Free Sweetness in the Belly by Camilla Gibb

that it was here that they should settle. Their answer came when a great wind swept down from the sky and created a fertile valley before them fed by rivers as sweet as those of Mecca. Some stayed to build a city in the heart of the valley—a labyrinthine maze of intersecting lanes, some of which are so narrow that a man must lift the jerry cans from the side of a donkey to let the animal proceed—while others continued westward, spreading news of the miracle of Bilal al Habash’s voice across North Africa.
    The neighborhood women suddenly scurried out of the compound. A man bent down and stepped over the threshold into our home, a room I was quite sure no man had ever entered. Nouria was at his heels.
    I had expected an old man, a grandfather wrapped in white layers, not a young, tall, handsome man with butter-soft dark skin and bright teeth, wearing a jacket and matching trousers.
    Dr. Aziz Abdulnasser had clearly not expected me either. He did a double take, squinting in the dark, then turned to Nouria.
    “Did the midwife at least disinfect the blade?” he asked, not masking his anger.
    Nouria replied in a quiet whisper, her eyes cast downward.
    He turned to me. “Perhaps you could describe what happened,” he said in perfect English
    But I didn’t have the words in any language. All I could say was that I thought Bortucan might have lost consciousness while it was happening.
    “Shock and hemorrhaging, I imagine.” He nodded, biting the pink at the center of his bottom lip.
    He cradled Bortucan in one arm and unwrapped the bandages with his other hand. I held a candle for him while he inspected her, but it was only seconds before he straightened his back. “We must get her to hospital,” he said.
    Nouria tugged at his sleeve with both hands. “Please, I beg you. Tell us how to take care of her here, but please, not the hospital, anything but that.”
    “They hate the hospital,” he said to me in English. “They think it’s a place where people go to die.”
    “And is it?” I asked him.
    “Often,” he said, “but only because they come to us when it’s too late.”
    Ignoring Nouria, he picked the little girl up, threw her over his shoulder, bent through the doorway and walked straight out into the sunlight of the courtyard, leaving a faint trail of sweet cologne behind him. His black curls glistened in the sun, and he stood unapologetically tall.
    “Go with her,” Nouria urged me. “Please.”
    I stepped into the courtyard. “Wait!” I called out to the doctor. “I’ll come with you.”
    “Fine,” he said, “get your shoes, then.”
    I hesitated. I had only what I was wearing on my feet, the flip-flops everyone wore: national dress. I looked down at his bright white socks and newly shined lace-up shoes and I suddenly felt ashamed.

blood
    T he Ras Makonnen Hospital lay just beyond the wall, along the eucalyptus-lined road that led into the city from the west. The yellow-brick building stood far bigger and grander than anything inside the city walls, intimidating all but the beggars who were strewn across the front steps, displaying their third-degree burns and waving their imaginary limbs in a bid for sympathy—preferably expressed in the form of cash. The farther up the stairs they crawled, the closer the beggars came to being poked in the ribs with the barrel of a guard’s gun or kicked down the steps to begin again their agonizing climb.
    It was not only the hospital’s reputation as a morgue that the Hararis feared but the neighborhood. To the north, south and east of the city lay their farmlands. This was why the people of the city were rich by Ethiopian standards: the Hararis owned the land and controlled the lucrative trade of the waxy, intoxicating leaves and the crisp green beans that grew upon it. They rented the land to peasant farmers, all Oromo, who tilled and tended the gardens in return for a 10 percent share of the harvest. While there was the occasional threat of hyenas or