Refugee Has Tale to Tell Harvard Peers

By James Bandler
Globe Correspondent
June 4, 1999

Before he falls asleep, Harvard senior Selamawi "Mawi" Asgedom pulls a sheet across his face, a protective ritual he has repeated every night since he was a young boy fleeing strife in his homeland.

"My mother told me to always sleep with a sheet over my head to keep away the snakes," says Asgedom, a half-Ethiopian, half-Eritrean refugee. "In the refugee camps there were cases of people who were killed after snakes slipped into their own mouths."

It has been a long journey from the snake-infested refugee camps in the Sudan to Harvard's Tercentenary Theatre, where Asgedom will stand next week before thousands and give the senior English oration on Commencement Day.

But America has not been the safe haven Asgedom's family thought it would be. Having escaped civil war in the Horn of Africa, Asgedom's father and brother were killed in separate accidents by drunk drivers in the United States.

But Asgedom has never shown any outward sign of anger, said Richard Marius, a retired senior lecturer of English at Harvard. "There's a gentleness that has come from the horror," said Marius, who was among the judges who picked Asgedom as speaker. "You and I might become very bitter... But Mawi has become very gentle as a result."

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