Picture This! The Collaborative Process of Publishing Children’s Picture Books (Part II)

Our driver shifted into a lower gear as the Toyota Land Cruiser turned onto a gravel road and climbed through one of the eucalyptus plantations that encircles the capital city of Ethiopia. With me was Abiy Eshete, a well-known artist based in Addis Ababa, who had agreed to illustrate my children’s book. Also in the car was the head social worker for a church-based organization, Beza Community Development Association (BCDA), who had arranged a photo shoot with two kids from their after-school program. And in the back seat were the models themselves–a boy and girl, Andualem and Kalkidan, both 12 years old, who had gotten parental approval and signed the appropriate forms to appear as characters in my story.

Between them was Kalkidan’s mom, Wubalem, who brought a unique set of skills to our photo shoot.

I didn’t expect any of this. I was visiting the after-school tutoring center that had been a long-time partner organization with my former employer, Mennonite Central Committee Ethiopia (MCCE). I expected to have a quick photo-shoot in the courtyard.

I knew BCDA well after five years of working with them when my husband and I were Country Representatives for MCCE from 2016 to 2021. When I was looking for two children to be models for characters in my book, I contacted the center to ask if they could recommend a boy and girl who would like to appear in the book’s illustrations. I had been gone from Ethiopia for over a year.

The boy would be Dawit, the main (human) character in the book who appeared across every illustration. I would need to photograph him from many angles and in different emotional states as his character progressed through the story.

Kalkidan would play Selamawit, one of the many characters Dawit meets along his journey. Her role in the story is small, but it is representative of the many women and girls who engage in difficult physical work in and around the city of Addis Ababa. Selamawit is a wood carrier, going into the dark eucalyptus forests and gathering fallen leaves and branches and carrying them several miles to the city markets to sell.

Wood carrying is difficult and dangerous work, and MCCE’s partner organization began by providing income generation to women who labored in the forests so they could start small businesses and have alternative sources of income. In time, they also provided health care to the women, many of whom were HIV positive, as well as educational support to their children. I wanted to honor the work this organization was doing to support vulnerable women and their children by writing a wood carrier into the story.

What I didn’t realize when we pulled into the tutoring center was how committed the staff was to making our photo shoot a success! The models were ready, and they jumped into the SUV along with Kalkidan’s mother, garbed in the traditional white homespun dress with a bright woven hem, her white natella head-covering with matching stripe gathered across her shoulder. We would go to eucalyptus forests on Entoto Mountain where Kalkidan’s mother had carried wood for years before she found a safer business through BCDA’s income generation initiatives.

Wubalem showed her daughter how to glean sticks left over after the trees were harvested for charcoal and tie them into a heavy bundle that rested horizontally across her back. A bustle of rags tied to her waist created a bit of padding that the sticks rested on. String rope around her shoulders kept the bundle snug against her back so it wouldn’t swing and make her lose her balance or pull her over backwards.

The burden was heavy and awkward, but even so, it fell short of the 80-100 pounds of wood that older women often carried every day.

While Kalkadan and her mother prepared the bundle for the photo shoot, I heard the sound of an engine coming down the mountain. My eyes followed the curve of the dirt road until it disappeared in the trees. I took the lens cap off my camera. Dust and diesel augmented the sound of an ancient green Fiat logging truck as it lurched around the corner. Completely unscripted, the appearance of the truck fit my illustration needs better than anything in my imagination!

Abiy used his skill as a collage artist to turn that event into Selamawit’s illustration. “Watch out, seyt!”

That afternoon in the sap-scented forest was the gift I needed to pull together the material Abiy would use to create the stunning images that accompany my story. After the excitement in the forest, we went to Kalkidan and Wubalem’s house. Over sweet Ethiopian coffee, I interviewed Wubalem about her years as a wood carrier and she told me how she found BCDA and entered into a safer, healthier way of life. Her daughter now benefits from tutoring and other educational support through BCDA, and she will have a much different life from her mother.

After coffee, Abiy and I asked the kids to pose for other scenarios from the book and we spent the rest of the afternoon playing acting games and cracking up and trying on different poses and facial expressions for the camera.

* * *

I had no idea when I sat down to write this small story about a boy and his dog how big of a project it would become. I flew back to Ethiopia in the spring of 2022 to meet with Abiy, read through the story, and propose the artwork. I met him at his studio and while I laid out pencil sketches, his wife made coffee.

When I finished reading the story, Abiy’s wife said “That is a true story. Except for the talking animals, every word in it is true to life! It is the real experience of so many children.” I felt incredibly validated. And honored when Abiy agreed to put my ideas on canvas, even though he admitted that it stretched him. “I’m not a landscape artist,” he demurred, knowing several of the pieces would be of natural spaces that are not his usual repertoire. Neither are the watercolors that alternate with the more intricate collage pieces.

This is a scene where Dawit and his animals shelter under a bridge during a rain storm. Abiy drew two versions of this scene and I liked them both for different reasons. I couldn’t decide between them, so I edited the story a bit and used both illustrations. However, this one didn’t have the goats in it. I asked Abiy’s permission to use a US artist and Photoshop to enhance and tweak some of the artwork so it integrated more closely with the storytelling. One of the challenges of working across distances, time zones, and language and culture barriers is that small miscommunications will occur, and we agreed that some digital changes were easier than redoing beautiful artwork. So my digital artist in Virginia, Nathaneal Eby, helped me with some minor tweaks and overlays, like adding the trio of goats to this watercolor.

On so many levels, this was a collaborative project. Not only that, it was an internationally collaborative project! On the Ethiopian side, I had the opportunity to work with someone of Abiy’s caliber and professionalism to envision and create the collage pieces and the watercolors. The director and social workers from BCDA , Tassaw and Ermias and others, put together the photo shoot on Entoto Mountain that became the portfolio of photographs we drew from to make the art. And I needed photos of animals too, in addition to my human characters. For that, I am indebted to Bereket Muluneh, a high school kid who lived in our neighborhood and who was my son’s best friend over the years we lived in Addis. Barry connected me to the owners of urban animals in the area and we were able to add them to our portfolio.

On the US side, Nathaneal helped me sharpen the images for maximum storytelling value and visual clarity. The scene with Dawit and the priest at the Meskel fire celebration featured earlier in this post is entirely his compilation.

And then back to East Africa where Edward Miller, a free-lance editor based in Nairobi, Kenya, laid everything out and added additional details like the color bar designs at the top and bottom of some of the paintings.

Finally, five years after I first wrote the story down, Watch Out, Woosha! was ready for publication.