Tuesday, November 8, 2011

My father’s journey from Ethiopia to Canada, MENBERE GABRESELASSIE


My father was barefoot until the age of 19.

I have one picture that shows his unadorned feet, a small miracle considering it was taken in 1951 in Addis Ababa, where cameras were a rare treasure. In the picture, he wears his high school’s uniform – a plain cotton shirt, dark cardigan and khaki shorts. Lanky legs give way to large bare feet firmly hugging the pavement.


Looking at this picture, I can see why being barefoot is such a classic symbol of poverty. The image of one journeying through the vast terrain of life without even the basic armour of the common sandal is startling.

My father, on the other hand, insists that being barefoot is “normal.” Any kind of symbolism attached to bare feet fails to impress him.

What is normal to him, though, is extraordinary to me. My father, Gabremikael, was born into abject poverty in a village in Eritrea, a small country above Ethiopia. Orphaned at 3, he was entrusted into the loving care of his grandmother and two uncles.

Not much had changed in this agrarian community for more than 3,000 years. A boy would assume shepherd duties at about age 6, and as he grew older he would be presented with one of two life pursuits – either as a priest or as a farmer.

But, in 1944, another uncle invited my father, then 9, to a small town in Ethiopia to start elementary school. This learning environment fired up my father’s curiosity, and he blazed through seven years of elementary curriculum in just two and a half years. Two years later, he won a scholarship to one of only two high schools in Addis Ababa, a boarding school designed, staffed and administered by Canadians.

Sent off by jubilant relatives, he climbed barefoot onto the canvas roof of a dilapidated transport truck. For five days he clung to the canvas as the truck lurched through muddy roads filled with potholes. He shivered through the highland’s frigid nights. He arrived in the capital city with his two worldly possessions – the ill-fitting shorts on his waist and the shirt on his back.

He finished at the top of his graduating class, and in 1954 gained entry into the School of Telecommunications, where he received a healthy stipend.

With that stipend, he bought his first pair of shoes.

I ask my 76-year-old father, a Toronto resident since 1980, to describe the shoes to me. He doesn’t remember. I ask him, eagerly, what it was like to put on his first pair of shoes. He shrugs his shoulders and swats the air with the back of his right hand. “No big deal!” he says.

Why? I ask, disappointed. Because the majority of Ethiopia’s residents were also barefoot at the time. Even after purchasing those shoes, he only wore them occasionally.

I wonder if his close friend Melaku, who also purchased his first pair of shoes at 19, might have a more enthusiastic response. “I wish shoes were never invented,” he says with a hint of scorn. “Our feet would have stayed sturdy.”

Clearly, I have taken my own symbolism far too literally. The transition from barefoot to shoes was an unremarkable event compared to the waves of personal and social changes they were negotiating in the era after the Second World War.

In 1957, my father received a scholarship from the United Nations to go to Geneva, Switzerland, to study broadcast engineering. Already having learned to speak fluent English and French through his Canadian teachers, he picked up a Berlitz book and taught himself fluent German within months.

Once in Switzerland, he had no choice but to wear his shoes every day. Neither culture nor weather would permit otherwise. From then on, shoes became an irreversible habit.

When I take his eight- and six-year-old granddaughters, my children, to one of Toronto’s many parks, they often ask if they can play barefoot. I always resist. I imagine broken glass or other sharp objects lurking underneath the sand or between blades of grass. On the rare occasion I do allow them to kick off their shoes, I warn them, “Watch where you are going.”

My father gets exasperated with this sort of tense vigilance. “Leave them alone,” he says. “They will be fine.” Even my older daughter, on hearing my abrupt “No!” the other day, shot back: “What is wrong with being barefoot anyway?”

Nothing, I realize, once I recalibrate my overblown sense of danger. As my father trekked through orphanhood, over rocky mountains, muddy roads and inhospitable terrain, through villages, towns and cities, he only looked straight ahead at the fantastic opportunities that lay before him, not at the dangers that lay beneath his exposed feet. Without this grit and unwavering focus, he may have never claimed a new way of living barely conceivable to those who raised him.

You have probably heard the saying, “Clothes don’t make the man.” I can add that neither do his shoes. For me, this modern accessory has become a metaphor for the extraordinary transformation in the quality of my father’s life – and mine – that I am reminded of whenever I visit that picture from 1951.

There is another rare picture I treasure, this one of him in 1963 at a conference in Switzerland. International delegates are seated alphabetically by country of origin. My father represents Ethiopia. His poise is calm, his dress immaculate. A silk scarf is tucked neatly into hisV-neck sweater. The cuffs of a well-pressed shirt peek below a finely tailored jacket.

I can’t see his feet. But I imagine well-polished shoes, real leather, simple and elegant.


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