“Our Wonderful Cook, Aragash Haile” by Richard Lyman (Ethiopia)
Our Wonderful Cook, Aragash Haile by Richard Lyman (Ethiopia 1962-64) Marty Benjamin, John Stockton, Dallas Smith and I who shared a house in Gondar had the naïve notion that we were going to be self-sufficient and live without servants. Little did we realize that in Gondar servants had servants. It took us several months to put aside the quaint notion of complete independence and hire much-needed help. The fact that of the four of us only Dallas liked to cook should have been a red flag from the start. Within a week we opened a charge account at Ato Ghile Berhane’s “Ghile’s Store.” It was a wide glass-fronted store just around the corner on the Asmara road from the post office. Behind a tall counter were two engaging young men who would retrieve what we wanted from the floor to ceiling shelves. Our bulk purchases like rice . . .
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This memoir made me misty eyed thinking of our Ethiopian help: our four students who washed our dishes and had…