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Do The Right Thing

by Y. Medhin

Listening to NPR, she marvels at the global attention focused on Afghanistan, on it's transition from the Old Testament rule of the Taliban to something less archaic, hopefully more humane. And she can't help but think of her own Ethiopia's ke'isat wede remeT path to the present. No global attention was spared for Ethiopia. Escort out the old, fly in the new. Beginning. Middle. End. The attention refocuses with each phase of famine. The world must be in love with images of an emaciated Ethiopia, her children especially, too sick, too weak, too...too!...to care enough to shoo away the flies zooming in for a close-up look at their desperate eyes, their beseechingly open mouths. She used to cry when she saw those faces. She doesn't any more. She simply turns her eyes away (wouldn't you?), flips the channel to something more soothing, like Home and Garden, and dwells upon the clean siminto patio they are installing for this ferenj couple with their 250K American Dollar starter home. The siminto comes in nice cool colors. The couple have picked it in marbled olive. She approves silently although she prefers the qEnT-free basic white.

Last year, she was in Addis. Legal reasons. Her husband was laying claim to her house. His reasoning was that since he'd lived in the house for the past 20 years (while she slaved away raising their children in the US, walking the daily miles from subway to office to subway to home - an attic efficiency and a shared bathroom with a stranger who was not the most hygienic of souls), well, he felt that he deserved her house, the one she had built in her early twenties, the one where she had hoped to asadiga medar her children, you know, that same house that he had contributed absolutely nothing to, while she had dealt with the delala, bought the land, hired the architects, and supervised the brick and mortar phases then sweet-talked the Italian carpenter into using quality wood on the built-in cedar closets. It wasn't just a house to her. It was proof that once upon a time she had been someone to be reckoned with in her own land, with her own people. So, anyway, he wanted it. And damn if she was going to let him have it.

Apart from the emotional trauma of having to play the system while trying to prove to strangers that the house she built was hers and hers alone (and the only people she had ever planned on signing it over to were her children) she also had to come face to face with the graphic deterioration of her city. Roads built decades ago had become corrugated obstacle courses overrun in nearly equal measures by pedestrians, animals, and machines. The abject poverty was like one of those Hollywood block busters with much gratuitous violence - too ugly to bear, too overwhelming to close your eyes against.

She traversed old hunting grounds and was delighted to find the sefi and shemanE in their old spots at Merkato. There was beauty there (you couldn't ignore that either) in strangely strange places, in unexpected moments, like a child shouting for his mother's attention while she bartered with the shinkurt shaCH. The humanity - Lord, the humanity! Does country, in any other place, under any other sky, feel so blessedly like home?

Standing in the midst of blissful chaos, she let the emotions waft over her and seep deep into her bones. No longer did she focus with seething frustration on the dirt walkways and the overflowing ditches. Instead, she let the perfect imperfections, the unordered order and the mixed aromas pull her back to the woman she used to be before she had become a card-carrying citizen of the anti-septic world she now called home. Open sewages were topics of discussion in her son's college History class. In Addis, certain aspects of the European Middle Ages were alive and well. But Addis was her city, and she had grown up here, lived here. Anywhere else she went, she had simply survived. Yes, freedom had its own sweetness about it, but, like everything else in this tigist CHerash life, it came with a price. Sometimes she paid it gladly. Other times, when the memories were particularly ardent in their wish to dwell in her thoughts, she shed her tears in private places with filtered air and soulless houses.

This, too, shall pass.

Waiting for her turn at the courts where utter strangers would get to decide the truth based on her legions of documents and her kehadi husband's words and allegations, she listened in stunned disbelief while another woman argue her case before the same judge that she would face later. This woman's case was particularly farcical. It seemed that while she was in Europe pursuing treatment for a life-threatening illness, her husband of some years had declared her dead, had the sad news printed in the papers, did the whole izin and leqso bit and inherited her habt in short order. Now, this woman was back and in the oddest of positions, having to prove to the courts that she was not dead. Imagine that!! Once, back in her anti-septic tank, watching a segment on 20/20, she remembers thinking that the Muslim law that allowed a man to divorce his wife by incanting, "I divorce you," three times was ridiculous. But the case of The Woman Hho Was Not Dead easily topped anything else in the realms of the absurd.

When it was her turn to present herself before the judges (three on the benches to prevent shenanigans, gubo meblat, and the countless other bad habits of those in power), she stepped forward, papers and lawyer at the ready, only to be told that her case had not been read yet - never mind she'd filed the papers more than five years ago. Such was the back-up in this most dysfunctional of all bureaucratic systems. So, more qeTero. More qaTelo. A case that should have been cut and dried (what was it about the deed to the house with her signature on it, and the ledger of loan payments to the bank she had made over the years, against the overwhelming lack of evidence her husband presented that seemed to confused the honorable judges?) was going to drag on some more. She would have given up the fight...if she wasn't tired of giving up. Thing was, she had another life to get back to, one where order, before negligible, was now a beckoning refuge. And where she had a job and a life that was beginning to seem more and more appealing with each passing day in Addis. She would have to mewekel someone she trusted to be present at the next appointment with the courts.

The thing about wkl'na and wekils was that those who wouldn't try to bilk you for every penny were too busy being law abiding globe trotters to bother with your troubles. And those who were eager to go fight the fight for you were eventually going to turn on you and punch your lights out with a left hook out of nowhere. She knew this because she had the bruises to prove it - and bruises really, really hurt and stayed with you forever when they were delivered by those you thought you could trust. And emotional bruises were the worst - they left scar tissue like you wouldn't believe!

Between getting the right papers signed to entrust her case and her secrets to yet another soul, she got her shopping done. No matter what you were involved in, if you went away and came back home not bearing gifts, you sent the wrong message, and she, well she hurt too much when she hurt others. Then she had flown back across two continents and an ocean to her anti-septic world and her home with the clean siminto on the berenda where her dog awaited her eagerly. Her children had picked her up at the airport and hugged and kissed her more than three times on each cheek. On the drive home, she had found herself zoning in on the multiple lane, smooth asphalt highway. No one honked. No over-laden donkeys jostling for position, and the beggars held their cardboard signs and stayed at a safe distance instead of banging on her window with their soiled hands, clamoring for attention with their plaintive, "Imama, Imama! Ibakwon!"

The home improvement program is over and she flips back to the news channel. They are still talking about the Taliban and the hunt for bin Ladin. A middle-aged woman with a Middle Eastern accent and intelligent eyes was passionately arguing for the UN to observe and sanction the transitional government in Afghanistan. Will they hear her, she wondered, then flipped again...and again, until she was tired of sitting there staring into an electrical window that told her nothing more than it wanted her to know. She switched it off, rose from her seat and slipped her feet into old sneakers. It was time to walk her dog. Meqes came trotting to her side when he heard his mistress remove the leash from its hook. She clipped it onto his collar and stepped out onto the porch. She inhaled the crisp autumn air as she stretched her arms above her head. "C'mon, iniheed," she said to the dog and walked down the porch steps, absently kicking a dead leaf off her clean siminto.

She had eschewed her customary neTela for a light, red white and blue jacket. She didn't want to be the isat-irat for some overzealous patriot on a warpath. When things settled down, she would get back to her neTela. Everything at a price. Some were just easier to pay.



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