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  • A Vocabulary for My Senses
  • Timothy Bascom (bio)

After six months at language school in northern Ethiopia, we finally moved south to our first mission station. Father, whose career as a doctor had been on hold, was posted to a hospital near the town of Soddo, in Wallayta district. There, we occupied a real house instead of a temporary apartment. The suitcases could stop masquerading as dressers, and though my older brother was still away at boarding school in Addis Ababa, I had my younger brother, Nat, to distract me. Plus, I now had a yard to gallop in, with grass kept short by a tethered donkey.

Out back, a huge avocado tree spread over the lawn, and this tree was a wonderful leafy world-unto-itself. Though barely five, I found that I was able to clamber up inside the green dome of leaves. Once there—where heavy limbs reached out parallel to the ground—I prowled in secret, like my pet chameleon, holding thinner branches as handrails. From hidden perches, I monitored the whole mission compound, seeing into the countryside all around.

The Wallayta region was lush compared to the cold, grassy plateau at Debre Birhan. Farm plots covered the terrain, stitched together in green and yellow squares and rectangles and trapezoids, blanketing the valleys and even the gentle sloping mountains. Banana trees flourished behind each thatched house, with leaves big as elephant ears. Papaya trees shot skyward too, looking like telephone poles that had sprouted green footballs.

A red dirt road split the fifteen acres owned by the mission. To the south, where the road entered the compound, four whitewashed classrooms boxed in an open field that served as a parade ground and soccer pitch for the mission's elementary school. I could see tin flashing through a row of trees and hear Ethiopian children calling out to each other at recess. Across from these classrooms, a series of long, narrow buildings stretched out in parallel rows, linked by roofed walkways. This was the clinic and patient wards. Made of chicka, an Ethiopian adobe of mud and straw and dung, these walls were whitewashed like all walls on the compound. And the roofs were made of tin, so they shimmered with silver light at midday. Through the leaves of the avocado tree I could spy into open windows, where the wooden shutters had been thrown open and patients lay on their iron beds, motionless—black silhouettes waiting to feel better. [End Page 55]

About fifteen missionaries worked at Soddo, and their houses were spread out along the remaining dirt drive. Across from us was the Andersons' squat, blocky house, with a spray of banana trees covering one corner. Then came the Schmidts and the Bergens, and the road petered out fifty yards up the slope, where old Selma lived next to her beloved bookshop full of ink-scented gospel tracts and Amharic New Testaments.

I clambered around in the dark foliage of our avocado tree every day, spying on this new world and picking the wrinkled fruit and squeezing it to feel if it was ripe. Mom made me avocado sandwiches on request, spreading the slick green pulp like butter or adding sliced egg and salt. Then I climbed right back into the tree with half a sandwich clamped in my mouth, to hide up there under the green umbrella, happily watching the mousebirds as they came and went, pirouetting on their thin tail feathers. I even dreamed at night that I could scramble out on the giant limbs until they bent down and delivered me to lower branches, so that I'd slip-slide clear to the ground. Like my chameleon, which I kept in a box of avocado leaves, I felt safest in this dark green refuge.

The only Ethiopian I encountered daily was Marta, the house worker, with her hair bound up in a blue turban, firm as a soccer ball, and her face turned gentle by a smile. As she stoked the wood stove and wrung out the wet sheets, she hummed hypnotic tunes. She murmured the same word over and over—Yesus.

I felt at ease around Marta, but take me elsewhere...

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