‘LOOK AFTER MY BABIES’
In Ethiopia, a refugee family struggles to escape war while coping with the loss of a mother
Gunfire crackled near the straw-woven home of Abraha Kinfe Gebremariam.
He hoped it drowned out the cries of his wife, curled up in pain, and the newborn twin daughters wailing beside her.
The violence in northern Ethiopia’s Tigray region had come at the worst possible time for Abraha and his family. Their village of Mai Kadra was caught in the first known massacre of a grinding war that has killed thousands of ethnic Tigrayans like them.
Abraha pleaded with his wife, still writhing from post-childbirth complications, to be silent, fearing any noise could bring gunmen to the door. His two young sons watched in fear.
“I prayed and prayed,” Abraha said. “God didn’t help me.”
He was terrified his family would not survive. Five months after it began, the armed conflict in Ethiopia has turned into what witnesses describe as a campaign to destroy the Tigrayan minority. Thousands of families have been shattered, fleeing their homes, starved, killed or still searching for each other across a region of 6 million people.
Amid the heartbreak, the sight of a tall, silent man carrying a grimy, pink bassinet slung around his neck with tiny twin girls would still bring out the kindness of strangers, even from the ethnicity targeting them.
The bloodshed in Mai Kadra began in November, as Abraha’s wife, Letay, was enjoying the final stretch of a seemingly normal pregnancy. She was four days late but untroubled. The number of the ambulance for the health clinic was in hand, ready to call.
But then the sounds of fighting grew closer. The shooting and screams sent Letay, her husband and their sons, 5-year-old Micheale and 11-year-old Daniel, into hiding in the tall, parched grass near their home.
They lay for hours under the hot sun. There was nothing to eat or drink. Letay rested on her side.
“Don’t worry, I’m OK,” she told her worried husband.
That night, they crept indoors to sleep. The next day, Letay went into labor. The gunfire continued in Mai Kadra, and most of the neighbors had fled. Frightened and feeling alone, Abraha and his wife decided not to risk going to the clinic. They would deliver their baby at home.
An elderly neighbor from the ethnic group fighting the Tigrayans, the Amhara, had not left. She agreed to help.
Abraha had never seen childbirth. Like most men across Tigray would do, he hovered outside the door, praying. The delivery was quiet and fast, just three hours long. Finally, he peeked inside.
He had longed for a daughter. Now, nestled beside his wife, he saw two. His joy was tempered by anxiety.
“Here something awful was happening in our village,” he said. “I wondered, ‘How can I do this?’ ”
But, in the hours ahead, he forgot about the babies. Something was badly wrong with his wife. Her afterbirth wasn’t coming out.
Letay’s pain grew. She tried to breastfeed the twins but couldn’t. As she lost herself in agony, the babies began to cry.
The family tried, in vain, to comfort them. They kept the exhausted Letay awake because of their belief that otherwise the afterbirth would fall back into her.
“I don’t know what wrong I did to my God for these troubles,” Abraha said, starting to cry.
Four days after Letay delivered, her afterbirth was expelled. But she wept day and night in pain.
Abraha despaired. By now, from neighbors’ accounts, the family understood they were trapped in a massacre. Ethnicity had become deadly, with reports of both Amhara and Tigrayans being shot or slaughtered.
“If I took my wife to the clinic, they might kill me,” Abraha said. “It was very difficult to decide.”
He waited until he could bear it no longer. A week after Letay gave birth, he asked the Amhara neighbor to take her for help.
But the clinic could not, or did not, help her. Abraha doesn’t know whether ethnic tensions played a role.
On the ninth day after giving birth, Letay beckoned Abraha closer.
“Look after my babies,” she said. “I’m going to die. I don’t have hope. I’m very sorry.” She died the next day.
In Tigray culture, the community gathers when someone dies. Even strangers take part, throwing a little dirt on the grave.
“I DON’T KNOW WHAT WRONG I DID TO MY GOD FOR THESE TROUBLES.” ABRAHA KINFE GEBREMARIAM
But as Abraha emerged from his home for the first time since the war began, only a handful of people stepped forward to help carry his wife’s body to the church. Fewer than a dozen neighbors were there.
It was daylight. The burial was short. There were no speeches. The churchyard likely was full of fresh graves from the hundreds killed in Mai Kadra, but Abraha didn’t notice his surroundings.
He returned home, where the babies he had almost forgotten about were waiting. Having been caught up in his wife’s final days, he had little idea how the girls were fed or even survived.
Abraha found himself struggling. Washing the tiny, wriggling girls terrified him. Without diapers, he rinsed and reused pieces of cloth. And with two babies instead of one, everything seemed to run short.
He wondered whether he was failing his family. The twins cried most of the time. Trapped in a home that spanned only a few paces in size, Abraha got little sleep.
When he broke down and cried, his sons comforted him.
“We need you, be strong,” they said. Abraha didn’t leave the house. His son Daniel tried to visit the market one day and saw 10 bodies piled onto a vehicle, with another four in the dirt. He never went to the market again.
The Amhara neighbor went out for the family’s food and helped with the children. For another measure of safety, an acquaintance from a different ethnic group, the Wolkait, managed to get the ethnicity changed on Abraha’s identity card. On paper, he, too, became Wolkait.
That happened just in time. When Amhara militia members came to his home, Abraha showed the altered ID. He addressed them in Amharic, Ethiopia’s main language, not daring to speak a word of his native Tigrinya. He also showed them his baby girls. Any suspicions disappeared. The militia came to the house several times after that. They offered Abraha a little money and tried to comfort him over his loss.
“They thought I was one of them,” Abraha said.
His family was safe, for now. But he knew they couldn’t stay. The fake Wolkait identity had worked almost too well. Abraha’s brother-in-law, 19-year-old Goytom Tsegay, said Amhara special forces tried to recruit him.
Life in Mai Kadra was more dangerous by the day. Every night, Abraha heard someone else had been killed. A month after the fighting began, he decided to leave.
He didn’t even know where to go.
The family packed light, so the Amhara who now controlled Mai Kadra would not notice they were leaving for good. Abraha, his children and his brother-in-law carried just five pieces of the local injera bread, a tin of milk and two liters of water, plus a change of clothes for the twins.
A woman in the community brought the pink bassinet for the babies. Abraha hid a small book of photos of his wife and children under its mattress, along with his wife’s jewelry. He