Yimenu a décidé de raconter sa vie. Banal mais pas trop quand même…

I was born about 25 years ago in a place called Sekela. Sekela is found in the present Western Gojjam zone.

It is surrounded by eroded mountains whereby flood and hail (grêle) were common.

Ahh! Sekela! Honestly speaking, in this place, those who did not eat were more numerous than those who got food. Especially during the summer, almost all in the area get starved.

The fact that Sekela is the source of the Blue Nile is the only positive asset it has (it is said so). Oh! One more, well know athletes are coming from it. Otherwise, it is the miserable life of the people that comes to my mind of what I remember during my child age.

Unfortunately, I could not stay any longer in the place where my umbilical chord is buried. Because though my father was an illiterate farmer he had the desire and enthusiasm to take his children to school. But Sekela had only one primary school at the time and it was very far from our house. Thus, my family took me to another place called Geray in 1985.

Wow! Geray is really a wonderful place I have ever seen. It is a plain area where you find fertile soil together with rivers suited for irrigation. Here the people have relatively good livelihood status; at least they have enough food. The challenges we faced were the hot weather and malaria. But we had to tolerate.

After two years, my father took me to Geray Primary school (for 6 years). I was happy and had no problem learning in that school. However, for the following 6 years I had to go to Fenote Selam town which is 7 km north of Geray.

Since I had great interest in education, I attended the two first years by going 14 km by foot every day. One of my classmates and I then rented a dormitory in Fenote Selam for 12 birr a month. ( 8-10 centimes d’euro)

By 2001, I joined the country’s largest and well respected university: Addis Ababa University. It was my first time to leave Fenote Selam and see the country’s capital. When I was young we used to sing an Amharic poem which magnifies the life style in Addis Ababa. The poem expresses that even the roads of Addis are made of gold.

Coming to Addis with this impression in mind, what I saw on the ground was quite the opposite. When we started entering Addis from the side of Entoto, I was ashamed when I saw very dilapidated houses constructed from wood and mud. The fences too were made of wood, dirty stuff spread on the roads. That was really under my expectation, apart from the vehicles…

Mots-clefs : Addis Ababa