By Mezemir Girma
A True Story
One sunny winter morning in my home village, Sasit, I sat on a log with fellow children and adults in front of a small shop. Bare-feet and wearing locally sewn cheap clothes, we were chatting gazing at people passing by. Our backs rested on one of the walls of an iron-roof mud-house. How the rectangular houses are built is a witness to the transforming local architecture. They share one or more of their walls and many of them line up for a considerable distance. There is controllable flooding when it rains heavily because the way is closed for the flood. The dirt-road now has become mud-road. At sloppy places, you walk carefully to avoid slipping. Most people walked barefoot as we did. We went natural almost in every sense of the word. Just out of the blue, a man who wore rain-boots that were really clean and shiny started strutting. The black rain-boots were really unbelievable sight because there was no trace of mud in them. Did he descend from the sky! “How attractive are those rain-boots!” I exclaimed. Unexpectedly, the countryman pranced straight towards me and grabbed my ear. He squeezed and pinched my ear until it was very painful and got red. I didn’t understand the wrong I did if any. I didn't cry either. I remained seated my eyes wide open towards the man going along the way! Adding insult to injury, after the furious man left, one of those who sat beside me exclaimed, “You deserve it, don’t you!” This could be one of the mornings I was basking in the sun before having food, a typical morning. I was 13. When I see it in hindsight, the man didn’t come from the countryside wearing those boots as I expected. He walked to town barefoot, bought the boots from the shop next door and wore them. There was a misunderstanding among us. And very recently one of the guys who sat with me then, met me on the way and told me that that man had a marriage linkage with a wealthy family in the area. He added he died recently. I rather told him that I feel sorry about his death. Would I feel happy by the death of a man who pinched me after I said something he thought was bad seconds after he wore his new boots and started celebrating the success!
At the the big hall of the Old Class Room Building, Institute of Language Studies, Addis Ababa University, we undergrads sat awaiting a movie to start. We were celebrating the European week with 27 embassies erecting tents on campus grounds and introducing their cultures. The film festival was a part of that and we had to go to cinemas throughout the town to watch European movies free of charge. This one was a Spanish movie. A tall beautiful Spanish woman came to officially open the movie show. She stood on the stage and started speaking in English with a Spanish accent. Her speech was on their culture and the context of the movie. I saw how she presented her point impeccably. More than anything, something attracted my attention. Unlike my German teacher, Moiken Jessen, this one cut her hair short. The slender woman’s hair looked beautiful to me.When these words left my mouth, I was almost made unconscious by her beauty: “How beautiful is she!” A boy sitting next to me was astounded and started to pour his appreciation to me for my remark. “Our people are not like this. We hide our feelings!” he whispered and kept telling me that I was an exception. He tried to explain his point further with examples, but there was no witness to this than myself owing to my experience five years before that. I felt proud and happy to be appreciated back for speaking the truth. This time, my feelings were accepted than questioned. No one took them to be sarcastic. I was 18. The difference between the rewards for expressing your appreciation in a village and a city is like that between sky and earth.
