A Web Site For The Young Ethiopian Professional. Volume I   Issue XIl    

 

 

 

 

Towards Debre Libanos

 

 

 

 

 

Towards Debre-Libanos
By: Zelalem Teferra

I have friends in every dreary lab, in every no-name town in the States. I have friends married to steam-pipes and engaged to particle accelerators. Friends buried under piles of data printouts, and piles of science journals, and piles of firiffarees of cookies and empty coffee cups. I have friends who spend their waking hours fondling mice and caressing keyboards. Friends who've camped out in dark corners of library stacks, holding hunger strikes, it seems, feeding on nothing but scraps of Ritz Crackers washed down with liters of Mountain Dew. I have friends whose vision of a hand wave from across the street is warped by the scanty light of academic dungeons, by myopic squints behind heavy spectacles, and by excess radiation from high-tech gadgets.

Wait, did I say friends? I mean EX-friends... because they roared and soared into the techno-sphere while I stayed to roll in the dust with simple-minded glee. They left to crusade in the name of Bill Gates and to usher in the era of the techno nerds. And now, it would take, they say, a "supercritical" twist of the mind's knob for them to wind back to my station, which has frozen right near the techno equivalent of ye dingay dabbo zemen. Whatever. Anyway, they'd be loathe to call "a friend" someone who, until corrected rudely, used to think 'alpha-centauri' was a respected brand of wristwatch. Loathe to call a friend someone who'd be hard pressed to say the frequency of the new Pentium III given to him as a birthday present.

There is Kebede from Keffa, who the day he found out what the WIN command was for, and lights flashed in his eyes and bells tolled in his head and had a revelation of himself atop the corporate chair of a startup.

There's Kebedech from Kazanchees who, after expressing surprise that none of the E's in EE stood for Ethiopia, nonetheless dove into the pool of electrical engineers already overflowing with Expatriopians [a term coined by a friend, LM].

There's Alemneh from Mojo, who used to think 'be mekina Tsegur mekkerkem' meant that a barber would hold a toy car and roll it back and forth on the scalp of a client, has since gone on to become a tenured physics professor in a respected state university. His goal: churn out little copies of himself... he would call them Alemneons, or li'l Alemnehoch.

There's Alemnesh from Mekanissa, a biochemist, married with children… I mean, married to a lab and guarding a bilQat of bacteria as though they were fragments of her own test-tube fertilized eggs.

There's Abbe from MeQele who's figured out that cold fusion is no fiction if we only assume a negatively-curved, 26-dimensional universe with non-trivial homology groups. People tell him to drop it all and go take a shower.

Then there's Alganesh from Dukem, a radiologist who drives the Geiger counter in her lab berserk every time she walks past it. She owns www.dukem-nukem.com and can't brag enough about it.

And then there's I.

I'm the butt of the common joke which goes: an engineering major asks "HOW does it work?"; a physics major asks, "WHY does it work?", and you know what a humanities major asks..? "Want fries with that?" And I've made sure that every single scientist who's had the audacity to say this to my face never leaves before I imprint some humbleness on his cheeks in the form of four upside-down exclamation marks. (Not quite, but I've fought the urge on several occasions.)

So, yes, I paint. And, every late afternoon, I lean out the window of my third-floor painting studio to watch the hizb serawit that swarms on the sidewalk below; a human crowd with the hyper-mobility of a QuCHaCH serawit. I glance at the golden glow of a late afternoon sun reflect on the top three of the five-floor commercial rise across the street. I look back down to the sidewalk. Not a soul, apparently, is mesmerized by the sight. Not a soul at sub-somsoma pace except a few loitering impatiently around the autobus fermata.

I stick my head back in, and think of my friends once again. My EX-friends.

I have friends who'll look at you with visible incredulity if you pulled over to the shoulder of a highway while driving through the spectacular landscape of Wyoming. Why? Because such leisure makes for a sub-optimal mileage/day ratio. I have friends who mistake every conversation for a duel about whose shit smells better, or a stage for debating whose toilet flushes with a smoother spiral vector field. I have friends who fall into euphoric ecstasy when they find a bug in your code, a missing assumption in your theorem, a breach in your security, an unintended mutation in your bacteria, and a missing digit in your measurement.

I have friends who... no, actually, I don't have friends any more.

But I say to all my ex-friends, come with me to Debre-Libanos. Come with me to the eucalyptus-scented highlands. Toss your gadgets and cacophony behind, throw your deodorant and your toothbrush and your toilet paper behind. Come with me to Debre-Libanos and we'll pretend like the sky is some blue gargantuan cosmic dinkuwan, and we will hold a diggiss, have orgies and make merry.

We will scream 'till our enTil flies out. We will beat the drums, we'll dance in circles and shake our booties all day long. We'll light fires at night and huddle around telling stories. We'll sing and tell stories until we cozily slide into sleep wrapped in our bernos...

Come with me to Debre-Libanos where everyone will love you whether you are dumb or smart; where no one will care to correct you if you mispronounced the nearest galaxy; where everyone will have X-ray vision to see beyond your skin; where everyone will have infrared vision to sense your internal warmth, and no one will ever care if you're dressed or naked.

Come with me to Debre-Libanos.

 

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