Happy Birthday, Watch Out, Woosha! (Picture This, Part I)

I year ago I published my first children’s book!

In the year since, I’ve read the story in schools and churches, discussed it with children in the US and in China, and promoted it at international events, festivals, and our local Farmer’s Market. The book has made its way into schools and bookstores in Addis Ababa, which is the setting for this collage-illustrated, universal story about a boy and a dog.

And of course Watch Out, Woosha! resides in the Massanutten Regional Library, and its author is thrilled to be a panelist in the upcoming Rocktown Author Festival on April 12! The topic I’ve been invited to discuss is “Picture This! The Collaborative Process of Publishing Children’s Picture Books.”

What an incredible, humbling experience–to work with internationally-renowned Ethiopian artist Abiy Eshete on my very first project!

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My husband Bruce and I were driving through Meskel Square in Addis Ababa when a boy started climbing through the window of our SUV. We lived in Addis from 2016 to 2021, working as Country Representatives for Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), managing relief, development, and peace projects across the country.

The historic intersection of Meskel Square is also home to a sizeable community of street boys who squeeze a meager living from passing vehicles and pedestrians. I usually rolled down my window and talked to the kids, asking their names and ages, and giving them the names of the local organizations who welcomed the younger boys into homes and programs and tried to reunite them with their families. (Our organization, MCC, works in prevention so does not partner with orphanages or have programming for unhoused children. Rather, they provide income generation to vulnerable families to keep children with their parents, and educational support to keep children in school.)

On this occasion, the boy I was talking to through Bruce’s open window had a bottle of glue in his hand. Glue was becoming more prevalent at Meskel Square; a short-term but addictive and neurologically damaging reprieve from abuse and hunger.

I told the kid, maybe in his early teens, that I thought what he was doing was dangerous for his brain. I asked if he’d be willing to trade his glue bottle for a few birr coins, one birr about 20 cents at the time. He reached across Bruce to take the coins from me and I put the bottle down by my feet. The boy leaned on the window and we continued chatting until the light turned green. Then we said said “ciao!” and eased into the intersection. Realizing we were driving away with his pain killer, the boy jumped on the running board and threw his lanky frame across the front seat to reach his glue.

Horns honked. A traffic policeman dashed across the intersection brandishing his club. Street kids and the traffic police have a tense relationship to begin with, and despite his desperate situation, the boy saw the officer and chose his own safety over his pain killer. He wriggled out of the car and darted through the protective chaos of vehicles and pedestrians, while honking horns and the press of traffic carried our SUV through the intersection and into the rest of our day.

The interaction on Meskel Square with the boy and the glue bottle is not in Watch Out, Woosha! It was one of the experiences that led me to learn as much as I could about child homelessness in the city where we lived.

This is Meskel Square. The vehicle in the collage painting is the one Bruce was driving when I took the glue bottle from the unnamed boy. The collage is a combination of my photography, as well as photographs of the city sourced by Abiy. The boy in the grey sweater, Andualem Kebede, is a student from one of MCC’s education partnerships. He worked for me as a model for the character of Dawit in Watch Out, Woosha!

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I first met Abiy Eshete at an art show at the Addis Ababa golf club. Gritty scenes of urban life in Addis crowded into canvas after canvas. Photographs cut with a precision knife and arranged with glue and paint retold the scenes I saw every day as I drove through the city. As the story of Dawit began to take shape in my mind, even before I wrote it down, I knew I had found my illustrator.

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The easiest thing about writing a book is writing it. We went to Mombassa, Kenya, with some friends for spring break in 2018. I walked on the beach. I wrote the story in two days, sitting under a palm tree with a Tusker by the pool at our resort. I had lived in Ethiopia for two years.

I spent the next two years telling myself that I should forget about Dawit. Who was I to write a book? As I conceived it in my mind, half the story was told by illustrations, and how would I get the artwork to match the pictures in my mind? I would have to find a traditional publisher, which I knew would be almost impossible, and how would I deal with the rejection? If I did find a publisher, they would not allow me to choose the illustrator or have control over the artwork. How could I give up what I saw as the necessary art to accompany my project? If I chose self-publishing, I would have to make all the decisions and do all the promotional work on my own, and how could I ever find the time and energy to do that? Every aspect of finishing the book was completely overwhelming.

So the idea languished. But it couldn’t quite be still. A chance meeting with another writer, Tej Rae, finally pushed me into action. I decided to approach Abiy Eshete and ask if he’d work with me to add life and color to my story line.

To be continued!