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SPEECH
DELIVERED BY MR. GALL AGHAR IN WASHINGTON D.C. AT KEREN HIGH
SCHOOL RE-UNION
July 3, 2010
.
Salaam, Salaam Alaykum and Cameloha.
My first view of
Agordot was on a hot summer day in 1962. I
was driven there by an officer of the
U.S.
Consulate in
Asmara
. He was going to Tessanie and
agreed to drop us off on his way. I
was horrified when I saw Agordot’s dusty streets and tukuls.
My roommate and I decided to continue on to Tessanie with the man from
the Consulate. We told ourselves
that it was a chance to see another part of
Eritrea
; but in reality we were suffering the world’s worst case of culture shock. We
were scared to death and we clung to the man who was our last hope of contact
with
America
. How did I get myself into this
mess?
I got myself into
this mess by joining the the Peace Corps. I was 21, and had graduated from
Monmouth
College
in
New Jersey
only five days earlier. It was the
Peace Corp’s first summer. My
group,
Ethiopia
I, was the first to go through training in our nation’s capital, at
Georgetown
’s excellent
School
of
Foreign Service
. It was the summer of ’62, the
best year of the Kennedy administration, and we were truly Camelot’s kids.
They put together a
yearbook of the more than 200 volunteers in the group, and I was intimidated by
my colleagues. Bill Tilney held the
world’s record for the 400 yard dash. Martha
Stonequist had played piano concerts in
Vienna
and
Madrid
. There were two Wiffenpoofs from
Yale and a graduate of the
Harvard
Law
School
. Some of my colleagues were over 60
and had professional credentials that still amaze me.
Paul Tsongas, who later became a Senator from
Massachusetts
and ran against Bill Clinton for the Democratic nomination in ’92 was one of
my fellow volunteers. Our group
director, Harris Wofford, had held Matin Luther King’s left hand at the bridge
at Selma and was generally credited with having gotten John Kenndey elected
President. But under my picture, the
bio read: “He has worked as a caddy, a valet parking attendant, and as a stock
boy for Food Circus Incorporated.” I
was sooooo humiliated. Did they have
to spell out “Food Circus Incorporated”?
Every liberal in
Washington
wanted to come and have his picture taken with us.
Our speakers that summer included: Chief Justice Earl Warren, Senator
Jay Rockerfeller, the noted anthropologist Margaret Meade, and Supreme Court
Justice William Douglas. We were
seen off at a tea party in the Green Room hosted by JFK and Jackie, and were
welcomed on our arrival in Addis Ababa by His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I,
King of Kings, Elect of God, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah and Emperor
of Ethiopia: who was God to the Rastafarians.
One of his cheetahs broke free and chased all 200 of us across his lawn
before the champagne was served in the throne room.
We sang the Etiopia Hoy to him in Amharic, and he spoke to me in English,
a language in which he was fluent, but rarely used because Emperors should not
speak with accents.
At
Georgetown
we were trained in the Amharic language and told that we would all be assigned
to cool towns in the mountains of the Christian country of
Ethiopia
. It was the first time I learned
that one should never trust what the government tells you.
A week after meeting His Imperial Majesty, I got my assignment to Agordot,
an Arabic-speaking Muslim village in
the Saharan lowlands near the Sudan border where the temperatures sometimes rose
to 120 degrees Fahrenheit. I
was born on
Manahttan
Island
, grew up in a suburb of
New York
called Deal,
New Jersey
which is the richest town in the
United States
. (I hasten to note that my widowed,
immigrant mother and I lived in the servant’s quarters behind the garage, but
we were surrounded by opulence.) My only trips away from home had been to
Montreal
and
Philadelphia
. I had never even seen a small
town, and had no idea how to behave in one.
My instinct was to
run right back home to Jersey; but I couldn’t afford the fare, so I started
teaching in the local middle school – a job for which I had absolutely no
training at all. We were told to
teach in English, but our students later admitted that they didn’t understand
a word we said for the first six months we were there.
But they loved us anyway. Up
to that point their educations had consisted of memorizing the Koran and
multiplication tables with teachers who kept order by hitting them on the wrists
with rulers. We laughed with them,
taught them to sing songs about coming “from
Alabama
with a banjo on my knee”, and tried to get them to think logically rather
than to simply memorize. For the
first time in their lives, school became fun.
(I should note that last year I met some of my former students in
Jidda
. One of them insisted on singing
all the songs I taught him. So there
we are in a fancy restaurant in
Saudi Arabia
with this crazy Eritrean singing “Row, row, row your boat”.) Thirty-five
years later when I was
Ethiopia
and
Eritrea
Country Officer at the State Department, I met most of the ministers and high
ranking officials in both countries. The
minute I told them I had been in the Peace Corps their faces turned into huge
smiles. “Miss Johnson was my
teacher. Did you know her?” they
all asked; even though Miss Johnson had been a volunteer 20 years after I left
the Peace Corps.
During three months
of Peace Corps training we were never told about political dissent in
Ethiopia
. We firmly believed that all the
people their loved their Emperor who had brought them education and jet planes.
Nobody told us about the four billion dollars he had stashed away in
Swiss banks while his subjects starved. One
day a small newspaper clipping was hung on a bulletin board at
Georgetown
which said that a small bomb had be set off by some sort of rebels in
Ethiopia
. There was no further explanation.
We had no idea why anyone in Haile Selassie’s paradise might be
unhappy.
Upon arriving in
Agordot, I was given a tour of the town by my dear, dear friend Shiek Hamid
Mohammed el-Hadi who some of you may remember as the Education Officer for
western
Eritrea
. At the Senior District Officer’s
building Hamid showed us a few stones which, he said, was put there in
remembrance of a bomb that had been placed there.
I remembered the article on the bulletin board at
Georgetown
and began peppering Hamid with questions. But
he was no fool, and was not about to
talk politics with a stranger. So I remained in ignorance for a while longer.
(Some might say for the rest of my life, but that’s another story!)
A month after my
arrival in Agordot, a muffled “boom” went off while I was trying to teach a
seventh grade history class. It was
another bomb at the SDO’s office, and this time, for the first time, some
people who called themselves “the Eritrean Liberation Front” took credit for
the event. It was the first time
that the ELF announced its existence, previously they were merely referred to as
shifta; so I claim to have heard first shot of the longest war of the 20th
century. Most Americans have
never even heard of
Eritrea
, or its wars; but they have remained a part of my life ever since that day.
As Sheik Hamid and
other local people came to trust me, I learned why people were throwing bombs. I
became aware of the discrimination that Eritreans faced and as my students
slipped away, one-by-one, to join the guerillas in the hills; I realized that I
had joined the Peace Corps, but found myself in the middle of a war.
One day our school
was buzzed by three
U.S.
manufactured F-85s flying at an altitude of 80 feet.
It was His Imperial Majesty’s way of telling us to behave.
Few people in Agordot had ever even seen an airplane, and the noise was
terrifying. People in the
surrounding market panicked, and all of the students jumped out of classroom
windows in terror – except for my 6th grade class which followed
their teacher’s example and hit the floor.
When we got up, the kids were laughing and I knew that I was the butt of
the joke. “What’s so funny”, I
asked; but they were too scared to tell me until a brave Somali boy, Mohammed
Ali Elmi, stood up very rigidly,
closed his eyes, and said: “But
Sir, we have never seen a white man become whiter before.”
On our second
Christmas in Eritrea the volunteers who were stationed in Keren and my roommate
and I decided to go as far away from western civilization as we could, so we
borrowed a Jeep from the Peace Corps and headed for the Red Sea.
Not to Massawa – We were Peace Corps volunteers.
We went to the bush. We decided to go swimming on a beach due east of
Nagfa, 50 miles north of Massawa. Unfortunately,
I got sick on Christmas Eve and decided that I was too weak to undertake a long,
hard trip; so I returned to Agordot by bus to spend my Christmas all alone and
very depressed. At about noon our
cook, Mohammed, came running in speaking in Arabic urging me to go with him to
the market to see a “sura” of some shifta. I understood the word “sura”
to mean “picture”. But I learned
that day that it can mean any framed object. I went out to the village square in
front of our house where I noticed that the people were very quiet, and all of
them had their eyes fixed on me. Suddenly
I looked to my right and saw the “sura”. In fact it was a gibbet which
framed the suspended body of a man who had died for his country,
Eritrea
. His body had nearly been cut in
half by automatic weapon fire. It
was my first view of the insides of a human body.
The government hung him publicly as an example to others who might think
of revolution. I was horrified
–and turned white all over again. I
went into the local general store which was run by a wonderful
Eritrean/Cypriot “caffe-latte” named Eftemios Fangarides who knew
that December 25 was an American holiday. He
looked at me as I entered his store, pointed to the unfortunate hero and said”
“This is our Christmas tree.” Subsequently,
the government hung seven other men in front of my house.
These events were intended to intimidate the Eritreans; but, in fact,
they served only to piss off the Eritrean populations and send more of them into
the hills to fight.
Lest I sound too
glum about my experience, I should note that there were moments of great fun in
Agordot. One day, the American
publisher, Golden Books, sent us a collections of their publications.
Golden Books were written for very bright 4th graders who were
asking intelligent questions about geology, archeology, and astro-physics among
other things. They were perfect for
our kids who were very bright teen-agers, but had about a 4th grade
level of English comprehension. Up
to that point the only books we had were 2nd grade readers donated by
the good people of
Darien
,
Connecticut
. They were about Dick and Jane and
their dog Spot. You can imagine how
the Muslims in our all-boys school reacted to Americans playing with girls and
dogs! These new books were a
God-send, but we had no library to put them in.
My roommate, Tom
Cutler, and I sat down with two Eritrean teachers to discuss how we might
present the books. The Eritreans
were all for building a tukul for a new library on our small campus.
I was cynical. “Where will we get the money?” There had never been a
community fund-raising event in our little town, and anyway,
Ethiopia
was, and remains, the poorest country in the world.
My colleagues argued that we could ask the rich Italian farmers and Arab
merchants in town for donations, and try to do the construction ourselves –
even though none of the four of us knew how to hammer a nail.
My mother’s
employer had sent me a $100 Christmas gift with a card instructing me to “do
something nice for your kids.” I
was annoyed because I wanted the money for myself, but I felt obliged to obey
her wishes. I told the Eritrean
teachers that I had $100, and would use it to match anything that we could raise
in town.
We wrote to the
Italians and the Arabs who came through with sizeable donations.
We went door-to-door through the market collecting whatever pennies the
merchants could afford. To the great
glee of my students, in broad daylight I walked into every whorehouse in town to
ask the ladies for money rather than to give them some.
They were so proud that the American teacher spoke to them in public, and
asked them to be a part of a community project, that they put their hands into
their cleavages and pulled out dollar bills.
In the end we raised
over $1000 and all sorts of donations of bricks and mortar.
Local carpenters and masons volunteered their time.
Felllow PCVs from all over
Eritrea
came on weekends to help us complete our project.
In the end, the school got two new classrooms, the Golden Books got their
library, and I got a great lesson in how effective Eritreans can be in
developing their communities.
Shortly after the
library was built, one of the students cut out the picture of Haile Selassie
from a beautiful set of Encyclopedia
Americana
that the Peace Corps had donated to the school.
I was furious. Like everyone
else in Agordot, I had learned to hate the Emperor who so abused what had now
become “my people” in
Eritrea
; but defacing the most beautiful book in town seemed like a bad way to make a
revolution against HIM. My fellow
Eritrean teachers urged me to stifle my anger and let it go, but I roared into
every classroom in the middle school to berate the boys and to demand an apology
from the perpetrator. We had a new
student in the eighth grade at the time who was half-Amhara, half-Eritrean.
His father was a military officer stationed at the army base in Agordot.
He told his father, who told the
number two police officer in Agordot. Captain
Habtemariam, who as an Eritrean needed to prove his loyalty to the Emperor,
summoned the Headmaster, Saleh Karar, the
Assistant Headmaster, the wonderful Osman Omrun, and the two Peace Corps
teachers to his office where he spent fifteen minutes denouncing us and
threatening to arrest all the teachers, all the students and all of their
fathers until he got a confession from the evil student who had done the deed.
I was scared witless and was sure I would be run out of the Peace Corps
for dabbling in local politics; but Saleh, Osman and my roommate were too
frightened to speak; so it was left to me to respond.
I was sitting at Captain Haptemariam’s desk, so he could see my head
and torso, but not my legs. I gave
him a reasoned response confirming that I shared his anger at the destruction of
property; but that this was ultimately the silly act of a teen-aged boy not the
act of a serious revolutionary. My
colleagues later told me that while my head and torso seemed calm, my legs,
which Captain Haptemariam could not see, were shaking like leaves in a tornado.
Fortunately, the day after this incident Captain Habtemarina’s boss
returned to town and cancelled the Captain’s investigation of teen-aged
revolutionaries. Several years later
I met the student who had squealed on us at a restaurant in
Addis Ababa
. By that time he had changed his
politics so dramatically that I had to tell him to stop talking about his love
for the Eritrean revolution lest he end up in Addis’ “carceli”.
Going back to the
political struggles for a moment: I never thought the Eritreans could win.
The odds were stacked against them.
Ethiopia
was much bigger. It got arms and
training from all the major powers, while the Eritreans had no foreign allies. Nonetheless,
I supported the revolution and to this day consider myself to be the first
American supporter of Eritrean freedom.
When I arrived in
Agordot, only one student from
Eritrea
’s
Western
Province
had ever gone as far as 9th grade.
But, because my Peace Corps group doubled the number of secondary school
teachers in
Ethiopia
, new schools were built and forty-six of our students went to Keren’s new
high school. (I met several of you this morning for the first time, and was very
impressed with your credentials. I
met a civil servant, an ecologist, a surgeon and a man who reversed my steps and
came to
Seattle
from
Eritrea
to teach Americans. I’m guessing
that all of you are college graduates. You’ve
come a long way.)
Before the war was
over, my dear friend and fellow Agordot teacher, Mohamoud Mohammed Saleh, was
running an underground Ministry of Education that brought about nearly 100 per
cent literacy, operated universities, and ran classes for Ethiopian prisoners of
war. The Eritrean revolutionaries
built a five mile long hospital in caves which had operating rooms of such high
quality that in later years I attended a dinner in San Francisco that opened a
program through which the University of California brought Eritrean doctors from
that cave to teach the Californian medical students how to handle gunshot wounds
in emergency rooms. And the
Eritreans accomplished all that without a nickel of foreign aid.
The Peace Corps
frequently thought about bringing us out
of harm’s way in Agordot; but they let us finish our tours.
Our Directors later told me that they left me there because they heard
that I was smart enough never to discuss politics in public.
I believed strongly that the Peace Corps was not sent to other countries
to interfere in local politics, so I controlled my emotions and did a lot more
listening than talking. But there
were no rules against teaching my students about Thomas Jefferson, or about
Lawrence
of Arabia’s leadership of an Arab revolt against the
Turkish Empire
, or about my family’s involvement with the 800 year-long Irish struggle for
freedom. They got the message.
In retrospect, I’m not sure that I did any of those young heroes a
favor by telling them about Jefferson, Lawrence and the IRA.
Sometimes I have nightmares about inspiring them to die for their
country. But most of the time I
think that I did the best I could.
Nowadays
the Peace Corps is a lot more careful about placing volunteers in war zones; but
I sure am glad they let me stay my full two years in Agordot.
In 1997 my Peace
Corps roommate and I returned together to Agordot, 34 years after we left, and
six years after
Eritrea
won its independence from
Ethiopia
. When we first came to Agordot in
1962 there were only 12 students in the 8th grade, our highest class.
In 1997 there were 1100 students in the regional high school. The
Eritrean economy was growing at seven per cent a year.
Agordot had a functioning hospital, and the road from
Asmara
was being paved all the way across
Western Eritrea
. The town which had scared me so in
1962 now seemed beautiful to me. I
took a hike to the Turkish fort on a small hill overlooking the Agordot.
From there I could see the extinct volcanoes that ringed the area, and
the “bannarie” farms on the banks of the Barka with their thick groves of
dom palms. The mosque still seems
like the most beautiful one in the world to me, and the tukuls seemed homey.
The desert really does have a majestic beauty.
But sadly, there was
not one person left in town who remembered us.
The Ethiopian army killed nearly 500 people in the Agordot market on one
awful day during the war. Most of my
kids joined the revolution, and many died as heroes for their country.
The rest had gone into exile in
Sudan
,
Saudi Arabia
,
Qatar
and
Sweden
. One made it to
Maryland
and another to
Virginia
. Almost everyone in town was under
34 years old, and could not possibly have known us. Even the predominant
language had changed from Arabic to Tigrinnya. But
the two-room addition to the school which we built was still standing, albeit
used only as a storeroom for the much bigger new school.
Sadly, about a month
after my 1997 visit,
Eritrea
and
Ethiopia
again went to war. The fighting
started, not surprisingly, about 30 miles from Agordot.
The Peace Corps was forced to pull out the one volunteer in Agordot,
Maria Said, on very short notice. When
she and I had dinner in
Washington
after her return, she told me of how sad she was that she never even had a
chance to say “good-bye” to many of her students and friends.
I was Country Officer for
Eritrea
and
Ethiopia
on the day they went back to fighting. A
fellow Peace Corps volunteer and I worked our asses off to stop that carnage,
and we came very close to success. But
we failed, and 100,000 people died. I
still don’t know why, and the nightmares continue.
Eritrea
gave me the best two years of my life
for which I will be eternally grateful. It
also gave me the best friends I’ve ever had.
I’m still in touch with my refugee students in
Jidda
,
Qatar
and
Maryland
, and with Sheik Hamid who lives in
Sudan
. I met him and Ostaz Omrun in
Jidda
last year. They are still
strikingly handsome and they’ve survived.
Like this group, my Peace Corps group has had about 20 reunions,
and I hope we live long enough to have 20 more.
We’ve stayed in touch for nearly half-a-century.
When we left Agordot,
our kids came out to the bus station to wave good-bye.
The bus drivers always honked their horn as they put their foot on the
gas. As the kids hands rose to wave
their last farewell in response to that horn, my roommate and I started to sob.
We cried for the next half-hour while 80 fellow passengers sat in amazed
silence staring at the strange behavior of American men.
Thank you all for
giving an old man a chance to remember his youth and the great love he has for
Eritrea
and its people. Yukunyele.
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