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Penguin random house jobs10/13/2023 ![]() ![]() But he didn’t have the luxury of anger, so he made Sibhat the treasurer of his army and continued the march. The governor was livid that my grandfather had disobeyed his orders to stay behind. Sibhat caught up with his governor’s army, which was headed to the Ogaden front in eastern Ethiopia. My grandfather was outraged when he received the message: I am not guarding the house as if I were a woman! He took off after the army immediately and, on his way, came across many men who were returning to their villages, having made up excuses for why they couldn’t fight. Before he left with his army, the governor left a message for Sibhat: you are to stay here and administer the region in my absence. His governor declared a ‘kitet’-a decree ordering all able bodied men to rise and rush to the defense of their homeland. In 1935, Italy invaded Ethiopia for the second time while he was in the countryside collecting taxes. Several years later, my grandfather moved to my home province to work for another governor. On their way back to the Ogaden, I imagine the brothers expressed their gratitude to God, which is the meaning of Sibhat, so at least on this account, the angels were very much on the nose. The prisoner wasn’t just spared of death, but was freed. He met Sibhat and begged him to intervene on his behalf, which my grandfather did. ![]() The man’s brother traveled to western Ethiopia from the eastern end, Ogaden, to plead for his life. A stranger was sentenced to death for a crime that my father either left out or didn’t know when he told me this. It begins about a century ago, in western Ethiopia, where my grandfather, Sibhat, was working as a secretary and treasurer for a provincial governor. My father’s name is one with an elaborate-and hard-to-believe-story. No matter how random they may seem at times, names are true descriptions of the bearers’ essence. Or that maybe our names are mere titles for the stories our parents want to tell about us, and stories don’t lose their truthfulness just because the titles aren’t factual. In hindsight, I feel we should have pushed back we should have told the preacher that maybe Abera lit up his mother’s life for at least a day or an hour or even a few minutes when he was born and that’s all that matters. “Look at you, for example,” said the preacher, “what about you says light?”Ībera trembled in laughter, as did most attendees. He turned to Abera, a darker skinned man who sat in the front row and whose name means ‘he lit up’ or ‘shined’. “He is our rescuer, our deliverer, just like his name says.” He told us that none of us lived up to the promises our names held. “Jesus Christ is the only man whose name matches his characteristics!” he declared once. ![]() A preacher at my childhood church disagreed. She wanted Mihret Ab-God’s mercy-but that was often used for boys, so she opted for the shorter version.Įthiopians say that names are given to people by angels. The bleeding stopped and the pain went away soon after I was born, so she named me Mihret: mercy. When I was conceived, my mother had long been suffering from endless bleeding and pain that she later learned were caused by uterine cancer. My name, like many Ethiopian names, has a story. ![]()
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