My new favorite book...

There's No Me Without You

These are the stories that exemplify a not-so-unusual journey of Ethiopian children. This book follows one woman's path that lead her from a typical upper middle-class wife/mother in Addis Ababa...to inadvertently running an orphanage. Some of the children's stories have happy endings. We are blessed to have participated in helping create a "happy ending" for one less orphan.

I've chosen a few little snipets that really touched my heart. There are many, many more...but I think Ms. Melissa may not appreciate me re-publishing her entire book on my blog :o)

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Haregewoin saw six-year-old Meskerem for the first time, alone and forlorn...

"She was living alone with her mother when her mother died," said the MMM staff worman.

In the night, Meskerem woke up missing her mother. She began crying before she was even awake, a high nasal sound like a siren in the distance. Her anguish woke up Haregewoin and made the old lady cry, too.

***

One night, Haregewoin was awakened by an insistent tapping on the steel door of her compound. In her nightgown, barefoot, she crept to the teel outer door and listened...

A tall thin man swayed on the road. He wore a wool sports jacket and tie. His eyes were bloodshot and his mustache unkempt. She though he was forty-five, and intoxicated; later she would learn he was twenty-nine and a nondrinker. A tiny girl slept in his arms.

"My wife has died. I am Theodros. This is Betti."...

Betti was four, he said.

Haregewoin pulled her flannel nightdress closer around her and stood on tiptoe to look. "so small?" she asked.

"Here," he offered with sudden enthusiasm, "you may see how she was before."

He maneuvered one hand away from the blanketed bundle to his pocket and pulled out several wallet-sized portraits of Betti. Taken one year earlier in a photographer's studio, they showed a bright-eyed, pigtailed child in a yellow satin leotard and tutu. Her round tummy stuck out and her hands were raised above her head in ballet position...

"Please, madam, I heard that you are helping the children. It would only be for a short while." ..

...She accepted the sleeping girl from the father. He bowed deeply to Haregewoin and stayed angled forward, hands clasped.

***

Mekdes Asnake was five years old and lived with her grandfather Addisu, her young aunt Fasika, and her little brother, Yabsira, in a hut on a shared dirt compound outside of the capital... Sometimes the family had firewood; when they did not, the circle of ashes on the floor was black and the hut was cold. They subsisted, year-round, on eggs.

The children's late father, Asnake, had been a day laborer in coffee processing. One day when Mekdes was three or four years old and waiting impatiently for him to come home and play with her, she saw a strange thing: he approached the house but suddenly knelt and lay full length on the dirt courtyard for awhile, before getting up and coming inside...

...Mekdes had not recovered from the horror of Asnake's death when her mother began to get the same disappointed, surprised look on her face. At night under the blankets, Mekdes and Yabsira snuggled close to their mother. By day, Mekdes, then four, chatted busily to her mother so she would be happy again.... But Mulu grew still; blisters encroached on her body, too; her eyes protruded and did not blink often; her voice grew hoarse...

Mekdes helped her mother by running to neighbors with important messages, and by taking care of Yabsira, twenty months younger...she carried him on her hip as her mother once did. When she fed Yabsira, she set food by her mother's side, too, and removed the untouched plate later...

...then one night Mulu did not move at all and Mekdes understood that her mother had died.

...The grandfather patted down each of the children, giving small aimless tugs and tucks on their clothing; he bent and kissed Mekdes hard on each cheek, then stooped and tried to do the same with runny-nosed Yabsira. Each aunt took a child's hand and the family stepped into the mud yard...

...Haregewoin hurried across the courtyard to greet them...

After handshakes and kisses all around, and commiserating talk among the adults, Haj and the young women began to depart. Mekdes felt the air at her back, and suddenly aware that her aunts were no longer behind her --they were walking toward the exit! Mekdes shrieked and ran after them. how would she find her way home to her grandfather? Aunt Fasika and Aunt Zewdenesh turned around; and they stroked Mekdes's face, kissed her many times, and told her good-bye...

...Mekdes turned inside out with grief and terror. She understood: she was being abandoned! She arched her back in protest. She pulled out of Haregewoin's grasp, fell backward to the ground, and writhed there, beginning to shriek.

Then she stood up and ran after the departing adults. She ran straight at the metal door of the compound, without slowing down, and hit it with a bang: it threw her back onto the dirt; she was up again in an instant, running straight at the door again. Bang...

...In the dirt, she went through all the prostration of grief; she knelt facing the door, bowed forward till her head touched the dust...she moaned and rocked and reached her hands out beseechingly toward the metal door.

I slipped out of the door myself to see what had become of the adults who'd dropped off the brother and sister. I thought I'd spot them at the top of the dirt hill, heading home, but they were right there, right outside the door of the compound, and they, too, were grief-stricken. Two pretty young women in their twenties had covered their faces with their shawls and were rocking and moaning, too: "Aii aii aii," they cried. One held out her hands palms up as if asking God for answers...

***