FEET AND BEGGED FOR HER SON’S FREEDOM. “P LEASE, SIR, I BEG YOU, HE IS MY ONLY SON AND ALL THAT I HAVE. P LEASE SHOW MERCY ON HIM.”
B UT BEFORE THE MAGISTRATE COULD SPEAK, THE SON REPLIED TO HIS MOTHER: “N O, MOTHER, IF YOU REALLY CARED ABOUT ME, YOU SHOULD HAVE STOPPED ME WHEN IT WAS ONLY A TINY EGG. N OW IT’S TOO LATE.”
I T STARTS SMALL, WITH A TINY EGG. B UT BEFORE YOU KNOW IT, THE EGG BECOMES A CHICKEN AND THE CHICKEN, A COW. T HEN YOU FIND YOURSELF IN THE HOUSE OF IMPRISONMENT OR WORSE.
S O I AM TELLING YOU NOWDON’T SAY THAT YOUR FATHER DID NOT WARN YOU. I F I EVER CATCH YOU STEALING THE SMALLEST THING, IF I HEAR THAT YOU HAVE EVEN BEEN THINKING ABOUT STEALING ANYTHING, FEAR FOR YOUR LIVES.
I WILL MAKE YOU LOST.
Having attended church fifty Sundays out of the year and studied the Bible as a family each Saturday and Sunday night, having grown up with our culture’s morals implanted in our conscience, and of course, having heard our father’s “it starts with an egg” fable, we should have feared to steal anything, let alone government property.
But we had not learned our lesson, and we found ourselves staring at a policeman. Had he seen us looking for the tent pegs out on the tracks? Had a passerby heard the clanging and told him about the noise? Had he discovered the missing parking meter and decided to snoop around?
We didn’t know. We just knew that it was time to run.
My brother and I had been chased by a huge dog one summer, chased for two blocks. We had run then.
We had exploded fireworks near a bully’s foot one Fourth of July, and he had chased us for almost half a mile. We had run then.
But never in our lives had we run like we ran from that cop. Keeping our heads low, hoping that the policeman was too tall to fit in the tunnel, praying that another policeman did not wait at the other end, we blazed out of the tunnel, as if a time bomb ticked behind us.
We sprinted all the way home, flew into our rooms, and changed our clothes.
Put on a hat! Pat down your hair! Try to look different! Hide in the basement!
And pray that they don’t come.
Running with my best friend, my brother Tewolde. I’m to the left.
L IBEE M IGBAR
E ven as we were vandalizing parking meters and terrorizing Halloween baskets, my brother and I were still what many Americans would call “good kids.” We listened to our parents, we did our best in school, and God knows, we tried to respect our peers.
It hurt my brother and me to see our parents struggle, and we wanted, more than anything, to be able to help them some day. So we worked hard at school, and after several years, we graduated from the ESL (English as a Second Language) program at Longfellow Elementary and entered regular classes full-time.
We were extremely fortunate to be in School District 200, where we were blessed with outstanding teachers. We recognized our good luck and took advantage of it.
Over the next ten years, my older brother and I missed fewer than ten days of school combined.
During that time, we thought more and more about how we could help our family. That’s when Tewolde really started to change.
Around age thirteen, he started to go through a special transformation, an emotional maturity that my people call
libee migbar,
or developing a heart.
Before long, Tewolde would teach us all what it truly meant to develop a heart.
Growing up, Tewolde and I often visited Wheaton Public Library. There are two particular visits that I’ll never forget.
The first one came in January 1989. We went with sandwiches, thick, poor-man’s ham from Aldi’s supermarket, slapped onto wheat bread and slathered with a thin film of mayonnaise. We approached the library’s entrance and saw a dark-haired white brother shivering under the awning, where kids usually wait for their parents.
But he was no kid, and no one was coming for him. That’s why he was sitting outside in the dead of winter.
We watched his reddish cheeks quiver; we
B UT BEFORE THE MAGISTRATE COULD SPEAK, THE SON REPLIED TO HIS MOTHER: “N O, MOTHER, IF YOU REALLY CARED ABOUT ME, YOU SHOULD HAVE STOPPED ME WHEN IT WAS ONLY A TINY EGG. N OW IT’S TOO LATE.”
I T STARTS SMALL, WITH A TINY EGG. B UT BEFORE YOU KNOW IT, THE EGG BECOMES A CHICKEN AND THE CHICKEN, A COW. T HEN YOU FIND YOURSELF IN THE HOUSE OF IMPRISONMENT OR WORSE.
S O I AM TELLING YOU NOWDON’T SAY THAT YOUR FATHER DID NOT WARN YOU. I F I EVER CATCH YOU STEALING THE SMALLEST THING, IF I HEAR THAT YOU HAVE EVEN BEEN THINKING ABOUT STEALING ANYTHING, FEAR FOR YOUR LIVES.
I WILL MAKE YOU LOST.
Having attended church fifty Sundays out of the year and studied the Bible as a family each Saturday and Sunday night, having grown up with our culture’s morals implanted in our conscience, and of course, having heard our father’s “it starts with an egg” fable, we should have feared to steal anything, let alone government property.
But we had not learned our lesson, and we found ourselves staring at a policeman. Had he seen us looking for the tent pegs out on the tracks? Had a passerby heard the clanging and told him about the noise? Had he discovered the missing parking meter and decided to snoop around?
We didn’t know. We just knew that it was time to run.
My brother and I had been chased by a huge dog one summer, chased for two blocks. We had run then.
We had exploded fireworks near a bully’s foot one Fourth of July, and he had chased us for almost half a mile. We had run then.
But never in our lives had we run like we ran from that cop. Keeping our heads low, hoping that the policeman was too tall to fit in the tunnel, praying that another policeman did not wait at the other end, we blazed out of the tunnel, as if a time bomb ticked behind us.
We sprinted all the way home, flew into our rooms, and changed our clothes.
Put on a hat! Pat down your hair! Try to look different! Hide in the basement!
And pray that they don’t come.
Running with my best friend, my brother Tewolde. I’m to the left.
L IBEE M IGBAR
E ven as we were vandalizing parking meters and terrorizing Halloween baskets, my brother and I were still what many Americans would call “good kids.” We listened to our parents, we did our best in school, and God knows, we tried to respect our peers.
It hurt my brother and me to see our parents struggle, and we wanted, more than anything, to be able to help them some day. So we worked hard at school, and after several years, we graduated from the ESL (English as a Second Language) program at Longfellow Elementary and entered regular classes full-time.
We were extremely fortunate to be in School District 200, where we were blessed with outstanding teachers. We recognized our good luck and took advantage of it.
Over the next ten years, my older brother and I missed fewer than ten days of school combined.
During that time, we thought more and more about how we could help our family. That’s when Tewolde really started to change.
Around age thirteen, he started to go through a special transformation, an emotional maturity that my people call
libee migbar,
or developing a heart.
Before long, Tewolde would teach us all what it truly meant to develop a heart.
Growing up, Tewolde and I often visited Wheaton Public Library. There are two particular visits that I’ll never forget.
The first one came in January 1989. We went with sandwiches, thick, poor-man’s ham from Aldi’s supermarket, slapped onto wheat bread and slathered with a thin film of mayonnaise. We approached the library’s entrance and saw a dark-haired white brother shivering under the awning, where kids usually wait for their parents.
But he was no kid, and no one was coming for him. That’s why he was sitting outside in the dead of winter.
We watched his reddish cheeks quiver; we
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