» FAMILY
was scared the militia would find them, but he couldn’t bear to leave them behind.
The family walked to the checkpoint at the edge of town accompanied by the Amhara neighbor. She chatted with fighters there. This family is Amhara, she said.
Sympathetic, the militia unknowingly helped the fleeing Tigrayan family. They stopped a car on the road and arranged a ride, saving Abraha and his children a sixhour walk to the city of Humera near the Sudanese border.
Blinded by grief and nervousness, Abraha hardly looked out the window during the drive, one he had made many times. Other desperate families were fleeing on foot through the lowland farms, trying to stay out of sight of the militia, clutching whatever possessions they had left.
In Humera, also under growing Amhara control, Abraha’s family went to the hospital to ask for milk. Again, one glance at the babies in his arms won him friends.
“All the staff was sorry for me, even the cleaners,” he said.
A fellow Tigrayan, one of the few remaining on staff, quietly took them to her home and suggested they go to Sudan for safety. It was a four-hour walk away.
Abraha had heard that the Amhara youth militia and soldiers from nearby Eritrea roamed the route. Both have been accused of beating or shooting people trying to flee.
“We were very afraid we would be killed,” he said.
The family members started their final walk before dawn. They stayed off the roads, crossing fields instead, asking fellow Tigrayans they met for the safest way. They stopped sometimes to hide in the grass and give milk to the crying babies.
The heat rose quickly with the rising sun. The flat expanse of Sudan came into sight, then the narrow Tekeze River.
Frantic Tigrayans jostled for places aboard the boats that would ferry them across the border. Many were waiting. It was loud and chaotic. The twins began to wail.
The sight of Abraha, the bassinet and what it carried stilled some in the crowd. To Abraha’s astonishment, the family was waved to the front and given a reduced price for the crossing.
He and the babies were ushered to a boat of their own that was lashed together from a dozen 20-liter jerrycans. It was flat, with no guardrail.
Abraha couldn’t swim. Still, as he settled into place in the center of the boat and its bottom scraped free of his country, he felt the burden of the past month ease.
“I was 100% sure the babies would grow up, that things would change from that moment,” he says. “My stress melted away. There were no more fears for our lives.”
Even the twins had become quiet. He looked down. They had fallen asleep.
The family arrived in Sudan exhausted, the twins badly underweight. Megan Donaghy, a nurse midwife with Doctors Without Borders, wondered what had happened to their mother.
Abraha pulled out a picture and told her, “This is my wife.” The entire family smiled as they looked at it.
“And that’s when I cried, when I saw her face,” Donaghy says. “She was just this beautiful, vibrant woman, a young woman, who loved her family, and here they were in tattered clothes, rundown, tired, hungry, with these sweet little babies.”
A fellow refugee, Mulu Gebrencheal, a mother of five, came across the family and wept. She has since become an informal adviser on the babies’ care. Abraha and his sons are quick learners, she says. But she mourns for the twins.
“Even the hug of a mother is very sweet,” she says. “They’ve never had this. They never will.”
Months after arriving in Sudan, the twins lay on their backs under tiny mosquito nets on metal-frame beds, gnawing a fist or smiling up at the besotted men who have become experts in infant care. On their tiny wrists, the girls take turns wearing a single protective amulet given to them by a local woman.
For Abraha, a painful task remained. He had finally managed to reach his relatives inside Tigray for the first time since the war began. His sister picked up the phone, and he asked her to invite other family members to an important call the following day.
He made his way alone back to the border with Ethiopia, where refugees come with their phones for a clearer signal. He forced himself to begin with the good news.
His family, excited, clamored for details of his wife.
“Did she give birth?” they asked. “Yes, twins,” Abraha told them. Joyful, his family pressed for more. “Boys or girls?” “Who looks like whom?” “How was the labor?”
Finally, Abraha calmed them and continued.
“But,” he said, “I couldn’t save her life.” His family began to cry. He joined them. He worried about what awful things might have happened to his sister and others that they were hiding from him even now.
As the tears calmed, his family tried to comfort him.
“God has his own plan.”
“Try to be strong.”
“Look after the babies and the boys.” “You’re all they have.”
That evening, Abraha returned to what he and his children now call home, thanks to those who helped them get out alive. He picked up the baby girls and again searched their faces for traces of their mother. His family agrees: One of the babies does look like Letay.
In the fear and despair following their birth, the twins were left unnamed. There was no time. Finally, Abraha’s young son Micheale christened them himself.
One of the girls was named Aden — “paradise.”
The other, who reminds people of her mother, was named Turfu — “left behind.”