The Girl With the Notebook
By Grace Aneiza Ali
There are no paved roads directly to Chaffe Jenetta — a small Muslim coffee farming community nestled in the remote terrains of Harrar in Eastern Ethiopia. Telephone lines and electric wires are rare in these parts. Women are immersed in their day — fetching water, gathering wood and sticks to stoke fires, and cooking for their families. Among their company, lush mountains and endless blue sky, I felt at home.
It was 2010 and my first time in Ethiopia, in fact my first trip to Africa. I had learned from growing up in Guyana and from a year traveling throughout India that there was no preparing for the rural countryside. You simply show up and let the land lead. So, I embraced Ethiopia with the same deference.
The journey to Harrar had started in New York City where I live. I was invited to travel with the staff and board members of The Abyssinian Fund, an NGO with a home-base in Harlem, New York, that works with coffee planters in Ethiopia’s rural villages like Chaffe Jenetta, helping them to grow better coffee, earn higher incomes, and improve social services with clinics, schools, and access to clean water.
While members of our group toured the village, I spent most of my time with the school children. One little girl in particular, about nine or ten years old, caught my attention — simply because of the way she clutched her notebooks. I asked for her name, but either she was too shy to tell me or didn’t understand my question. I pointed to her books and asked if I could look at them. Her notes, written in Oromo, the local language of Chaffe Jenetta, filled up every usable blank space. Her handwriting was in the margins, on the inside and outside of the covers, written horizontally and vertically.
I recalled my own primary school days in Guyana when notebooks and paper were a luxury. Instead, we had hand-held chalkboards and little bits of chalk. It was cheaper, but it meant everything that was written had to be erased. So I would gather sheets of paper wherever I could find them and glue or sew them together to make books. It was within those pages that I could invent the life I wanted. I wanted to be a writer.
