"Of Beetles and Angels," by Selamawi Asgedom

Selamawi "Mawi" Asgedom

  "Of Beetles and Angels," by the rags-to-Harvard Selamawi Asgedom, is a truly masterful story of his childhood, ranging from African bully survival to trick-or-treating incidents, and should be read by anyone that wants to be presented with a full understanding of giving, or that wants to read a quick book about an African-born child attempting to be the best person he can be for himself, his family, and everyone else--in most cases.

  One of the most beautifully astonishing, yet surprising, moments from any book I’ve ever read was the moment when Selamawi was going through Tewolde’s belongings after he died and noticed a picture of five-year-old from Africa and flipped the card over.  He then looked at the print on the backside of the card that read, “Here is your child.  Thank you for sponsoring him.  With your twenty dollars a month, he goes to school, receives medical care, and eats healthy food”(81).  Tewolde honestly is just the most unbelievably generous person in the world.  Aside from the $240 that this one donation would accumulate to annually, Tewolde had barely a cent to his name.  Until his final job of his life, he was actually making around a maximum of $25 dollars a week, meaning that he really was just giving away last bit of money that he had.  He didn’t just donate to “Compassion International,” but he additionally cared for people on the streets and could very well have donated to several other charities, too.  My favorite character of the book is Tewolde, Selamawi’s close and beloved brother, for Tewolde seemed to be an example of an ideal person.  Even though he was raised from rags and no riches, he still managed to be more charitable than most other people in the entire world, mostly sentimentally, though, on account of the fact that he never had much money to donate.  Although his budget was low, he nonetheless consistently donated to charities and aided people living on the streets in person, too—with almost no help.  Almost all of the people mentioned in this entire story were generous or humane in some way.  At times, there were chances to hate others forever, but Selamawi eventually forgave just about everyone for the terrible things that the many people had committed to him.  He even considers looking the other ways for dangerous bullies and criminals.  A gigantic child that tortured Selamawi and his entire family back in Africa even stole the family’s dinner…Selamawi claims it was okay because that same bully was later added to the casualties of African war.  I can relate to many of the characters in this story, but it was more like tiny little tidbits of personality of specific people of the plethora of characters involved in the book, so I can’t really place my finger on any specific people that Selamawi discusses.
  One interesting story that Selamawi tells is that of Tewolde’s business plan to begin a cleaning franchise and eventually replace the whole system of night janitors at the local library.  The father of Selamawi and his siblings is always ordering his children to work as hard as possible in school and to focus on education and not to get caught up in any predicaments outside of school.  Well, the family’s dad always influenced his kids to start on an occupation in order to earn extra money earlier in their lives, but he probably never expected Tewolde to get so caught up in working that he would dream skipping college to get a jump start on a lesser job.  Well, this potential job for Tewolde could have actually been a very amazing one, being the boss of himself and earning a much fatter pay check than Tewolde had seen earlier in his previous teenager-jobs.  Tewolde actually had his business going for him, but, according to Selamawi—who kept his head in schooling and eventually graduated from Harvard—Tewolde was killed by a drunk driver midway through his senior year.  If that horrible event had not occurred, “ProClean” could have been one of this nation’s top cleaning companies to date.

  Living in a family that is religiously mixed between a Catholic mother and a Jewish father, my family celebrates both Chanukah and Christmas annually.  Even though I am fairly young, however, I do not simply get a surplus of video games, football jerseys, and other stuff that I always love getting, and my sister does not just get make-up and other random girl-objects.  We all trade presents instead, especially during the nights of Chanukah, where we actually constructed our own scheme of giving and receiving an equal quantity of gifts.  Since the 8 nights of Chanukah spread out the time of gift-giving, we really do understand the powerful feeling that giving things to others can help you end up with.  Not only should one give during holidays, though, but ne should attempt to always give to others.  Selamawi depicts the core of gift-giving during the his last words of the book by summing up that “of the gifts that we can give, the greatest is to see beauty in each other—in essence, to give beauty to each other.  When we give that beauty, we prepare our hearts to receive it back”(148), of course acknowledging that non-materialistic giving can be the best giving of all.

Written by:

The HAMMER