Of Beetles and Angels (11 page)

As I got older, I knew that I had to take increasing responsibility for my family. I also knew that academic success would help me to help them.

Even when I was older, though, I had always approached my schoolwork with the highest dedication. Starting in elementary school, I read books in my room until my father screamed at me to come out: Y
OU
! H
OW LONG ARE YOU GOING TO SIT IN THERE BY YOURSELF
? I
F YOU DO NOT LEARN TO MINGLE WITH PEOPLE, YOU WILL BECOME LIKE THOSE WILD ONES WHO NEVER SPEAK WITH ANYONE
.

But I kept reading. I read thousands of pages a week and cleared out whole sections of the Wheaton Public Library. The Hardy Boys. Encyclopedia Brown. And my favorite, Alfred Hitchcock’s Three Investigators.

Then I started on the biographies in the children’s section: Knute Rockne, Martin Luther King, and many others.

As I read, my English improved dramatically. I graduated from Longfellow’s ESL program at the end of second grade, and by sixth grade, I was making the high honor roll.

By then, though, some of my classmates had discovered the best way to hurt me — not with their fists, but with their words:
Your father doesn’t even work, does he? How come you wore that shirt again? Nerd! Why you so poor?

I started to see through that dangerous lie that all kids are taught: “Sticks and stones can break your bones, but words can never hurt you.”

Sticks and stones can indeed break bones, but words can often do worse. They can stifle, destroy, and mutilate all of the beautiful, hopeful things inside of us.

My middle-school classmates massacred my self-esteem. My grades dropped. I got my first D in eighth grade and started to wonder if I could make it academically. High school was fast approaching, and I feared that it might chew me up and spit me out.

But the good thing about words is that they can also breathe life into our spirits. My brother and family encouraged me:
Don’t give up. You’re smart enough. All you have to do is work hard and believe.

My faith in God gave me confidence. And as I entered high school, I set my sights on the scholarship my parents had hoped for.

I chose the hardest freshman schedule possible: advanced geometry, advanced English, advanced biology.

But there was one advanced class that I couldn’t take: advanced world history. I wanted to take it, but there were only twenty spots available for our class of four hundred.

Our performance on a middle-school test determined who could take the class. The test was loaded with absurd, abstract questions, such as: “If you were on Mars and you came across a stream of liquid that you had never seen before, whom would you ask to help you cross it: a) a Psychologist; b) a Mechanic; c) a Nurse; d) None of the above.”

I had never visited Mars; I didn’t make the cut.

So I enrolled in intermediate world history with two hundred other freshmen. I knew what I had to do to earn a spot in the advanced sophomore history class.

I scored the highest grade out of all two hundred students, setting the class’s curve both semesters.

After the year ended, I asked my world history teacher and my counselor to move me up to the advanced class. They agreed.

Still, I wasn’t sure how I would fare. Advanced U.S. history was one of the toughest classes in the school. A part of me wondered, too, if that placement test in middle school had been right. Maybe these white kids really were smarter than me. Maybe I couldn’t keep up with them.

Advanced U.S. history would reveal the truth.

Using the bench in my room as my desk, I stayed up night after night, rereading the chapters and reviewing my notes.

I would get home from sports at 6
P.M
., eat, help out around the house, and study until midnight. Then I would get up at 6
A.M
. and do it all over again.

The hard work paid off. I often got the highest grade in the class, and I carried an A through the entire first semester.

I was getting straight A’s in all of my classes when my life changed forever.

My best friend, my brother Tewolde, took a trip to Montana during Christmas break of his senior year in high school. He was driving near Sioux Falls, South Dakota, at around 3 in the morning when a drunk driver, heading the wrong way, slammed into my brother and killed him.

I cannot describe the grief that flooded our hearts that night.I cannot describe how it feels to wish that you could tell someone what they mean to you and to know that you cannot. I cannot describe what it feels like to realize that while your life has changed forever, you don’t understand what has happened.

I remember asking myself:
How can something this beautiful be stolen by someone else’s recklessness?
If that’s what life was like, then what were we striving for, anyway?

I almost abandoned my dreams of becoming a top student and earning a scholarship. But I loved my family too much to give up. And I knew that my brother Tewolde never would have given up. I knew that the way to honor him best was to take myself even higher. Not just as a student, but as a human being who saw beauty in others.

So I decided that I would always keep my brother in my heart. I turned to God for strength and started to work even harder. I aced my finals and maintained my straight A’s.

Sometimes I took extreme measures to get the grade that I wanted, as in my junior English class.

Tewolde had warned me about the teacher: “She doesn’t give A’s.”

Still, as the semester was coming to an end, I was close. I needed a 96 on the final to get an A in the class. But that was pretty much impossible — her tests were nightmares.

There was only one way I could ace the final: Reread every book that we had covered. Take notes and have them fresh in my mind.

So I did it. Over Christmas vacation, I read and took notes on more than twelve hundred pages.

I couldn’t finish every book, though; I didn’t have time to reread
Ethan Frome.
So I went to sleep the night before, praying that Ethan Frome would mind his own business and stay off my exam.

A snowstorm hit the next morning, forcing our school to shut down. I stayed home and reread
Ethan Frome.

The test was as hard as I thought it would be. But I had every book fresh in my mind, and I aced it. And I aced the class.

While schoolwork consumed most of my energy, I still loved basketball. I was thrilled when I made the freshman team.

But being on the team had its own challenges.

Often, especially on Saturdays, I couldn’t get a ride to practice. So I would run the three miles. On the coldest days, I showed up unable to dribble because my hands had become icicles. And on a few crazy days, I ran to practice, ran all throughout practice, then ran back home.

After the season ended, I decided to focus completely on schoolwork. I hadn’t planned on joining the track team.

But one day after school, my basketball coach, Coach Kroger, saw me getting on the bus. It’s funny how one word of encouragement can change your life.

“What are you doing going home, Mawi? You should be on the track team — you were always way up there in the wind sprints.”

Several weeks later, I ran in my first meet. By the end of the season, I was among the fastest freshmen in our conference.

I wanted good running shoes, but spending fifty dollars on a new pair was out of the question. So I wore a raggedy pair that my mom had rustled up. My track coach, Jim Martin, noticed almost immediately.

For each of the next four years, he paid for my training shoes and racing spikes. Sometimes he even took me shopping for school clothes — without telling anyone.

Even with such support from my coach, I made only marginal progress during my sophomore and junior years. So at the end of my junior year, I made myself a promise: That summer, I would run at least six days a week and lift weights every other day.

I did it, working during the day and training at night.

Again, my hard work paid big dividends. In cross-country, where four schools in our conference were ranked among the state’s top twenty, I earned all-conference honors.

Fueled by my improvement during the cross-country season, I kept training throughout the brutal Illinois winter. I ran almost four hundred outdoor miles between November and January and lifted weights in my room every other day. Before I went to sleep each night, I recorded my mileage and weight training at the front of my journal.

The discipline brought results. In track, I ran the anchor leg on our all-state 4 x 800-meter relay team. We won our conference championship and competed in the state finals.

Looking back, I’m always thankful that Coach Kroger stopped me alongside that bus my freshman year.

I was never one of the popular kids in high school, but during my sophomore year, I finally started to develop close friendships: some with kids on my sports teams, some with kids from the advanced-level classes. And I still had my refugee brothers and sisters from back in the day.

No matter whom I hung out with, I always tried not to view my classmates through the caste system that runs most high schools: the cool kids — usually beautiful kids or athletes; the normal kids — who comprise most of the school; and the dreaded ones — the nerds.

Most of my friends were from the lower two castes. But that was fine. My parents and my brother had taught me to see beauty in everyone. And to be honest, I often saw the least beauty in the coolest, most popular kids.

It’s funny how things work out. My best non-
habesha
friend in high school was Mike Olander — the same kid from whom my brother and I had “borrowed” all those Reese’s so many Halloweens ago.

Mike ran track and cross-country with me and went out of his way to give me rides to school. One day, in September of our senior year, he picked me up at 6:30
A.M.
for our first National Honor Society meeting.

About sixty of our classmates had gathered in the auditorium. We were late. I grabbed a seat next to Bonnie Nadzam, the girl that I and every other guy in school had a crush on.

An announcement went out: “Last call for nominations for president.” I thought for a second about raising my hand. I had never participated in student government, partly because I couldn’t get rides to the early meetings and partly because I wasn’t popular enough to get elected.

But I figured, what the heck? So I asked Mike to nominate me.

I didn’t think I had much of a chance. Six or seven other students were running, many much cooler than me.

We closed our eyes and voted. We opened them again, and I was the president.

I looked around the room, and I knew what had happened. Half of my classmates had voted for cool kids. But there had been three or four cool kids to choose from, so none of them could amass many votes.

The other half of the class wouldn’t have voted for the cool kids if their lives had depended on it. Why? Because all throughout high school, the cool kids had made them feel like beetles.

I hadn’t. And that’s how I got elected. I had treated everyone as an angel.

I wasn’t the first person in my family to apply to college. Tewolde had started to apply. He had an A average and good test scores, and he would have had fantastic letters of recommendation — every teacher loved him. But he never finished the application process.

Like him, I wanted to stay close to home, and when my senior year started, I pretty much knew where I wanted to go: Taylor University in Indiana. I had just gone through their summer honors program, and it had sold me on the school.

The only real question was how I would pay for it.

I remember visiting my counselor, Mrs. Martin, to get some tips. She was my track coach’s wife, and she had also been my coach for scholastic bowl.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: It’s funny what a few words of encouragement can do. She told me that I could probably go to school anywhere I wanted. Duke, Yale, maybe even Harvard.

I thought she was crazy.
Mrs. Martin,
I wanted to shout,
I’m about the most ghetto, poor, welfare, refugee brother who ever lived. Those schools are gonna laugh if they get an application from someone like me.

But she kept encouraging me to apply. “Let the admissions committees say no,” she told me. “Don’t say no for them. You’re ranked in the top one percent of your class. You have top test scores. You never know, they just might say yes.”

Then Mike’s mom, who had become a second mother to me, started to encourage me. Then several of my teachers pitched in.

So I decided to do it. I found out what achievement tests those schools required and took them in December — long after most applicants had taken them and right before each school’s application deadline.

Then I got my letters of recommendation. Later, when I talked to college administrators, they told me that the letters of recommendation had had the biggest impact.

What were those letters about? They said little about my grades but much about my attitude. Seeing beauty in others had paid off again.

In fact, seeing angels had helped even with my grades. My transcript included several A’s that could have been B’s. But those teachers had appreciated how I treated my classmates, and they had also appreciated my work ethic, so they had bumped me up to the A.

I applied to eight schools in all: Taylor, Miami of Ohio, Illinois, Duke, Wake Forest, Washington University in St. Louis, Yale, and Harvard. I applied to so many because I didn’t know if any would give me a scholarship.

The only problem with this strategy was that each application cost about fifty dollars. I got some schools to waive the application fee. For the rest, I attached a letter to my application, explaining that I could not afford the fee and asking if they would please consider my application anyway.

They did.

First, I heard from Miami of Ohio. They flew me to their campus and offered me a sizable merit scholarship.

Then Duke flew me out. They offered even more.

Last came Wash. U. They flew me out for a four-day weekend and offered a merit scholarship worth $90,000 — free tuition, plus an annual stipend.