Friday Friend or Family Feature: Guest Blogger Edition-Jane Kurtz, Part One: My magical, confusing Ethiopian-American childhood.

With World War II raging and sacrifice a word thousands of families were learning from the inside out, my father and his four brothers, each one in turn, left their family farm in the dry, sagebrush hills of eastern Oregon (a place that seemed so isolated my dad, as a boy, assumed he’d never even get to see the capital city of Oregon) and headed to Europe. My dad’s turn came when he was 18. Later, in an interview, he said, “When I came back, the world was on my heart.” Having seen a world at war, he thought there had to be a better way.


In Monmouth , Illinois , he met my mom at a small Presbyterian college, which he was able to attend thanks to the G.I. bill. On a recent author trip, the husband of my librarian hostess (a history buff) told me that as the original G.I. bill nearly stalled in Congress in 1944, presidents of major U.S. universities argued against it and the riff-raff that would flow into in the American college system if it passed. I’m sure my dad was more-or-less the type of riff-raff they had in mind. After graduating from college and a Presbyterian seminary in Pittsburgh , my dad—who was a challenged but motivated student--headed to Portland , Oregon . That’s where I was born.

During those years, a lot had been happening in Ethiopia . The emperor Haile Selassie had returned from exile to discover that the Italian occupation of his country had resulted in the wiping out of a generation of educated Ethiopians. This place--fiercely proud of its independence, a country that had long fought to keep outsiders out—began to invite outsiders in. TWA advisors and pilots came to help with what would become Ethiopian Airlines, often named one of the best airlines in Africa . Church groups also responded. Each was assigned a different section of Ethiopia and charged with starting schools and hospitals where none had ever been. The Presbyterians, who had already established the country’s first school for girls (in Addis Ababa), were asked to concentrate on part of southwest Ethiopia, a rugged area of multiple distinct ethnic groups and languages.

Someone in the United States heard about this opportunity and told my dad he’d be great in this kind of role—a storyteller, an idealistic but pragmatic person with lots of skills in patching things together and making them run. My dad agreed. He also saw a way to respond to the world on his heart. A family photo shows two-year-old me in chilly post-war England …on the way to Ethiopia …on a leash.


We landed in a capital city where hyenas provided garbage-control, skulking along the streets at night (as they still do) and where we trundled here and there on my dad’s bicycle or in a small, horse-drawn taxi called a gari. My mom had to figure out diapers for two toddlers, household necessities and food for all of us, and a hospital for the baby on the way. When my first little brother, died at four months—crib death, it was assumed—my parents’ neighbors and Amharic tutors came to simply sit, silently, in our living room. Ethiopian customs dictate that people should be not be left alone with their grief. Later, my father said it was a strong message that the people he had come to minister to would, in fact, minister to us.

I say I grew up in Maji, a magical place of fog and waterfalls, of frogs and fern-tips we picked and called our water babies, of mule trips and stories around the fire at night and bursts of music and spear-shaking dancing. Maji is where my mom taught me to read and to love books and words. It’s the place where I had Ethiopian playmates until I was about six or seven. After that, Ethiopian girls had to work in their own houses, not come to play, not go to the school my mom and dad helped with. It’s where—without television—I learned to invent games and act out stories with my siblings, eventually four sisters and one brother.


My childhood was really more complicated than that, though. It included two initial language-study years in Addis Ababa where I picked up Amharic from hearing it around me—and dashed in, during a rainstorm, to announce, “It’s zin-ah-bing..” It included two awkward trips to the United States (when I was 7 and when I was 13) where other kids asked, “Did you see Tarzan?” and where, in a New York City elevator, my sisters and I struggled to know how to answer the man who asked, “Where are you from?” (finally deciding the correct answer must be, “We’re from America ”). It also included five years in boarding school in Addis Ababa, where I loved getting the chance to have classmates, teachers (who were not my mother), and a library, but where I learned about pillow-crying at night and homesickness.


Even after I, too, trekked to college in Monmouth , Illinois , I didn’t lose the idea of Ethiopia as home until my parents left in 1977, three years after the Marxists overthrew the last emperor--His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie, who had first invited my mom and dad (and others) in. During those mid-1970s years, I was a visitor, a question-er, someone still scrambling to find an answer to the question, “Where are you from?” Once my parents were back in Portland, Oregon , I tried to put Ethiopia away in a little memory box and simply learn how to be an American—a teacher, an aspiring writer, and a mom.

To be continued...