Is this Dr. Getatchew Haile? the caller asks.
Yes, Getatchew answers into the telephone.
Can I come over and talk to you?, the voice asks.
Why and about what?, Getatchew asks, skeptical.
It’s Oct. 4, 1975. Getatchew is at home in the Ethiopian capital city of Addis Ababa. He knows the dictatorship government sees him, an outspoken critic, as a threat.
While his infant daughter sleeps in her crib and the rest of his family is at a party, Getatchew loads a .45-caliber revolver. It’s dinner time — 5 p.m.
Two men, one in a military uniform, see Getatchew waiting at his home’s gate with his revolver. They scurry away to call for assistance.
A group of 50 to 100 soldiers surround the home. Getatchew hears the whistle of bullets pass his ears and fires back.
Later he finds out the military shot 4,000 bullets into his house and considered demolishing it during the attack.
Getatchew runs out of ammunition. He tries to climb over the garden wall to escape.
He feels a bullet hit his back. He falls. A man with steel-toe boots kicks him in the head.
Where are the rest of them? he demands.
It’s just me, Getatchew utters, his mouth full of blood.
The man doesn’t believe him. He keeps kicking.
The military doesn’t know if they should leave Getatchew to die or take him to jail. The men shove him onto a truck bed and take him to the hospital.
That is the last time Getatchew sees his home in Ethiopia.
‘Like a movie’
The attack, and the incriminations that followed, pushed Getatchew out of his homeland, but his ties to a religious library brought him to a new home at St. John’s University.
Getatchew, now 75 and retired, sits in his lake home in Avon. He’s made Central Minnesota his home since 1976 — raising a family, working at the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library in Collegeville for about 22 years and voicing his opposition to the communist influence on the Ethiopian government.
His expertise with Ethiopian manuscripts made him an invaluable resource at the library and the university. Getatchew also taught medieval studies.
Since 1973, he has spoken against the two communist governments that have run Ethiopia. He favors a democracy.
Even now, Ethiopian courts have charged Getatchew with treason for speaking out against the government in 2005. If he were ever to travel to Ethiopia, he would be jailed or hanged.
“My whole story is like a movie,” Getatchew says, sitting in his wheelchair, dressed in slacks and a warm sweater.
He now writes his life story for his family.
Hospital stay
After the attack, Getatchew lays for days on his back in the hospital. Doctors place him on a board with only a white bed sheet covering it.
He asks to be rolled over. Doctors move him.
The sheet, soaked with blood, sticks to his back. Doctors pull it off. The movement strips his back of skin.
The BBC and the Voice of America report Getatchew’s story that year.
Newspapers in England and the United States pick up the story. The international pressure proves too much for the government.
After a month in the Ethiopian hospital, Getatchew and his wife, Misrak, leave their three children to seek medical treatment near London.
When Getatchew arrives in London, hymn-singing choirs greet him at the gate. The choral salute was arranged by an organization he has served while in Ethiopia — the World Council of Churches. The organization pays for his medical bills.
“When you are rejected from your country and you are welcomed like this, what do you feel?” Getatchew asks rhetorically.
That winter, Julian Plante, then-executive director of the Hill library, visits Ethiopia’s manuscript preservation office in Addis Ababa. Getatchew, a deeply religious man, has worked with the Hill library in the past to preserve and record valuable Christian manuscripts.
Where’s Getatchew?, Plante asks.
Members of the Hill library’s Addis Abba’s office tell him what happened.
The director finds Getatchew in a London hospital.
Come to Collegeville when you are well, he says later. We have a position.
“The mercy was there,” Getatchew said. “The need was there. They had a job for me.”
Italian invasion Getatchew was born in 1931 in the Ethiopian countryside. As a boy, his parents divorce and he moves to Addis Ababa to be with his father.
Ethiopia is under Italian occupation in 1935. He and his father, who is educated as a priest in the Ethiopian Orthodox church, are homeless, living in a makeshift community in a local graveyard.
“It was almost an acropolis,” Getatchew said. His father teaches church lessons, reading and writing to the children living in the graveyard.
Italy withdraws from Ethiopia in 1941.
Getatchew studies theology and social sciences in Egypt. He then earns his doctorate in Semitic philology, the study of words, in Germany.
He settles in Addis Ababa and teaches at a university.
“That’s what I wanted to study,” Getatchew said of his love for language. “I was kidnapped by this discipline.”
Not again Getatchew sees hope when the army rebels against the Ethiopia monarchy in 1973. He wants the country’s people to have more freedom.
But the military starts ruling the country.
“There was no freedom. We wanted to have democracy, to make the monarchy a figurehead,” Getatchew said.
The government confiscates land. It stops newspapers. People starve.
The government creates a civil parliament; each major department and province appoints representatives. People in the province where Getatchew was born ask him to represent them. He sees it as a way to speak out.
“That revolution, I always compare it to a tsunami,” Getatchew said. “When a tsunami comes you run away. You can’t resist it.
Many of us tried to direct it — to redirect it. It didn’t work.”
Collegeville
Seven months after he was wheeled into a London airport on a stretcher, Getatchew contacts a travel agent.
I want to go to Collegeville, he says.
The agent scours maps. It’s as if it doesn’t exist.
The closest airport is in St. Paul. Is that OK?, she asks.
He receives a two-year visiting scholar visa.
He and Misrak discover a new home.
St. John’s gives Getatchew a job cataloging Ethiopian manuscripts.
He struggles to bring his children to the United States. Why do the children need to come if Getatchew plans to stay for only two years?, the U.S. government wonders.
St. John’s takes on his case. He will have to stay, they say. There is too much work, and he is the most qualified, they say.
Send the children, they plead.
A few months later, the family is reunited.
Getatchew still worries. St. John’s gives him one-year contracts. What if they don’t renew his work?, he wonders. He’s paralyzed. What kind of life can he give his family when he’s confined to a wheelchair? “This worry hangs around your neck,” he said.
After four or five years, he receives word the contract will not be renewed. There is no more money.
But before he can comprehend it, the university president finds him.
Don’t worry, says the Rev. Hilary Thimmesh, then-university president. Your work is not done, Thimmesh says. We will find the money.
Getatchew never worries again. His work is still not done. Although now technically retired, Getatchew continues to work at the Hill. He does research and writes about his experiences.
He also helps scholars who want to learn about his homeland. “(St. John’s) is hugely important to my family,” said Rebecca Haile, Getatchew’s oldest daughter. “For them, that’s where they came and set down roots.”
His co-workers call him an inspiration and a gift.
“He’s one of the most remarkable people I know,” said Columba Stewart, Order of St. Benedict, executive director for Hill. “I respect him. … There’s a personal story of survival, exile and making a new life in a very strange place.”
Study
Getatchew’s home office shows the luxuries of living in the United States. Hanging on his wall are the college diplomas of his six grown children from places such as Harvard and Yale. His room is filled with photos of his six grandchildren hugging him.
Despite the comforts of his current life, Getatchew watches the turmoil in his homeland. He still speaks out. His vocal opposition makes it impossible for him to go back. He visits his homeland mentally while reading its ancient manuscripts. He almost can hear the stories told in Ge’ez, a language spoken in Ethiopian churches. He becomes so immersed sometimes he forgets he’s at St. John’s. His scars from that 1975 attack are still evident. The mark where the bullet left his body still has an angry bump. His arms tell of him breaking through glass while trying to escape. His head still has a scar where the soldier kicked him. But never assume Getatchew carries pity for what has been taken away. His love for family, education and religion have
blessed him, Rebecca Haile said.
“He is able to see the joy in every (situation),” she said. “He has always been able to focus on the happiness and joyfulness. … He’s one in a million.”