Meron Hadero is a finalist for The Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing.
Original version published in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern Issue 52, finalist for the 2019 Caine Prize for African Writing
When I met Herr Weill, I was a lanky 10-year-old, a fish out of water in –, Iowa, a small college town surrounded by fields in every direction. My family had moved to the US a few weeks earlier from Ethiopia via Berlin, so I knew no English, but was fluent in Amharic and German. I’d speak those sometimes to strangers or just mumble under my breath to say what was on my mind, never getting an answer until the day I met Herr Weill.
I was wearing jeans with a button down, a too-big blazer, and a clip-on tie waiting in line during what I’d later come to know as a typical mid-80s Midwest community potluck, with potato salad, pasta salad, green bean casserole,
bean salad casserole, tuna pasta salad casserole, a good three-quarters of the dishes on offer incorporating crushed potato chips and dollops of mayonnaise. The Norman Borlaug Community Center had welcomed us because one of the local big-wigs was in the Peace Corps in his student days, and he’d cultivated an interest in global humanitarianism.
He’d heard of the new stream of refugees leaving communist dictatorships in the Third World, found us through the charity that gave us housing in Berlin, and had arranged for the NBCC to orient us, get us some new used clothes, and a place to live. They also invited us to Sunday meals that were the best ones of my week.
