Berhanu Nega was once one of Bucknell Universitys most popular professors.

An
Ethiopian exile with a Ph.D. from the New School for Social Research in Manhattan,
he taught one of the economics departments most sought-after electives, African
Economic Development. When he wasnt leading seminars or puttering around his
comfortable home in a wooded neighborhood five minutes from the Bucknell
campus in rural Lewisburg, Pa., Nega traveled abroad for academic conferences and
lectured on human rights at the European Parliament in Brussels. He was very
much concerned with the relationship between democracy and development, says
John Rickard, an English professor who became one of his close friends. He argued
that you cannot have viable economic development without democratization, and
vice versa. A gregarious and active figure on campus, he rooted for the
Philadelphia Eagles and the Cleveland Cavaliers, campaigned door-to-door for
Barack Obama in 2008 and was known as one of the best squash players on the
Bucknell faculty. He and his wife, an Ethiopian-born optometrist, raised two sons and
sent them to top-ranked colleges, the University of Pennsylvania and Carnegie
Mellon. On weekends he sometimes hosted dinners for other Bucknell professors
and their families, regaling them with stories about Abyssinian culture and history
over Ethiopian food he would prepare himself; he imported the spices from Addis
Ababa and made the injera, a spongy sourdough bread made of teff flour, by hand.

Nega remained vague about his past. But students curious enough to Google him
would discover that the man who stood before them, outlining development policies
in sub-Saharan Africa, was in fact intimately involved in the long-running hostility
between Ethiopia and neighboring Eritrea, a conflict that has dragged on for half a
century. By the start of the millennium, its newest incarnation, a border war over a
patch of seemingly worthless ground just 250 square miles in size, devolved into a
tense standoff, with the two nations each massing along the border thousands of
troops from both official and unofficial armies. One proxy army fighting on the
Eritrean side, a group of disaffected Ethiopians called Ginbot 7, was a force that
Nega helped create, founding the movement in 2008 with another Ethiopian exile,
Andargachew Tsege, in Washington. The Ethiopian government, which had
previously detained Nega as a political prisoner for two years in Addis Ababa, now
sentenced him to death in absentia. Bucknell students who did learn about their
teachers past were thrilled. It made his classes exciting, Rickard says.

In Ginbot 7, Tsege served as the political leader based in Eritrea; Nega was the
groups intellectual leader and principal fund-raiser, collecting money from
members of the Ethiopian diaspora in Europe and the United States. That all
changed one day in June 2014, when Tsege, known to everyone as Andy, made a
brief stopover in Sanaa, the capital of Yemen, on his way to Asmara, the capital of
Eritrea. As he sat in the airport transit lounge, waiting to board his flight, Yemeni

security forces, apparently acting in collusion with Ethiopian intelligence, arrested

him and put him on a plane to Addis Ababa, where he was paraded on state
television and currently faces a death sentence.

Days after Tseges arrest and extradition, Nega volunteered to replace him in
Eritrea. Was I going to remain an academic, sitting in an ivory tower criticizing
things? he told me. Or was I going to do something as an engaged citizen? Nega
put his house up for sale and took an indefinite leave of absence from the university.
It was an extended sabbatical, he told his colleagues. Only a handful of close
friends, his wife and his two sons knew the truth.

On a hot July afternoon in 2015, Nega packed a suitcase, bade his wife farewell and
was driven by comrades to John F. Kennedy International Airport. He carried a
laissez-passer from the Eritrean government, allowing him a one-time entry into the
country. Nega was heading for a new life inside a destitute dictatorship sometimes
referred to as the North Korea of Africa; the regime was notorious for having
supported the Shabab, an Islamist terrorist group in Somalia, and for a military
conscription program that condemns many citizens over age 18 to unlimited
servitude. Nega also believes he has drawn the scrutiny of the Obama
administration and was worried about being stopped and turned around by
Homeland Security. It wasnt until the wheels on the EgyptAir jet were up and he
was settling into his seat over the Atlantic Ocean, bound for one of the most
isolated and repressive nations on Earth, that he was able to relax.
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The lights cut out above Nega one chilly night this July, and the rebel chief sat in
darkness in a bungalow in Asmara, Eritreas 7,600-foot-high capital. Nega had
spread a map on a coffee table, and he was showing me the route for a clandestine
mission that he planned to undertake the following morning. At dawn, he and a

comrade would drive 300 miles southwest to the mined, militarized border between
Eritrea and Ethiopia to rendezvous with intelligence sources at a rebel base camp.
His contacts were smuggling across the border highly sensitive information about
Ethiopian troop positions and about the strength of resistance cells inside Ethiopia,
whom Nega was hoping to link up with his own fighters on the Eritrean side of the
border.

Theyve got documents, and they insist on handing them over only to me, Nega
told me. When there is sensitive material, they first want me to see it and then
filter the information to the rest of the organization. Nega, a burly, balding 58-yearold with a rumpled facade and an appealingly unassuming manner, rubbed his
forehead as the lights flickered and then returned. In recent years, Ginbot 7 has
grown, and it is now guided by an 80-member council of representatives spread
around the world. As commander, Nega oversees several hundred rebel fighters in
Eritrea as well as an unknown number of armed members inside Ethiopia who carry
out occasional attacks in the movements name. During his frequent visits to the
front lines, he spends his time meeting with fellow commanders, observing training
and ever the professor leading history and democracy seminars using chalk
and a blackboard in a classroom in the bush.

Nega turned back to the map and traced a straight line leading to the Tekeze River,
the westernmost border between Ethiopia and Eritrea. The stream was a main
crossing point for Ethiopian Army deserters fleeing to the rebels, and in recent
weeks it had come under threat from advancing Ethiopian troops. They are moving
a sizable force into this area, because we are their main target now, he said,
referring to Ginbot 7, now known as Patriotic Ginbot 7. And they are pushing a large
part of their army, artillery and tanks into this zone. They havent started shelling us
yet.

The two nations, now ferocious enemies, were once joined. Eritrea, an Italian colony
from 1890 until 1941, was annexed by Ethiopia after World War II; it took a threedecades-long war for the Eritreans to finally liberate themselves, in 1991. The
neighbors remained at peace until 1998, when a simmering dispute over the Yirga
triangle, a piece of rocky land along the border that had never been clearly
demarcated in colonial maps, exploded into two years of tank and trench warfare in
which 100,000 died. Today, despite a United Nations-supervised mediation that
awarded the disputed territory to Eritrea, Ethiopia continues to occupy the border
village Badame. Tens of thousands of troops face each other across a landscape of
mines, bunkers, sniper posts and other fortifications.

Violence on the border, while infrequent, can be both sudden and brutal. In midJune, according to the Eritrean government, Ethiopia launched a full-scale attack
along the frontier at Tsorona, the first major incursion since 2012, possibly in
retaliation for attacks on its forces by Ginbot 7. Eritrea claimed that it had killed 200
enemy soldiers and wounded 300, though Ethiopia downplayed its losses. They
almost always deny it, Nega told me. As far as the Ethiopian government is
concerned, nobody ever dies.

Ethiopia, while an American ally and an economic leader by African standards, is

notoriously repressive. The minority Tigrayan regime has jailed hundreds of
bloggers, journalists and opposition figures, keeping itself in power by intimidating
political opponents, rigging elections and violently putting down protests. Since
November of last year, according to Human Rights Watch, state security forces
killed more than 400 protesters in the Oromia region, which surrounds Addis Ababa.
Protests have recently spread to the Amhara region, as well; in August, security
forces shot dead roughly 100 demonstrators and injured hundreds more. Thousands
of Oromos, a minority group that makes up about a third of the population, have
been jailed without trial on suspicion of supporting the Oromo Liberation Front, a
secessionist group. The Ethiopian marathoner Feyisa Lilesa, who won the silver
medal at the Olympics this year, drew global attention to the governments abuses
when he held his crossed arms over his head at the finish line in solidarity with his
fellow Oromos; he says he fears returning home and is seeking political asylum.

Across the room in Negas bungalow, four fellow rebel commanders, all members of
the Ethiopian diaspora, were finishing their supper. The men tore off pieces of injera
and dipped the bread into a thick sauce called shiro, washing down the meal with
bottles of the local Asmara beer. Esat, an Ethiopian opposition satellite channel
broadcast from Europe and the United States, played softly on a television in the
corner. The men were part of a revolving contingent of commanders who returned
to Asmara from time to time to check their email and escape the primitive
conditions in the bush. We are five right now, Nega said, introducing me to his
comrades from Dallas; Arlington, Va.; Calgary, Canada; and Luxembourg. Another,
from the United Kingdom, is returning here tomorrow morning. Well be six when he
comes. Last week we were eight at one point we were 11.

The house also serves as an infirmary for rebels who become ill or are wounded in
combat, and it provides a temporary sanctuary for Ethiopian Army defectors who
cross the front lines. One recent arrival was a former Ethiopian Air Force officer, an

Oromo who had traveled north 42 hours by bus and on foot, then swum across the
Tekeze River to Eritrea. He made the decision to defect while sitting in an Addis
Ababa jail cell on false charges, he told me, of being a member of the Oromo
secessionist movement.
Photo
Zalambessa, Ethiopia, a city on the border with Eritrea, was almost entirely
destroyed during the two countries war, sparked by a dispute over a tiny parcel of
rocky land. Credit Boris Heger/Associated Press

We have many like him, Nega said.

Nega put on his jacket to head off in search of diesel fuel for the morning journey to
the border. With another rebel comrade from Virginia, we drove down the deserted,
lightless streets of Asmara, searching for an open filling station, but the one we
found had run out of diesel; Nega would have to return the next morning, delaying
his departure for the front lines. When we returned to his home, Nega pointed to a
pile of medical supplies in the hallway bandages, splints, antibiotics, antimalarials
that he was planning to ferry to his fighters, and three cardboard boxes packed
with solar cells that would provide some rudimentary electricity in the bush. While
in the camps, Nega was dependent on his mobile phone for contact with the outside
world, but even that was not guaranteed. They have shut off phone coverage since
the incursion by the Ethiopians at Tsorona, he told me. Ill be out of touch for
days.

When I first met Nega, in late May 2016, the conditions were decidedly more
comfortable. After 10 months in Asmara, Nega had flown back to the United States
to attend meetings and the graduation of his younger son, Iyassu, from the
University of Pennsylvania. Given his deepening involvement in a rebellion against
an American ally, it was possible that this would be the last time he could visit the
United States. Indeed, Nega, who is not an American citizen, had his State
Department-issued travel document suspended three years ago, and his
application for United States citizenship has been put on indefinite hold. He now
travels on an Eritrean passport; together with his green card, it gained him entry
into the country this time. The State Department would not comment on Nega or
Ginbot 7, but Nega surmises that the Obama administration does not look favorably
on his activities. Still, he insists, nobody is saying, Back off. I think they know that
this is not about being against the U.S. We are upholding the basic principles under
which the U.S. was established.

We met over Memorial Day weekend on the terrace of the upscale Caf Dupont on
Dupont Circle in Washington, joined by his sister Hiwot, who runs a technology startup in New York, and Iyassu, a 21-year-old former high-school track star who was
starting work at a New York investment bank in the fall. Over white wine and
chicken salad, the conversation touched on Lin-Manuel Mirandas commencement
address and Negas excitement over crossing paths, after the ceremony, with
Donald Trump and Vice President Joe Biden. (Trumps daughter and Bidens
granddaughter were members of Iyassus graduating class.) I asked Iyassu if he had
reconciled himself to the idea of his fathers new life on the front lines, and he said
that he had. Ultimately he should continue to pursue what he believes in, he told
me. He expressed little interest, though, in visiting his father at his Eritrean rebel
camp or delving deeper into the raison dtre of the Ginbot 7 movement. I just got
out of college my life has its own direction, he said. I cant take time off. ... Im
a little bit removed generationally as well.

The elder Nega is part of a generation of Ethiopians who grew up amid violence and
tumult. Over lunch, he recalled what it was like to be a high-school student when a
Marxist junta, the Soviet-backed Derg, overthrew Emperor Haile Selassie and
ushered in a brutal dictatorship. Nega had grown up privileged, the son of a wealthy
entrepreneur, and he watched as his fathers vast commercial corn and soybean
farms were seized and security forces began arresting, imprisoning and executing
thousands of dissidents, including many students. He and his two older sisters
joined a resistance movement called the Ethiopian Peoples Revolutionary Party
(E.P.R.P.). They went underground, living in safe houses, eluding the police. His
eldest sister was later captured and disappeared in the Dergs prisons. His family
searched for her everywhere.

We had people coming to our house and telling my parents, I saw her at this
place. My mother used to go out all over looking for her, Nega recalls. Her former
cellmates later told him that she had died in prison, probably by committing suicide
with a cyanide capsule that she wore around her neck. It was common to have
cyanide with you because if you were caught, you would be tortured and executed,
and through torture you might be forced to betray people, Nega said. As the
crackdown in Addis intensified, the E.P.R.P. sent Nega north to Tigray province, the
center of a growing guerrilla war against the Derg; there, he carried out attacks on
government forces. In 1978 a power struggle erupted within the E.P.R.P. leadership,
and Nega was thrown into prison. He was released one day before guards turned
their guns on the remaining prisoners, killing 15. Nega escaped to Sudan, living as a

refugee in Khartoum for nearly two years, then obtained political asylum in the
United States in 1980.
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Recent Comments
Saperstein September 6, 2016

Professor Nega's War has a fascinating but extremely troubling lifeline. As a student
he joins a revolution against a Stalinist Ethiopian...
global hoosier September 6, 2016

Thanks Hammer and Nega, for this informative article. We know so little of Eritrea,
but I got to know a young Eritrean journalist living in...
Esu September 6, 2016

The good professor is indeed a fox clothed as a sheep,Springing from Eritrea to

"Arat-killo" he dreams to leap,Wise friends should advice...

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He earned his bachelors degree from the State University of New York at New Paltz,
where he also played on the soccer team. While studying for his doctorate at the
New School for Social Research, he lived in Brooklyn and wrote his dissertation on
the failures of Ethiopian agriculture under the Communist regime. Meanwhile,
Ethiopia was sliding deeper into calamity. When the guerrilla movements increased
their attacks in Tigray in the mid-1980s, the Derg dictator, Mengistu Haile Mariam,
blocked food supplies to the region, creating a devastating famine in which one
million people died. Photographs of starving children, disseminated by the news
media, catalyzed an international relief effort, Live Aid, and inspired the pop hit We

Are the World, making Ethiopia a worldwide synonym for hunger. The famine had
wound down, and the rebel war was escalating, when Bucknell hired Nega as an
assistant professor in 1990. He never trumpeted his background, the fact that he
had been a guerrilla fighter, says Dean Baker, a former Bucknell colleague who
now heads the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington.

In 1991, after a decades struggle, three rebel groups the Tigrayan Peoples
Liberation Front, the Oromo Liberation Front and the Eritrean Peoples Liberation
Front defeated the Derg and marched into Addis Ababa. The new government, led
by the Tigrayan rebel leader Meles Zenawi, set about rebuilding the war-shattered
nation. Nega finally had reason for optimism. He knew Meles well the prime
minister had been in the same university class as his dead sister and after the
Tigrayans consolidated power, Nega obtained a leave of absence from Bucknell and
flew with his wife and two sons, both toddlers, back to Addis, determined to help
rebuild the country. Nega believed that Meles had good intentions, he told me.

But Negas enthusiasm for the new government wore off quickly. At Addis Ababa
University, where he taught part-time (he had also taken over several of his fathers
businesses), administrators cracked down on dissent, banning the student
government and the school newspaper. When Nega encouraged his students to
press for academic freedoms, police assaulted them and other demonstrators; later,
as unrest spread through the city, they shot 41 people dead. Nega spent a month in
jail for abetting the protests. At night I was hearing prisoners being tortured,
beaten, he says.

Was I going to remain an academic, sitting in an ivory tower criticizing things? Or

was I going to do something as an engaged citizen?

In May 2005, with the economy growing rapidly and the governments popularity
apparently high, Ethiopia held elections, the first truly multiparty vote in Ethiopias
history, and invited international observers to attend. But the results were not to
Meless liking. Negas Coalition for Unity and Democracy won 137 of the 138 seats
on the City Council in Addis Ababa. Nega was poised to become mayor, but the
government denied his party the victory and jailed him along with other C.U.D.
leaders. American colleagues began a campaign to free Nega. The Bucknell faculty
approved a motion to support him and call attention to his plight, Rickard says.
We talked with journalists, ambassadors, trying to make sure that he stayed on the
front burner. International pressure helped to secure Negas release after 21

months, and he returned to the United States. The experience hardened him, says
Samuel Adamassu, a member of the Ethiopian diaspora who has known Nega and
his family since the 1980s. It made him realize these people are not willing to
change without being forced.

After our lunch in Washington, I attended a fund-raising rally for Ginbot 7 at the
Georgetown Marriott, attended by about 500 members of the Ethiopian diaspora.
Nega stood before a backdrop of Ethiopian and American flags. It would be a fight to
the death, he assured the cheering crowd. There is no negotiation with someone
who is coming to rape you, Nega went on in Amharic, the principal language of
Ethiopia. We have to stop them. The contrast between the mild-mannered
academic I had met on the patio of the Caf Dupont and the fiery rebel leader was
striking. Nega announced that he had brought news from the front lines: Guerillas
claiming loyalty to his movement had carried out their most significant attack to
date, outside the town Arba Minch, in southern Ethiopia, formerly the site of an
American drone base. We killed 20 soldiers and injured 50 of them, he said,
calling it a new stage in the struggle. (The Ethiopian government claimed they
foiled the attack and killed some of the gunman.)

When Nega helped found the Ginbot 7 movement in 2008, the year he returned to
teaching at Bucknell, he explained that the movement would seek to organize civil
disobedience and help the existing armed movements inside and outside Ethiopia
and put pressure on the government, and the international community, to come to
a negotiation. Yet the Ginbot 7 platform advocated destabilizing the government
by any means necessary, including attacks on soldiers and police. It was a
discordant message coming out of a liberal American university whose first class
was held in the basement of the First Baptist Church of Lewisburg in 1846. Its a
line that he has crossed, says Rickard, the English professor, who finds Negas
advocacy of violence troubling but understandable. He has never been a pacifist,
never renounced armed struggle, he says. He has seen elections overturned,
hundreds of people murdered on the streets. His sister died, and his best friend is in
prison, in peril of his life. He sees violence as viable and necessary. Its kind of
shocking, in a way.

While Ginbot 7 started to foment its resistance, Ethiopia was busy rebranding itself
as an economic success story. Following South Korean and Chinese models of statedirected development, Meles borrowed from state-owned banks and used Western
aid money to invest heavily in dams, airlines, agriculture, education and health
care. Ethiopias economy took off, averaging nearly 11 percent growth per year for
the last decade, one of the highest rates in Africa. Addis Ababa became the

showpiece of the countrys transformation, with a light rail system, ubiquitous highrise construction and luxury hotels, high-end restaurants and wine bars packed with
newly minted millionaires. At the same time, the country was becoming a bulwark
against the spread of radical Islam in the Horn of Africa. Today Ethiopia provides
4,400 peacekeepers to an African Union force in Somalia and helps keep the peace
along the tense border between North and South Sudan. In July 2015 President
Obama, on an African tour, paid the first visit ever to Ethiopia by a sitting American
president.

Yet in the classroom and abroad, Nega argued that Ethiopias transformation was a
mirage, created to placate Western observers troubled by the lack of democracy. In
2005, it became clear that legitimacy would not come through the political process,
so they started this new narrative development, he told me. Nega insists that
Ethiopia has cooked the books, and that its growth rate is largely attributable to
huge infrastructure projects and Western development aid, with little contribution
from the private sector. The World Bank is throwing money at Ethiopia like theres
no tomorrow, he told me. The actual growth rate, he insists, is closer to 5 to 6
percent per capita income is still among the lowest in the world and the
weakness of the countrys institutions will mean that even this rate cannot be
sustained.

Two months before Obama arrived, the government presided over what was widely
considered a sham election, in which the ruling party won all 547 seats in
Parliament, But Obama, making it clear that security trumped other concerns in the
Horn of Africa, stood beside Meless successor, Prime Minister Hailemariam
Desalegn, and described the government as being democratically elected.

I was shocked, Nega told me. I understand the reality of power and why he
supports the Ethiopian government, but to say it is democratically elected? I was
disgusted.

Three days after my first meeting with Nega in Asmara, and shortly after he
returned from his border rendezvous, we drove in the late afternoon in his white
Hilux pickup truck through the landscape of his new life. We passed the run-down
and nearly deserted Asmara Palace Hotel, formerly an Intercontinental Hotel, and a
large Catholic church that Nega couldnt identify. Im a lousy tourist guide, he said
apologetically. While in Asmara, he spends most of his time hunkered down either in
his residence or at a borrowed office in the center of town one of the few places

in the city with a high-speed internet connection. Eritrea has the lowest internet
penetration in the world, with only about 1 percent of the population online, and this
rare broadband connection allows him to catch up regularly on Skype with his sons
and his wife. I dont think shes very happy about my being here, he admitted,
shifting uncomfortably. We have really stopped talking about it.

He has seen elections overturned, hundreds of people murdered on the streets. His
sister died, and his best friend is in prison, in peril of his life. He sees violence as
viable and necessary. Its kind of shocking, in a way.

Immediately following its independence in the early 1990s, under the rebel-leaderturned-president Isaias Afwerki, Eritrea was briefly considered one of the hopes of
Africa. When I visited the country in 1996, five years after it won its liberation from
Ethiopia, the former rebels were starting to revive the wrecked economy
rebuilding roads, bridges and a railway to the coast, calling on the Eritrean diaspora
to invest. But after the border war between 1998 and 2000, Eritreas leadership
turned inward, growing increasingly suspicious of the outside world. Afwerki
suppressed dissent, expelled Western journalists and NGOs, turned down foreign
aid, nationalized industries and discouraged foreign investment; according to the
World Bank, per capita income is about $1,400 a year. In 2009 the United Nations
Security Council imposed sanctions on Eritrea, including an arms embargo and a
travel ban and a freeze on the assets of top Eritrean officials, for providing weapons
to the Shabab, the radical Islamist group that has carried out hundreds of terrorist
attacks in Somalia and neighboring Kenya. (Eritrea called the allegation fabricated
lies.) A June 2016 United Nations report accused the Eritrean government of
committing crimes against humanity, including torture, jailing dissidents and the
open-ended military conscription program that the government justifies as
preparation against another Ethiopian invasion.

With virtually no investment coming into the country, Asmara has become a city
frozen in time. Two donkeys meandered down Harnet Avenue, the capitals main
boulevard, stopping to nibble at a patch of grass around a palm tree. As we watched
the crowds walk down the tidy avenue lined by an imposing red brick cathedral, a
1930s-era Art Deco movie theater and crumbling Italian bakeries and cappuccino
bars, Nega defended his decision to turn to the dictatorship for support.

Do we really have to discuss the kind of dictatorships that the U.S. sleeps with? he
asked me. Here is a country that was willing to give us sanctuary, a country that

had once been part of Ethiopia. I look at any of these people, I talk to them, and
they are just like me, they are as Ethiopian as I am. Why should I not get help from
them?

Nega insisted that he saw some positives in the dictatorship. This is the only
country that says, despite its poverty, We are going to chart our own course
whether you like it or not, he told me. They are not corrupt. You see these
government officials driving 1980s cars, torn down the middle. I have seen their
lives, their houses. There is some element of a David-and-Goliath struggle in this
thing. He called the United Nations report describing crimes against humanity an
exaggeration. (A Western diplomat in Asmara I talked to, who asked not to be
identified because of the political sensitivities of his position, agreed with Negas
assessment of the report, saying it was based on testimony of refugees in Europe
who had an interest in depicting their country as badly as possible to justify their
status.)

It goes without saying that Nega was reluctant to speak harshly about the nation
that was providing his movement with a refuge and that could snatch it away at
any moment. I dont want to butt into their personal issues, he said carefully.
Theyve always been nice to us. Out of the public eye, however, the rebel leader
can be more critical. He holds no illusions about Eritrea, says his friend and former
Bucknell colleague Dean Baker.

I asked Nega if he was confident that pressure by the rebel groups could bring down
the Ethiopian government. Nega believed that momentum was on his side. This
resistance to the state is coming in every direction now, in all parts of the country,
he said. He was giving himself four or five years before he and his rebel forces
entered Ethiopia as part of a new democratic dispensation. It certainly wont be a
decade, he told me.

Until that happens, Nega will continue planning and preparing from a precarious and
lonely limbo. Back at the bungalow, he led me down the corridor and showed me
where he slept: a monastic chamber furnished with a single bed, an armoire and a
night table strewn with jars of vitamins and blood-pressure medication. (He lost his
medical insurance when he left Bucknell, but still has American insurance coverage
through his wife, and he picked up a three-month supply of the medicine on his May
trip to the United States.) He retrieved from the freezer a chilled bottle of Absolut
and poured two glasses. We sat in the concrete courtyard, beside a clothesline

draped with Negas laundry. The power failed again, casting us into total darkness,
then returned a few seconds later. The contrast with his previous life in the States
cheering for the Lewisburg Green Dragons, his sons high-school track team;
vacationing on the beaches of Maryland and North Carolina with his extended family
could hardly have been more extreme.

If you like comfort, and thats what drives you, youll never do this, he told me,
taking a sip of the ice-cold vodka. But sometimes you get really surprised. Once
you have a commitment to something, all these things that you thought were
normal in your day-to-day life become unnecessary luxuries.