Date: Friday, 14 April 2017
Dawit Gebremichael Habte, a brilliant software engineer from Johns Hopkins University, here in America, has beautifully narrated his life at home (Eritrea) and in the United States. He has impressively put it in a mesmerizingly sequential manner.
Dawit’s early childhood is a fine blend of urban and rural life in Eritrea. The Iyoba part of his story is one I found to be very touching because one can hardly find an Eritrean who has not lost an Iyoba as a friend or family member. It was a bitter and long struggle, however, inspite of all odds success was achieved and people are now free and on their way to putting their lives and future together.
Dawit was a teenager in Asmara during the pivotal and latter stages of Eritrea’s armed struggle for independence in the late 1980s, a period that saw town after town fall the the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) and with it the Ethiopian Army’s brutality increased exponentially with each setback it experienced at the war front. Needless to say, Dawit’s life experience and lot in life was significantly shaped by that.
Though the book is about the author’s acknowledgement of the debt of gratitude he owes to the many people who have helped him in life as well as Eritrea’s warriors form the Yikealo and Warsay generations who paid the ultimate price in liberating the country and defending it, the author does highlight Eritrea’s history from the ancient times to the post-independence era.
I particularly liked the fact that Dawit managed to work in some Eritrean proverbs into his book to illustrate his points such as the one that says, “For those who have helped you in life, either tell the world about them or return the favor in kind.” It’s clear that the author has carried a mental list throughout his life of the people who have helped him in some way. At one point, he was rescued from a Kenyan prison for illegally entering the country by a family friend, only after the family friend paid the security guard a significant sum of money as a bribe. Dawit’s way of paying it forward is through knowledge transfer and equipping young people in his native country with technical skills that open up opportunities for them in life while at the same time contributing to the nation-building of their young country.
The most gripping part of the book is the last chapter. Dawit returns to Asmara in August 1999 in the middle of Ethio-Eritrean border war to find his youngest sister, Simret, lying in a hospital bed after being wounded by an Ethiopian artillery on the Assab Front and is instantly introduced to the human cost of war in Ward M. He turns down the US Embassy’s offer to be evacuated out of Asmara when war breaks out again and stays behind to help out his countrymen in whatever he could and frantically drives from one military makeshift hospital to the next to check on his wounded family members and childhood friends.
Tesfai Kflu, MA, MSc. (University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin)
Emeritus SUNY Fredonia.
