Title: The Weight of Paper
PEACE
The ink on my birth certificate had lied to me since the day I was born.
It began in 1972, in the heart of Addis Ababa, where my mother, Alem, labored through a sweltering August night at Princess Tsehai Hospital. The midwives remembered her screams echoing down the corridor, but the official records told a different story. My name—Meron—had been scrawled beside the heading, but the date beneath it was wrong: August 13 instead of the July 30 I had always known. A month’s discrepancy, but to me, it was a chasm.
Step 1: The Mistake
In the chaos of my birth, a junior clerk at the hospital misfiled the delivery log. My mother, exhausted and delirious, had repeated my name and birthdate to three different staff members, but the clerk transcribed the date as August 13—the day she intended to deliver me, not the day I arrived early. By the time the error was noticed, the original log had been lost in a bureaucratic shuffle. The Addis Ababa Municipality, reliant on that single document, issued my first certificate with the wrong date. No one questioned it.
Step 2: The Silence
For decades, the error lay dormant. My parents, weary of red tape, accepted the certificate as is. Ethiopia’s revolution in 1974, my father’s disappearance into the political turmoil, and my mother’s quiet survival in a changing city left no room for bureaucratic battles. I grew up believing August 13 was my birthday—a date I celebrated with cake and family laughter, unaware it was a lie.
Step 3: The Crisis
At 48, I needed a passport to visit my daughter in Sweden. The Municipality’s office in Akaky Kality became my prison. “The records show August 13,” said Mr. Getachew, his eyes narrowing as I presented the hospital’s faded delivery note, dated July 30. “Paperwork is paperwork,” he muttered, handing me a form requiring two affidavits, three witness signatures, and a hospital stamp that no longer existed. Princess Tsehai had been rebuilt, its old archives buried under concrete.
Step 4: The Fight
I combed through the city. My aunt, who’d stood by my mother during labor, swore on our grandmother’s memory that I’d been born in July. A dusty midwife, now retired in Lalibela, recalled the July rainstorm that flooded the hospital that week. Yet the Municipality demanded “official proof.” Desperate, I filed a petition, only to be met with shrugs. “Corruption is expensive,” one official whispered, as if the truth had a price.
Step 5: The Truth
Peace eluded me. Nights turned to dreams of my father, his voice urging me to persist. I lobbied MPs, wrote letters to the mayor, and finally, a journalist took interest. Her article exposed the Municipality’s stalemate, and suddenly, the bureaucrats who’d once ignored me were rushing to “resolve the matter.” A week later, a new certificate arrived—July 30, 1972, at last.
Step 6: The Peace
Today, I hold both certificates side by side. The old one, with its August lie, is a relic of a country that once swallowed truth whole. The new one is a promise—that even in systems built on stone, a single voice can chisel away at the rubble. My daughter’s laughter echoes in my ears as I plan to visit her this July, not as a stranger to my own story, but as its author.
PEACE is not given. It is carved, one paperclip at a time.
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