Cover Story | survival “the journey of life,” continued...
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take Agwa along. In exchange for Agwa’s service, the teacher promised to educate the boy. Agwa’s mother refused. She knew what highlanders did to Anuak boys. But on the day his teacher was to leave, young Agwa walked from the village on a long dirt road, waiting for his teacher’s car to pass. When it did, Melcamu opened the door, and Agwa jumped in. As the car carried him 300 miles away from the only place he’d ever known, Agwa had a feeling that this man was a magician of some kind, someone who could teach him things he never would learn in Gambela. He remembers feeling like this man was a bright light, a beacon shining into this forgotten corner of the world.
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24 INLANDER march 14, 2013
On a snowy winter afternoon, sitting in a Starbucks high on Spokane’s South Hill, it’s so clear to Agwa that his life could have been cut short then. Of course it’s easy now to see what a highlander man wanted from a little Anuak child. Hindsight is 20/20. But then, tempted by a teacher’s promises, how would he have known? As a boy, Agwa’s naïveté deceived him. It made him follow Melcamu. It made him
believe in people. And it made him think he was an exception to the tales he’d heard of Anuaks being plucked like low fruit on a tree — snatched out of villages to be slaves. Of course, today Agwa knows the reality of child slavery in Africa. When families send their young children out to work in fields or homes to supplement the household income, they’re often exploited because of that naïveté. A 2005 United Nations report found that more than 58 percent of Ethiopian boys between the ages of 5 and 14 were child laborers. “Child domestics work long hours and are vulnerable to sexual abuse,” the report reads. “Many are unable to attend school and are unpaid, receiving only room and board.” But back then, it took years for Agwa to realize he was one of those statistics. At first, his teacher kept his promises. In his home on the outskirts of the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, he’d teach Agwa to read. In exchange, the young boy would make him tea. He showed him to write, and then Agwa would cook. One day after Agwa learned to read, he found a letter in his teacher’s clothing
from Agwa’s own stepfather. It begged the teacher to “bring my child back to me.” The boy ignored it. As the weeks turned to months, and months to years, his lessons became less frequent and his work — cleaning, sweeping, washing, serving — became more and more grueling. It wasn’t until some six or seven years after Agwa got into his
Her knees were bound with rags, and scars crisscrossed her heels, where her Achilles tendons had been sliced. teacher’s car that he realized he was indeed a slave. He was chatting with a neighbor. She mentioned that other people talked of stealing him to be their own slave, jealous of Melcamu’s doting young Anuak. At that moment, Agwa pictured another neighbor woman he’d met. She lived behind a building holding cows and horses, in a closet-sized space — her bed sandwiched between a stove and a large grindstone. There she lived and worked,
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