OUR FAVORITE MAIL

Aha! Yep, we found another one… and the voices in our heads promise they weren't the ones who wrote it… Naa… they're too busy dealing with the voices in their heads.

It is from our friend and oft critique Metchal, who, for those of you who read The Mail and/or are part of the underground SELEDA cyber-culture, has had something to say about something on SELEDA for the past year and a half. It's a love/hate thing. We wouldn't understand.

We've ducked his verbal Qaria Tffi's so many times, but like a delectable bad habit, we keep going back to him for more. To us, he has become the sketchy, straight shooting uncle at a dysfunctional family gathering, the one who talks to himself, the one who looks at you deadpan and says stuff like, "Ant Qzenam… ye sew Qzenam…" before spouting out some profundity.

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EmbayaN Tregut

Just wanted to take time to thank you because you're making our Ethiopian world (or cyber-world) a much better place to cope with our realities. You're making a difference and you'll be remembered for that.

SELEDA is really the third milestone in the cyberspace abesha

community development - you've put us in touch with ourselves, our feelings, frustrations, hopes... informed and taught us about ourselves, our kind, culture,... all captured so eloquently that I'm planning on archiving the whole site for my kids and their kids to read and re-read. I'm not sure you realize how significant SELEDA is to our generation, to each and everyone of us, how it is helping us cope with the harsh realities of daily life here and how it will help future generations understand how, why and what we've gone through to make a small difference in the world they'll

live in, so that they can be proud of our choices and sacrifices.

As you and your contributors have put it such poignant, articulate and sometimes movingly expressive way, we're the "transitional generation" - the bridge between the old traditional ye hager bEt , and the nuro besew ager - in exile. In exile because as we've come to realize, we might never be welcome anywhere - always in "yesew ager" - we won't fit "hager bEt" and we don't fit here either.

The salient event that changed it all being the Red and White Terror. It's the leitmotiv in all these testimonies/articles. It reminds me of Maghrebi friends of mine, whose parents were lured to France by the French in the 50s/60s to "rebuild the nation that Germany destroyed" (cheap labor, part of the French male population had died in the war...).

And now they don't have a place to call home because today you can't

have a name like Mohammed and be French in France. And the Maghreb countries are as foreign to them as they are to you and me.

I know I bug you all the time about this and that, but I want you to know that it's nothing but out of the deep respect and love I have for your work. You deserve a bouquet of flowers every month for helping us help ourselves in this cruel transition.

Metchal Zeberga

Cupertino, CA