Among the Ethiopians
The following is an excerpt from my book, Memoirs of a Middle-aged Hummingbird, published in 2006.
I arrived at the boarding school ten days after they did. The 25 mostly mid-teenage Ethiopian Jewish boys had come to Israel by plane from refugee camps in Sudan. I was (in 1984) a 41-year-old American Jewish social worker who had been in Israel 14 months. They came without parents, and without personal possessions. Some came from cities, but most came from small extended family villages with no knowledge of “modern” life. I came from a modern, extended world that had not included most of everything that had filled their lives.
They came with no Hebrew, but a solid Jewish religious tradition. I came with an inexperienced, limited Hebrew, and with no religious beliefs or convictions. I came white from a middle-class liberal culture. They came black from the all-black world of Ethiopia. They came to Israel because they had no other good options. I came to Israel voluntarily in the spirit of adventure. They had stared at starvation and eath. I had only read about it and studied how such experiences might affect children. They came to Israel filled with expectations and dreams for their future. I came to Israel with few expectations and no dreams.
We lived together in a small all-male Orthodox religious school with a view on one side overlooking the mountains of northern Israel extending into Lebanon. On the other side were white non-descript buildings of the small development town called Maalot. The nature there, including the howls of the nearby jackals at night, reminded the boys of their mountain villages. It reminded me of nothing I had ever lived in before, but had only visited occasionally on camping trips.
Along with us in the school were about 15 religious families, mostly all Israeli-born and raised, who were the teaching staff, 120 Israeli high school boys, and 17 Ethiopian boys who had been in Israel less than half a year. They had been transferred from a transitional place in the Tel Aviv area. I was to live in that boarding school for eight difficult, very intense months. It was to be one of the most fascinating times of my life.
Over the months, I would come to know each child as a separate personality, his strengths, weaknesses, and quirks that one learns from the daily familiarity of living together. However, in the very beginning, their Ethiopian names defied my tongue, and the absolute lack of verbal communication rendered them harder to differentiate as individuals. Their behavior was also more or less “communal” since they were not relaxed enough in their new situation to assert their individuality. Even so, one child obviously had artistic talent judging by a large lion he drew on the dormitory wall. One had a tendency to fight. Another promised to be an excellent student because he used every moment to study the simple Hebrew letters an Ethiopian counselor was trying to teach in the time before an experienced Hebrew teacher arrived.
Some communication was possible with the 17 Ethiopian boys who had been in the country for some months. In the six weeks they had been at this boarding school, these 17 already had a reputation as troublemakers and tough kids who had no respect for authority. They were known for complaining loudly about everything, accentuating their demands by striking — food strikes, study strikes, whatever they felt worked.
I immediately saw there were definitely reasons to complain. A mother’s job is to make everything all right. As their housemother, the children saw me as the appropriate person to complain to. There were reasonable and unreasonable complaints to deal with, as well as my own interpretation of how things “should” be. The habit of complaining spread like a virus from the 17 “old-timers,” to the 25 new students until they plagued both my waking hours in which I tried out possible ways to solve the problems, and my sleeping hours in which I tried to dream up solutions. For a variety of complex reasons, not the least of which was my newness in a foreign work environment that followed unwritten rules which were unknown to me, my powerlessness to make changes left me frustrated, ineffective, and sometimes ridiculous. It often made me feel that I had joined Alice at the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. A discordant theme ran through our time together.
To be continued…….
Tags: Jewish Ethiopians; Ethiopians in Israel 1984; boarding, Travel
