An Ethiopian Odyssey

Kieran Conrad teaches English at Haile-Manas Academy

I always loved Homer’s Odyssey.

Journeying overseas, the poem flitted through my mind often—how each of us becomes, at some point in our lives, Odysseus, departing from and arriving at home, caught in peculiar and foreign circumstances in the midst. We leave home with a sense of excitement and find ourselves longing for it when it exists only in memory. We experience this when leaving our childhood homes. We experience it when leaving for work and returning home daily. We experience it, too, if in some foolhardy adventure we happen to leave our homeland and find ourselves on distant soil. I imagine all of us—Haile-Manas Academy faculty, staff, students—experienced a semblance of this as we each left the comfort and familiarity of our respective Ithacas to find ourselves on new shores, scaling over and taking shelter behind new walls.

And they presented themselves often. Walls announced themselves at customs, stopping and inspecting me, redirecting me to foreign forms and stamps whose meaning I did not know. Walls announced themselves at the school, opening their gates after hours of driving and closing behind me, keeping me safely bound upon my newfound island. Walls announced themselves when I attempted to express myself to colleagues and strangers when words exited my mouth, fruitless wisps in the air. Walls from international pandemics to intranational politics to interpersonal bureaucracies presented themselves to me and my colleagues and the school, peeking around each corner. I essentially found myself helpless to the whims and mercy of an exotic, unknown place.

This newfound reality made me more deeply appreciate what I once considered a dull theme in the poem: xenia, meaning “guest-friendship.” Strangers not only invited me into their homes and lives but also traveled across their own country, entrusting me with the sacred task of safeguarding and educating their children, to guide their minds upon odysseys of their own. We all seemed closed to one another in one way or another, but amid all the walls, we all found open gates too, welcoming us.

This seemed most prominent the day when the students arrived, scarcely uttering a word. Nervous, uncertain, they were all Telemachus—son of Odysseus—leaving home not only in search of their father—the knowledge of the past—but, in a sense, in search of themselves, in search of their voices. We asked them to tell us their stories as we told them ours. We learned how each of them left a home too but, moreover, a childhood, which—much like Telemachus—found itself in disarray and under threat while they held hopes of finding the father who will help restore order to Ithaca once more. As all youths discover, we leave as Telemachus and eventually become Odysseus in our search for him, tasked with bringing order to home—if only we return. This is the mantle of responsibility.

The Homeric epic sings clearly and astutely in this regard: The characters all assert their identities, introducing themselves through recounting—real or embellished—origins and destinations, the things that well within the heart. I found myself surrounded by these youths who left their homes, joining a school whose mission wishes for Telemachus to become a good king for Ithaca. It always feels like the most difficult of requests to prepare them for what they will encounter in the world.

We do this daily. We face many perils when we leave home to enter the fray. We encounter witnessing fellow sailors potentially become the lotus-eaters, intoxicating themselves with pleasure and distraction, idling life away. We encounter the cyclopean monstrosities whose myopic views erupt in belligerence and ultimately, their own blindness. We encounter sirens whose sweet songs about our past enchant us but, much like ideology, attract us with hidden, destructive ends. We encounter the loneliness of those like Calypso, who would seek to deceive and possess us, against our wills and paths, or we might encounter witches like Circe, who would seek to change who we are should we become greedy. We encounter choosing between the lesser of evils at times, when the monsters Scylla, the six-headed monster will terrorize our safe passage with sudden tragedy, or Charybdis, the great whirlpool whose current sucks us into something that plans to consume us. We encounter Hades when we lose those whom we love and who showed love to us, encountering them in the underworld to remind us of what we are doing and what we need to do. We encounter all these threats to tell us about the person whom we should not become so that, instead, we might become ourselves—our full, best selves: This is what Ithaca not only needs, but what it demands. It seems the poems sing clearly thousands of years later because of the way that they always speak to the human condition.

I left my own island and ventured around the world to teach the most promising youths in Ethiopia because I believe in the school’s mission: It echoes what this poem sings to us from millennia ago. I saw these youths take a step outside the safety of their homes into the unknown toward their own becoming. It is no easy feat. I admire them for their bravery to do this, for recognizing that they needed this, that their home needed this.

Odysseus survives Homer’s first epic poem, The Iliad, in spite of all the horrors and violence of war, finding his way home, finally, a generation later, in The Odyssey. The child must leave home and enter the world, with all its violence and cruelty, to find what kind of person will return, a generation later. Unlike the tyrannical ruler of The Iliad, Agamemnon, who willingly sacrifices his own child to ensure the furthering of his own militaristic expedition, Odysseus, when people arrive to summon him from his home to war, feigns madness while plowing the fields. He only breaks his facade when his newborn son, Telemachus, is thrown before the plow. He stops the cart and chooses his child’s wellbeing over his own.

Isn’t this what it’s all about?