WISDOM He’s never one to talk much, never one to divulge information, or betray a secret. He keeps himself to himself and gets on with his job. He has no time for shallow talk or shallow conversation. He has his wife and child to take care of, and his future. Consequently I never did get much time to talk to him, or question him about his life. And the time we did have to do that, we never did that. We were too busy discussing other things. Like what you could do with a rainy season, for instance, or a plot of land in the rift valley where it fills up with water and there is nothing much else to do but plant and grow things and harvest them later. In Ethiopia the climate is good, he says, and the land. And the water. You could do whatever you wanted there with a bit of money. But he was not one to talk too much about it, or share his knowledge. And I found in this aspect of his a wisdom that was not without sense, and another thing you could call foresight. He had learned along the road what you could and could not talk about, and who to talk to. And I took it as an honour, and a privilege, that he could talk to me at all. I’m not sure if there is anything else I can say about him, or anything else I need to. It was only later, much later, that I got the chance to give him a lift down to the village and pack his bicycle into the back. It was a happy day as I remember, for it was the first time we had sat together in a car, like men, and spoken as men from that unique viewpoint, with the country passing you by on either side and the road being eaten up by the wheels. And the world as it was on either side giving way perhaps to the development that comes with this thing we call civilization and progress. And infrastructure, where an Ethiopian could now ride a bicycle to work, or a car even, and use roads that had laid down for him. And those Ethiopian footpaths of the years past counting now taken over again by the weeds and the grass. And no footpath there to find a shortcut over the hill. Of course I asked him about that and he told me, they are there, but you have to be strong, and young, and energetic. Because they go up and down, as the crow flies, not easy and flat like the road. And you may find it shorter, but not necessary easier, or quicker. And better perhaps to go with the flow. Soon enough we had done our job dumping the rubbish and it was good for me, I felt, to be doing it together with this man, seeing as it was my rubbish. I felt a little closer to him after that, closer to the whole tribe I suppose. And later when we picked his daughter up from the nursery school I was happy to feel part of the family. And she was so shy, but so happy too, I saw, with that smile of hers so like her father. And that wise gentle spirit. And that something special, secretive, that he had, that gave him that name. And later, when I saw her again, and she smiled at me that way, happy to see me again, I knew they had not told her yet that he was gone.
Posted on: Fri, 18 Oct 2013 17:06:48 +0000
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