Several nights a week now, Feleke will tell us a story from his life in rural Ethiopia, usually when we are putting him to bed. It's sort of his way of unwinding, or maybe of putting off going to sleep. Kids will do that. But he didn't start telling such stories right away. At first he was very quiet most of the time, out of necessity. He simply didn't know a word of English. And then even after he had learned some English, he probably didn't feel comfortable telling us about his life. But eventually, after a few weeks, the stories came poring out.
With his first few attempts at storytelling in English, it was a challenge for us to understand him. He would supplement his words with a fair amount of hand waving and pointing and pantomime. Meanwhile, I would flip through my dog-eared copy of the Ethiopian Amharic phrasebook, trying to find anything I could recognize in what he was saying.
One of the first stories he told involved hyenas. We should have known, of course, that his daily life included encounters with and concerns about wild animals. Hyenas, leopards, wild boars, various types of monkeys, gorillas, and baboons, and any number of poisonous snakes are common in the rural parts of Ethiopia, including the area where Feleke's family lives. Yet when he first started talking about hyenas, we made him repeat it several times, and we asked him lots of questions to fill in the details. Here is, I think, how the story goes. As his English gets better, we may have to make revisions.
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Feleke and his older brother Addisu were walking from their village to the town of Abomsa, which lies a few miles south of Dafe Jema. (Google Maps says that it is unable to calculate the distance between the two, but it looks to be about 6 miles.) It is a walk that Feleke has made many times, since Abomsa has the nearest marketplace to his village. (It is also a trip that he once made, in the opposite direction, riding by himself in a flat out gallop on the back of his father's horse. But that's a story for another day.) On this walk to Abomsa, the two boys were also accompanied by their older cousin, the son of their father's brother, both of whom also live in Dafe Jema. The purpose of the trip was to get some sugar from the Abomsa market, perhaps for the family's coffee. Coffee is a big deal in Ethiopia. At some point during the long walk, the boys noticed that they were being followed by a lone hyena. It was the first hyena that Feleke had ever seen up close.
As mentioned, hyenas are common in this part of Ethiopia. They loom as a constant, low-level menace. They are just frightening enough to serve as a bogeyman for Ethiopian parents. ("Eat your gomen or the hyenas will get you.") But they are not so scary as to disrupt daily life. They generally stay away from the towns and villages during the day, except when they get very hungry, such as when there is a severe drought and their normal sources of food are scarce. At these times of desperation, the hyenas will approach the villages in broad daylight, looking for the wayward chicken or stray goat. When that happens, the hyenas can indeed be dangerous to humans as well, if a person happens upon them in the act of feeding. But that is rare.
What is not rare is the sound of hyenas at night, often many of them, just beyond the fences that surround the mud houses in which Feleke and his family live. Because there are no bathrooms in Dafe Jema, when a person has to relieve himself or herself in the middle of the night, he or she must go out of the house and walk to the edge of the compound, just inside the fence, and there take care of business. At that time of night, the hyenas are close village, lying (in large numbers) a short distance from the outer fence, hiding in the weeds. And if hyenas see a person walking around at night, they let loose a sort of mournful wail, one after another, and then together. Although the wailing resembles a musical performance, sort of an out-of-sync and out-of--tune choir, the purpose of the wailing probably is communication between each other and maybe intimidation of the pesky humans. As you can imagine, hearing this chorus of howls from dozens of hyenas squatting only a few dozen feet away in the dark, especially if you are a little boy, is enough to make your skin crawl and your hair stand on end. And it might well inhibit the process of emptying your bladders or bowels or whatever it was you went out there to do in the first place.
Anyway, although Feleke had heard many hyenas near his home at night and had seen them in the distance during the day, this was his first closeup encounter in the day--on the way to Abomsa with his brother and cousin. The beast must have been hungry, Feleke thought, because why else would it be following them in the daytime. This fact alone was enough to worry Feleke. And his brother seemed nervous too. For whatever reason, Feleke's cousin seemed calm. It wasn't clear whether he was genuinely unconcerned or whether he was doing a better job of hiding his fear. But he paid no attention to the hyena for a long time. Eventually, however, after the hyena had been following them for some time, either Feleke or his brother suggested the following grim possibility, which seemed plausible to them at the time: Maybe he is stalking us for the pack, and, if that's true, maybe he will howl or, worse, "laugh" (as they sometimes do) and call the other hyenas to the hunt.
At that suggestion, Feleke's cousin apparently decided that this was serious enough, at least in the minds of his companions, to warrant some action. So he stopped walking, turned to the hyena, who also stopped walking. And he (the cousin) then spoke very sternly to the hyena: Go away. Then, this time almost in a shout, he said, go away, hyena. And he spoke the commands in Amharic. This surprised Feleke. His native tongue, and that of his family (including his cousin), is Oromic. That is the language they speak to each other. It is the language of their ancestors. But they also grew up with the Amharic language. Not so much speaking it, as being expected to learn it. Amharic is the "official language" of Ethiopia and the language that the school children are taught to read and write. It is the language of the Ethiopian government, of the police and the tax collectors. It is the language used in church for some of the songs. It is the language of the educated elite in Addis Ababa. It is not the language of everyday speech in the Oromia region, including Dafe Jema. Indeed, they almost never speak Amharic to each other, except when they are showing off what they have learned in school. Still, somehow it worked. The hyena ran away and didn't come back. Nor did his friends. Just like that. The rest of the story ended uneventfully. They went to Abomsa and back, and their lives went on.
But the occasion made an impression on Feleke. So much so that it was among the first stories from back home that he chose to tell us. I wonder why. The first time he told it, he seemed to be trying to make a point about the language of Amharic. He literally said, "hyenas speak Amharic." But what did that mean? Was he saying, look how powerful the language of Amharic is, it even works to scare away hyenas? Or was he being more snide: look, Amharic isn't so much the language of the elite as it is the language of the hyenas. Probably neither of those. More likely, he was just remembering this confrontation with the dreaded hyena, where the monster of his imagination proved to be no more than a nuisance, as part of his process of dealing with his new fears--of the cancer, of living in a strange place with people who speak a strange language, of being so far from his family. Or most likely, maybe he just thought this was a remarkable tale, one that we would be impressed by. He would have been right about that.
