a changed person from this experience.

I gained so much knowledge, that I would cheat society and myself if I didn't share and implement my experience and knowledge and tell the truth as it has never been told due to particle censorship.  Being aware and learning what happened was not only enlightening but also empowering. 

My tolerance for hate and racism is at an all time low.  I have now committed myself to fight racism in my life and society at large.

 I have experience more than the average teenager who is solely obsessed with their figure and shades of lipstick does.  My attitude and out look has dramatically changed I feel focused and molded. 

I am finally ready to shine the light in the darkness at the expense of sounding idealistic.  I am determined to contribute to change the reality in the South; at least it is worth my try.

Rahel Ayalew  (Cambridge, Massachusetts)

Until this River Dries

June 2002

A river wide

A river violent

A river shallows

It is a river filled with the debris of our hate and pain

A river smelling with the foulness of our sins and crimes

It is a river that sings to us songs of our past

With lyrics of woeful evidence of our madness, deception and shame

It is a river that brings us dire warnings for tomorrow

Warnings of what destruction our greed can bring

It is a river dark, suspicious and ironically calm

Quietly flowing with the current of our want for revenge

It is a river that widens with our deceits and lies

A river that strives on the blood of our innocent families and friends

Until this river’s height sinks to levels that reveal the true power of democracy

When our legislators and judges are no longer puppets of a corrupt regime

Until the voice of the press can be heard without restrictions

Until it’s mass clears to reveal the riches of our land, hidden deep

Exposing the thugs and thieves who strive on our people’s suffering

Until this river dries, our fear will not die

Until this river dries, our joy will not return

Until this river dries, peace will elude us

Our hurts will not go away

No, No, No, We will not know peace or calm

Until this river dries

Saah charles N’Tow, Rhode Island, 1998

Jane Kurtz: Author and Friend of Ethiopia

June 2002

Jane Kurtz, was born in Portland, Oregon, but grew up Ethiopia, Maji, a small town in the Southwest part of the country.  Jane, is not only a well known, and award -winning author of children's books but she is also the first non-Ethiopian author who writes Ethiopian children's books such as Fire on the Mountain, Only A Pigeon,  Pulling the Lion's Tail and so many other books. So we decided to get know more about her work, as to why she is interested in writing Children's books in general and Ethiopian Children's books, in particular. We also asked her if she speaks Amharic? (The Ethiopian official language) About some of the difficulties that she has encountered in the process publishing her books? And abut her future plan as to how she is planning to introduce her books to the larger American readers? 

 My parents moved to Ethiopia in the 1950s to work for the Presbyterian Church. When they reached Addis Ababa, I was two years old, so I had no memories of life in the U.S. and never thought about comparing my experiences in Ethiopia to any place else.  My parents studied Amharic in Addis Ababa and then took their family (four children by then) to live in Maji, in the southwest corner of Ethiopia.  I visited the U.S. when I was in the second grade and again when I was in the eighth grade, but otherwise I spent my whole childhood in Maji or Addis Ababa. 

Maji was a magical place for me.  We had no television, of course, or movies or telephones or anything like that, so my sisters and I would make up our own stories and act them out for days at a time.  Often, we would pick my mother’s flowers to use in our games or scoop frogs out of the inset plants.  The Ethiopian adults around us didn’t like to see us handling frogs and would sometimes scold us and make us drop them.  Maji is mountainous and green even in dry season.  One year, my father’s parents came to visit, and my grandfather and my dad built a house for us, using the materials that everyone used around Maji—mud mixed with straw for the walls, a koro koro roof (tin).

The new house had square walls instead of the round wall of the house I’d lived in up until then.  My sisters and I would climb into the attic of the new house and play paper dolls with families we cut out of the Sears catalog.  After my mother taught my sisters and me how to read, we loved books and got many more ideas for stories from reading and re-reading the few books we had in Maji.

When I was in fourth grade, I went to boarding school in Addis Ababa run by the Presbyterian, Mennonite, Lutheran and Baptist missions.  After that, I only went home to Maji at Christmas and during summer vacation.  When I was in high school, my parents moved into Addis Ababa.  They lived in Ethiopia for 23 years, finally leaving in 1977 when it became dangerous for ferenjis (foreigners) to stay.  I loved growing up in Ethiopia and would never trade my childhood for another kind of experience, even if I could.  I learned enough Amharic to play with my friends and bargain in the markato (market place) and so on—and enough to understand what was being said around me.  I never studied the language as my parents did, and I wish I had.  But in Maji, my family, a nurse, and a teacher were the only people who spoke English, so I heard Amharic and Deeze and other languages around me all the time.  My oldest sister and my brother both taught in Ethiopia during the 1980s and 1990s, and they became fluent in Amharic because their ears were used to the sounds. I went to boarding school in Addis Ababa through high school, attended college in Illinois, and eventually earned a master’s degree at the University of North Dakota.

Jane said, I always loved to read and write, but I didn’t have any dream of writing children’s books until my own children were young and I was reading hundreds of books to them.  That’s when I fell in love with children’s books.  At first, I wrote stories inspired by my children’s childhoods.  In 1990, after I had moved to North Dakota, I became quite homesick for Ethiopia and realized that I could reconnect with Ethiopia by writing stories that related to my own childhood.  I started by writing my own versions of some of the stories I remembered hearing as a child in Ethiopia.  After that, I ended up writing a novel set in the time of war in the 1980s, a picture book based on the daily life of a shoeshine boy who was a friend of my brother’s, and a picture book inspired by the experience of some Ethiopian friends here in the U.S.

I hadn’t been back to Ethiopia for 20 years until 1997 when I was invited to speak in three schools in Addis Ababa, the international school, the British school, and a mission school.  During my years away, I heard news of Ethiopia from my parents, who went back to visit quite often, and from my brother and older sister when they lived in Addis Ababa.  I also kept up with what was happening by reading.  This Christmas, my parents, five of their children (including me) and seven of their grandchildren (including two of my children) went to Ethiopia for about three weeks.  We climbed Maji mountain, visited Lalibela, and spent time at the girls’ school run by the Presbyterian church in Addis Ababa.  The other project that has kept me in touch with Ethiopia recently is that I was asked to serve on the board of a non-profit organization called Ethiopian Books for Children and Educational Foundation. It was started by Gebregeorgis Yohannes, who was born in the small town of Negele Borena in southern Ethiopia, left Ethiopia in the troubled 1980s and eventually (with a MLIS degree from the University of Texas) became a children’s book librarian at San Francisco Public Library.  Nineteen years old when he first read a book outside of school, Yohannes now lives by the motto “Books change lives.” In the 1990s, he began to try to figure out how he could share books with children in the country where he grew up.  He formed a nonprofit organization (the Ethiopian Books for Children and Educational Foundation, or EBCEF) and asked me to serve as a member of the board.  He gathered about 4,000 books and other educational materials.Then he took a leave of absence from his job and went to Ethiopia with a goal of publishing the first Ethiopian picture book and setting up a book center for poor Ethiopian children.  He wrote down a favorite story from his childhood, Kilu Mammo (Silly Mammo), hired an Ethiopian artist to do the illustrations, and started to look in to printing possibilities.

So far, Yohannes has not been able to get NGO status to operate in Ethiopia. In the meantime, he and the Board of Directors decided to publish the first edition of Kilu Mammo in the U.S. in order to provide a resource for the many Ethiopian families in the U.S. and raise money for the operation of EBCEF in Ethiopia.  Kilu Mammo is at the printer right now, and we hope to have copies available within the month—a picture book in both English and Amharic.

When a new book comes out, the publisher typically sends copies to all the review journals and sometimes to newspapers and so on around the country.  After that, it’s up to the author to try to find ways to let readers know about her book.  For most children’s authors, the primary opportunity to do that is speaking in schools and at conferences, which I do.  In the last few years, I have spoken in such places as California, Oregon, Washington, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Maine, Tennessee—and overseas

in Ethiopia and Kenya.  I was invited to be

continues page 9

continued from page 5

one of fourteen children’s authors and illustrators to speak during Laura Bush Celebrates America’s Authors Day in Washington D.C. last year at the time of the inauguration. Everywhere I go, I show pictures of my childhood in Ethiopia and talk about that beautiful country.  I do, indeed, hope that Ethiopian families who find my books will tell others about them, too, because word of mouth is one of the main ways people find out about books.

 In the 1980s and 1990s, there was a real “multicultural boom” in the world of children’s books.  Though I had to work very hard to find my first publisher—and got rejection letters for 10 years—I also found editors very interested in stories that showed a glimpse of life in far-away places.  Now it’s harder to get multicultural books published because many of the publishers have become huge corporations concerned about profits. 

If books don’t sell in big numbers, they often feel they cannot afford to publish them.  So it’s an on-going struggle to get new books accepted.  That’s one reason I appreciate this opportunity to let people know about my books.  If people can find out about my work and tell others, it will help keep the books in print and help me find a publisher for other books.

You can find an order form on my web page, http://www.janekurtz.com.

Voice of Hope

 December 2001 Volume 5, Issue 1
 

VOICES OF HOPE
On Saturday October 2000-2001 Communities of African refugees/immigrants gathered at Faneuil Hall to pay tribute to the survivors of September 11 incident. The event was commarated by songs, poems from many cultures of various groups. One of the organizers Tory Krua from Universal Human Rights International summed up the main message of the gathering when he read "Refugees in America know about terror and loss. They know about grief, survival and rebuilding.


A SHARED MOMENT I was one of those who walked to help the Menagesha Cheshire Home For Physically Handicapped Children in the year 1999, about a year before I came to the United States. One afternoon I was visiting the children recovering from operations and confined to bed in the Recovery Room.


A charming young girl with a smile on her face greeted me as if I was her sister. I had seen her during a visit to the Center some three weeks earlier. She obviously noticed me then and was overwhelmed to see me again. I guess she was right. She was one of the additional sixty children from different regions of the country who had come to the center to benefit from surgical rehabilitation that was offered by the medical team of visiting Indian Rotarians for a limited period of time. She told me that she was from the northern part of Ethiopia, that it was her first time in Addis Ababa (the capital city of Ethiopia) and that she knew no one. I could imagine how hard it must be for her I felt like talking so I sat beside her and started chatting. Her leg was still in plaster as it had been when I first saw her and I asked her how she was feeling. She smiled shyly and said that the pain had been continuous but that as many people had come to visit because it was the “ Annual Walk Day” and now that I was chatting to her, it seemed to have disappeared. She laughed again and I laughed with her.
 
I had never thought about bringing happiness to the children at the Center by just paying a visit and chatting for a while with them. I spent two years of rehabilitation at Menagesha myself when I was a child and remember the joy we all felt when visitors came but I had forgotten the extent until I talked to this girl. I was glad to be able to take her mind off her pain and homesickness for a while but deep in my heart I understood that this problem was common to all the children in the home. I was even more touched later on when some of the children told me that seeing what I could do now had given them hope, I remember one young boy said to me I want to go to school and when I grow up I want to become a Doctor which made the pain even more bearable because I realized that most of the children in the home can’t read and write.
 
I thought I was lucky I was able to go to the near by school in my days at the home so I did not have to miss any time of my school years. Due to limited resource, the home can’t send the children to school anymore neither can it hire a tutor for them at the home.
 
At the end of the day, on my way home, I was talking to my self, what does the future hold for these children if they can’t go to school. These children are the men and women of tomorrow, with a great deal of social, economic, political and cultural responsibility to carry. Now, today, they need the care, attention, a sense of belonging and most importantly love in their lives, which most of them can’t get very often. Therefore, it would be best if we could all help in some small way to give them what they deserve today so that they can lead a good quality of life and be potential citizens of their country and the world at large in the future.
 
By Elleni Moges

Happy Ethiopian New Year, 2000

September 2000, Volume 1, Issue 1 FROM THE EDITORIAL BOARD Since the 1950's, Ethiopian women have receded from participation on significant public agendas. The current results, which have been in the making since 1974, speak for themselves. The national quagmire indicates the absence of female sensibility, sensitivity, humility and wisdom. In 1993, a number of women, who are concerned with the relative deprivation of Ethiopian women from having a voice in matters that affect their destiny and well­being, got together to establish Adbar-Alliance of Ethiopian Women. Adbar was founded on the conviction that social life is complex and is shaped by many economic, social, cultural, and political forces, which cannot be isolated and treated as separable factors. As Ethiopian women, we need to realize that we have been among the most brutalized and victimized people in Ethiopian society, because of the mindless disregard for human dignity that started in 1974. When we try to address Ethiopian Women's, rights, lack of education, under education, disease, health care, economic, social, human rights as well as refugee/immigrants problems abroad, we must conclude that all are tied to lack of civil participation and democracy in our homeland Ethiopia. So we need to dedicate ourselves to these causes. A secure and peaceful environment in which people are free to mobilize their best human and material assets to realize improvement in their life conditions is a prerequisite for all people-centered actions. Adbar starts with the obvious. As Ethiopian women, whether it is in refugee camps in neighboring countries, in internal exile and displacement, in famine and economic crises, we fight harrowing abuses and carry a disproportionate share of the burden of our families' survival. Most Ethiopian Women who are in better situations seems less interested in taking the lead, and creating and pursuing an agenda to confront the situation that creates our human burden and suffering. Is it that our own life burdens are so great that we lack the time and energy to bother with the common good and our shared responsibility? Is it because we have been so marginalized in Ethiopian society that we no longer see a role for ourselves in the public arena? None of these reasons can justify our indifference. Mela is one of the many roads that Adbar has pursued to draw men and women to work together on their shared problems. Throughout Ethiopian history, our mothers had the wisdom never to relinquish social responsibility to the men alone. We seem to have changed over the last half century, and the results speak for themselves. Women did not willfully abandon their social responsibility; they were constitutionally pushed and shunted into the domestic, or powerless arena. Mela does not wish to open yet another avenue for infinite polemics on this issue of female absence and male dominance in the public agenda and its consequences, or for that matter to dwell on the misery created over the last half century. What Mela does hope to do is to encourage men and women to put their heads together in a disciplined way to pursue solutions to the extraordinary human problem whose genesis is well known to us all. The endless discussions and rehashing of life-experiences of the last two decades will not help solve our human problems. New visions and actions can. We invite all to challenge their ingenuity to create and share ideas and programs to address the enormous human suffering of Ethiopian women and their families. We hope Mela, the Adbar publication, will be a modest forum for the dissemination of ideas and information compatible with Adbar's human and social aspirations. Equally important, Mela should be a publication, which encourages Ethiopian women and girls' self-empowerment. We would also like to help the women and girls to develop their sense of self-worth, and thereby enhance their opportunities to lift themselves up by the bootstraps understanding ones responsibilities to self, community and society are among the building blocks of uplifting human experience. We urge our sisters to come forth and use this, their medium, to dialogue and cooperate with men in solving our age-old problems. Small beginnings can take us to great heights if we persist in our efforts.

 

Happy Ethiopian New Year

September 2001, Volume 4, Issue 1

PATRIARCHY: PART II
THE ETHIOPIAN WOMEN'S CHALLENGE

The realm of spirituality is no exception. The world’s religions have tended to treat womanhood and feminine experiences with suspicion, distrust and even fear. Menstruation has been condemned as unclean, menopause as disastrous, female sexuality as something dangerous and any female involvement in it as a dirty, sinful thing that seriously needs to be suppressed. Women’s reproductive ability has been ridiculously translated into weakness, needing male intervention to control and manage it.

My earlier quest for a meaningful spiritual life, which was inevitably found in the Christian faith, required a complete change of behavior on my part. I learned the virtues of humility and humbleness, chastity and purity; selflessness and generosity, kindness and compassion; endurance of hardships. An important element of my faith was the sense of belonging to a family of ‘those of the household of Faith’. I found out that the work calls for the highest standards of living from ‘the Faithful’. In this I was able to oblige. And then, I found out that a special pecking order existed in ‘the household of Faith’, men came first and then women followed; women were expected to play behind-the-scene roles, supporting the brothers. A few sisters in the ‘household of faith’ were able to emerge and take the front row a few times, but almost always we stayed a few ‘respectful’ paces behind our brothers, always letting them take the lead. This was a source of secret frustration for me. I wanted a piece of the action, but I did not dare to become ‘too forward’ and risk being misunderstood. It soon became obviously clear to me that it was ‘disadvantageous’ to be a woman. A woman has to conform in order to fit within the confines of organized religions, which are overwhelmingly male-oriented.

The culture that I grew up in was a simple extension of the larger Ethiopian patriarchal system. It was a reinforcement of the subordination and subjugation of women. In order to be a decent ‘woman’ one has to fit into the mold. There is no room for questioning ­ that would be perceived as disobedience of the ‘culture’. It glorified subservience of a woman to man, willing to be led and ready to endure whatever hardships came her way, with thanksgiving.

In our culture men are expected to be better than women; to be more powerful, more successful, more authoritative, more aggressive than women. Men are expected to be better than women; indeed, this is a source of pride. They are the providers, protectors, and controllers of the home. These are the men who are perceived to be “true men”. Many of us grew up knowing and accepting that women and men have different roles.

Many of us firmly believe that men and women have different roles to play in society. Many of us perform our part without question. Although a lot of women respect the principle of equality in principle and support the work some of us are doing, they have qualms about what some of us do. They believe that it may not be a good idea ‘to rock the boat’ by agitating for equality between men and women.

As far as some women are concerned, women should be more independent than they currently are, but they are quite apprehensive about what will happen when changes occur. Some of my friends, like many conservative Ethiopian women, are a bit skeptical of the so-called ‘women’s movement’.

“What do we want to achieve anyways: The men to go to the kitchen or start changing the babies’ diaper?” A friend of mine told me she would never subject her man to that. She has nothing to gain by ‘demeaning’ him in this way and would hate to see him lose face by having to do such menial tasks ‘meant for women’. Besides, what would people say about her if they got to know that she makes him do such things?

When we look at the gender role in the larger portion of our society, the peasant setting, both men and women would work on land, tilling and preparing the grounds for planting. The actual planting of seed, and thereafter removing weeds from the farm, was mostly done by womenfolk. The women also took care of the home, keeping the house and its environs clean and tidy, doing the washing, fetching water from the nearby rivers, for home consumption, collecting firewood or hewing wood, cooking, taking care of the domestic animals and caring for the children. The younger boys joined the women in doing these chores, but the much older boys stuck to male roles which includes felling trees or pulling out tree stumps, tilling virgin land, building new structures in the homestead and other exerting, manual jobs. Taking care of the general welfare of the home is the duty of the family patriarchs. They have the authority to decide what happens to whom, where and when.

The life of the rural women consists of almost the same routine day after day. The women are the first to get up in the morning within the homestead to start the daily chores; milking the cattle and proceeding to draw water and fetching firewood, cooking, feeding the children, taking lunch for the family members working on the field, helping on the field, gathering the animals into the pens for the night, etc. Later in the evening, the men would freshen up, may be change into their better apparel and take an evening stroll as they waited for the women to carry out the evening chores. One does not have to go through this routine to understand what this life entails. There is practically no leisure for women in the home. I found it a drag and grossly unfair.

I wanted to know how the women feel about it. I got a chance to talk to a woman who passed through this routine. She did not see this life as burdensome. It was simply the way things were and she accepted it. She accepts her role as a woman without complaint and cannot understand why some women (like me) think that we should get more out of life. “More of what?” She asks. As a young girl she was her mother’s understudy. Her mother always succumbed to her father’s will, even when she thought that his decisions were far from wise or even unfair. It was not a woman’s place to question her husband’s intentions, or keep second-guessing his decisions. She saw all this and learnt well.

When she eventually got married herself, she always did what her husband wished. This is what made a good wife and that is what she wanted to be. In time, she told me, she learnt her man well enough to influence his decisions without threatening his position. Indeed, according to her, a wise woman learns the art of putting ideas into her husband’s head and letting him think it was his own idea. So long as your wishes are fulfilled, why does it matter whose idea it was originally? Obviously she does not see that this robs women of visibility as someone else gets to take the credit for their ingenious ideas. She did not evens think twice when her husband asked her to resign from her job. It was earlier on in the relationship and she figured that her husband’s demand that she resign stemmed from his need to establish some sort of authority over her from the very start. “Things are very testy at the beginning”, she says. “A man needs the assurance that you are not going to run for his ‘post’ in the family”. She, however, concedes that she is lucky that she ended up with a man who took good care of her and the children. Many other women are not usually so lucky.

 

Their husbands often use their financial power to punish or ‘tramline’ their ‘errant’ wives by withholding much-needed monetary support. Like the majority of Ethiopian, women who have learnt the art of survival in marriage, she has relied on her wit to suffuse crisis in her marriage. “Often, pretending to be much more foolish than you really are, is a ruse that men fall for over and over again”, she told me. Apparently most men feel secure when they think that their wives are too dumb to really do anything by themselves. Strange reasoning, but I am assured that it works. According to her, there is no way for the sexes to be equal. Say, for instance, the question of fidelity in marriage. While women are expected to be absolutely faithful in marriage, men have flagrant extra-marital affairs. A married woman, who is caught having a similar affair, has no hope for a pardon from her spouse; she is quickly gotten rid of. The man, with his superior earning power and capacity to provide for the family, indulges in such behavior in the comfort of knowing that there can be no significant reprieve against him. Many women simply suffer their errant husbands quietly and bear the pain.

In my view, most women know exactly what is going on. They appreciate the double standards applied to both sexes. Despite this fact, many women adapted to male whims, as did our mothers and grandmothers before us.

I feel that women are like undergrowth plants desperately trying to flourish and thrive on the forest floor, while the bigger, taller, gigantic trees block out almost the entire sky and sunlight from view. Most of these miserable plants will never reach the height of the big trees, unless all things remain equal. Indeed, most of the really puny and vulnerable ones are the first to be trampled upon and destroyed when hazards come. Some of the forest undergrowth does survive, of course, but at best it only gets to become sturdy bushes; never strong, tall, or gigantic trees comparable to the ‘dominant’ forest trees.

So long as women engage in the ‘survival tactics’, they shall continue to be the ‘forest undergrowth’. In my opinion this is not enough. It is too little. Women must acquire the same opportunity with men to grow, with enough space, sunlight and sky to thrive, even bloom and blossom!

By Muluken Teshome

 

 

ETHIOPIA THE PH.D. WHO CAN'T WORK WITH OTHERS
AND THE SOCIETAL IMPACT

In this day and age, Africa imports modern education, cars, computers, telephones, TVs, the Internet, fashion, books, and pretty much every thing. But it does not look like it imports modern "organization" education. This hold true for Ethiopia, there may be many reasons for that, but the fact is that we now have several generations of people "educated" without the faintest experience and knowledge about how to team with others, how to work, organize with others to solve old and unsolved huge problems or get together and build new institutions that last and achieve their goals.

One must be exposed to organized work, to being elected, to team-work success, to being rewarded for a good job. Since elementary school, these notions become second nature, instinctive to him or her. Organizations are a collective of human being grouped for a certain mission. They are social entities. My belief is that organizations are like scaffolding around buildings. It is in their womb that the new buildings grow. It is hard to imagine Noble Prize winners in medicine without the American Medical Association, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Royal Medical Society and the like.

It is hard to imagine for instance a telecom industry flourishing in Ethiopia and de-regulation obtained without an Ethiopian trade association of IT related businesses, without an Internet users association, without an Ethiopian Telecommunication Corporation's customers association, and telecom is an Ethiopia's window to the future in business, in education, in governance and many other areas.

Without an organization the individual, highly educated or not, is alone. His efforts are invisible and insignificant. He or she will be modern "handyman" who can only work on an as an employee to do a specific job in larger organizations belonging to those who were "organization" trained since their childhood.

 

In Ethiopia, perhaps in many African countries, when one goes to school he or she is expected to study the basics (math, reading, writing) and gets no education in how to team with others, in organizing and solving problems together. Perhaps one of the few places where one gets a crash course on how to "organize" and "lead" is the army.

I, for one, don't remember doing anything related to teaming with my school friends, or my neighbors to accomplish a community work during my whole student life. To make it short, we now have Ethiopian PhDs, MSS and BAs in chemistry, social science, in many other fields who are incapable of working together. And if they get together they will raise the most contentious issues political or otherwise, argue forever and split. If by miracle they get to form an organization they will measure its performance by how much it opposes someone else (people, institutions, government, etc.) and not by how much positive work it has done, how much result it has obtained, how many members it has produce, or how much recognition it has given to excellent work.

 

This is my view, a direct result of there not being "organization trained". This behavior perhaps explains why Ethiopians rarely team up to start business together here in the United States and else where. 

Why our community misses opportunities to grow strong, wealthy and well established and why we grow relatively poor every day when compared to the other immigrant communities in the United States.