Summary

In “Kind Stranger,” an unnamed American narrator recalls visiting Addis Ababa. She tripped on a curb and looked at the ground to discover a man reaching out for her. She bent down to see if he was OK and he began speaking. The man, whose name was Gedeyon, recalled seeing a woman named Marta Kebede recently, whom he had known in college. He had once asked her out and she declined, making fun of his “farmer shoes” (83). He saved up for months to buy new shoes and then asked her out again, but she did not even recognize him and declined again. Later, when Gedeyon was arrested by representatives of the Derg, Ethiopia's military leadership in the 1980s, he gave them Marta's name, claiming that she was a “bourgeois princess” (86). Gedeyon asked the narrator if she had lived in Ethiopia during...