A Peculiar Place

What you were told when your parents were prepping you for the entrance exam at The Bible Academy and what you found out when you actually started school there were so diametrically opposed that you found your head spinning for your first month or so. The strict rules that shocked you because you couldn’t imagine living by them even for an hour, let alone a whole school-year; the permissive behavior you saw in your fellow students that stopped you in your tracks because you never expected to see such things at a ‘religious’ school – it was all too much for a sheltered child that was forced to grow into adulthood in two weeks flat.

After the goodbyes were done and you had done your share of crying, that sinking feeling you got as you saw your family drive away was a feeling of utter surrender. To whom, though? It was hard to tell who the enemy was and whom you were surrendering to.

You saw bands of upper-classmen roaming the school grounds for fresh kill, otherwise known as freshmen. The pure unadulterated glee you saw in their eyes as these marauders picked on a poor fellow, whose only mistake was being alive at that moment, was absolutely terrifying. Their defense was, of course, their misguided sense of justice - the ‘sophomore justice’ that entitles you to exact revenge for the previous year’s shellacking that was received at the hands of upper-classmen.

As bad as things were, though, you got to meet and know a lot of strange characters – characters that stay with me to this day. You couldn’t make up these characters even if your life depended on it. Some of them were just brutes, some merely selfish or inconsiderate, and the rest just plain cuckoo. 

On our very first night at the school, on a cold evening of September, Techane swaggered into our dorm room and rudely interrupted our cowed conversations by rifling through everybody's brand-spanking-new ShanTa (Luggage). He even went through the cleanly laid out pajamas and towels. He soon spied a brand new Afro Meedo (Comb), picked it up, and after a very deliberate study, put it in his back pocket and left. But not without taking someone's extra-big towel along with him. It was all surreal - he never said a word at all! None of us spoke or even looked at each other until he had left our dorm room. 

A sympathetic sophomore later told us that Techane was in the business of appropriating anything and everything that tickled his fancy. That sophomore also told us that Techane's specialty was hunting for that perfect Meedo that would do justice to his Afro. An afro that Techane was clearly proud of – that you could tell.  It took us a couple of days to associate his appearance and his proud afro to the old Janhoy’s (Emperor), right after the Mekele defeat-- shell shocked and drawn, but still keeping up appearances.  Techane never walked more than a couple of steps without slowing down to pat down his Afro and do a proud look-around, as if expecting all those around him to admire and marvel at his very unkempt hair. Of course, most people avoided Techane’s gaze at all cost, because he had a very unsettling habit of coming right to your face and lock eyes with you. The cowed ones would squirm, but the few brave ones, especially the ones with the muscle to back it up, would just crack up and laugh in his face.

If you were real careful and mighty lucky, you could avoid Techane’s stare, but there was no running away from Anteneh, especially for his dorm mates.  Anti, as he was known to his friends, was a fellow who had stopped using water on his body right around the time of his Christening. He would compound the problem by exercising vigorously every night before promptly jumping into his unmade bed. He combed his curly hair sideways "just like Elvis", he said, but we didn't have the heart to remind him that Elvis had shiny, jet-black pompadour. The only thing he had in common with Elvis was the significant amount of grease permanently preserved on his clothes. It was all too much and a very bitter but emboldened roommate of ours once wrote "Gm Shita" (Terrible Smell) on Anti's side of the wall, just to let him know what he thought of his peculiarity. We expected him to be embarrassed, but NO, not our Anti! He simply made funky artwork out of the letters. Little did we know that our resident Elvis was an accomplished artist!

We failed to shame him into showering, though something in us stopped him from using our clean clothes to 'launder' his clothes. Anti was a great believer in osmosis when it came to dirty clothes. He preached that burying one's dirty clothes in a basketful of clean laundry cleaned the dirt right out of the soiled ones. We succeeded in subtly nudging him away from our clean batch, but every week or so, he would 'wash' his clothes in somebody's bunch of freshly laundered clothes and take his time retrieving the load. After about twenty-four hours or so, he would go and bring his clothes from the 'dry cleaners', as he put it. It was much easier to appreciate his ‘invention’ when you knew he wasn’t using your own clean clothes.

Then there was Alem. It was Alem's job to play with our minds. Alem, for whatever reason, woke up one day and began pontificating about how we were all in this one big dream. A dream that made it possible for us to relive the lives we had once lived. Alem thought life, as we knew it, was all a figment of our imagination. I don't think we quite got the immensity of his sudden revelation, but we were for anything that would distract us from the daily rigors of our lives at the boarding school. To the non-Orthodox Christians, this was nothing short of absolute blasphemy. They were, after all, living the good Christian life, while awaiting the return. Telling them that they were actually dreaming their 'dreamy' lives totally knocked them off kilter. The problem was, in our gleeful effort to play with their minds, we unconsciously started to believe in Alem's theory, too. We became evangelizers of the ‘dream’ theory and enjoyed having loud arguments with anybody who tried to discount our theory. I don’t remember how Alem took all this in, but it must have been awesome seeing your friends become more ‘dreamy’ than your own theory suggested. We spent so much time ‘defending’ the theory that it was hard to focus on our main objective – the already paid-for education.

'Dreaming' our day away would have been fine with us, if it weren't for Binyam and his MerfE (Needle), which made night-time dreaming, the real one, quite impossible. Binyam had a peculiar habit of waking up in the middle of the night, grabbing his trusted MerfE, and going around pricking anybody and everybody he found sleeping. That was all he did for about an hour or so every night. Alem and his acolytes might have thought they were all dreaming, but dream or not, the pain was real for those of us on the receiving end. Even Alem had to beg Binyam not to use his MerfE on him, his theory be damned…

Come morning time, the pain of Binyam's MerfE was compounded by Lakew – our resident morning jock. Lakew was the one who forced everybody up at 5:45 AM, like clockwork, every morning with his high-pitched singing voice. The cold showers-- there were no hot showers at the Academy-- made his voice even shriller, rendering futile any attempt at ignoring him. The Bee Gees were king then, and Lakew would sing a very bad version of the Bee Gee's latest hit or his version of a favorite Mezmur (religious song). If he hadn't already lined up one or two freshmen to give him a back rub, the singing/shower session might end after only ten minutes or so, otherwise, his ‘assisted’ showers could take as long as thirty minutes – the horror!

After such a shocking wake-up call, we would wash up and head off for breakfast. The big sign, 'Man doesn't live by bread alone…’, was the first thing you saw in the cafeteria. That sign always gave you the distinct feeling that the kitchen staff was hedging its bet. If you liked the meal or if there was enough to eat, well and good, but if the food was bad or too little, hey, Man didn’t live by bread alone…

In the cafeteria line, people would be complaining about the lack of sleep and curse the culprits of the previous night's misery.

Techane would continue to groom his hair and look around making sure people were admiring his Afro…

Anti would run his fingers thru his hair, making everybody wince from smelling all that stuff - on an empty stomach no less…

Alem would talk himself hoarse defending his 'dream' theory until he 'woke up' to remember the day's math exam…

Lakew would practice the latest Bee Gee's song under his breath…

Binyam would work on his mental list of his next MerfE victims…

All the while these peculiar characters would stare at each other and mutter, albeit to themselves, “Ibd Hulu” (crazy bunch)…

--by Hyiwot Teshome