It is an often-repeated tale in Addis Ababa: Two white children were kidnapped or abandoned 20 years ago, when the boy was about 5 years old and the girl but an infant, and raised in a tribal family.
The years have provided different variations on the story, and though many here know some version, there are no records to substantiate it.Now, however, a brother and sister have stepped forward, claiming to be those lost children. They say they want to find their parents.
On June 23, a cable arrived at the State Department in Washington from the U.S. Embassy in Ethiopia's capital. It began:
"On June 14, two Oromigna-speaking Caucasians visited (consular officer) Conoff claiming to be the long-rumored kidnapped Americans of 20 years ago."
"After I sent the cable, I called Washington to assure them I wasn't making this up on a slow day in Addis," said Carol L. Rose, who retired last month as the U.S. consul in Ethiopia. "I was afraid the desk officer wouldn't believe it. It's all just too fantastic."
Rose's 21/2-page cable told the story of Haile Mariam Gadessa and Tegest Gadessa as they recounted it through an interpreter and later repeated it to The Associated Press.
Haile Mariam, now 24 or 25, and Tegest, about 20, speak haltingly and nervously about their story in the presence of what to them are strange, white foreigners.
What little they know was told them by the native couple who raised them. Haile Mariam has only the vaguest memory of those days, Tegest none at all.
They tell of being left by their parents in the care of a housekeeper, a man of the Oromo tribe who took them to live with his relatives in a house of mud with a thatched roof.
Haile Mariam said he was raised as a herdsboy, keeping the family's cattle, sheep and goats, while Tegest was given to another family as a maid.
His eyes downcast and haunted, Haile Mariam tells of frequent beatings by a foster father who never wanted them, of being taunted and abused by villagers who saw him and his sister as freaks.
His gnarled hands speak of a lifetime of hard work. He has never spent a day in a classroom. His sister has completed eight years of school.
They said they are not sure why they were left with the housekeeper, but Haile Mariam thinks their father became ill and was flown out of Ethiopia for treatment, accompanied by their mother.
They said the housekeeper took them to live with his sister and brother-in-law in Chabor-Gurage, a region about 50 miles west of Addis Ababa. Whether or not that was meant to be temporary, it became permanent after the housekeeper was bitten by a rabid dog and died.
"After he died, they (the foster parents) were afraid they would get in trouble (if they went to Ethiopian authorities), Haile Mariam said.
"I've been hearing this legend almost from the day I arrived 22 months ago," said Rose. "All of the embassy's Ethiopian employees know it."
So, too, do many other Ethiopians. Some speak of the children being taken "by a gang of Oromos." Others say the mother died of a stroke shortly after they were abducted and "the father has come back many times looking for them."
"The mystery is that we have no record of the parents asking the embassy for help in finding the children, and neither does anyone else," said Rose.
The consulate checked its own records back more than 20 years and asked the State Department, the Defense Department, the Canadian and all European embassies to do the same. All came up blank.
"All we have is the legend," said Rose. "No records, just the story."
But she has a theory: "Back in the '60s, I was one of those backpacking around the world on 50 cents a day," she said. "If you got in trouble, the last place you went was to the U.S. Embassy."
Rose referred to a time when many Americans did not trust their own government - the days of assassinations, the Vietnam War and turmoil in the streets.
If the parents were civilians who chose not to seek help from the U.S. Embassy, why didn't they go to local authorities for assistance?
The children disappeared in the last years of the long reign of Emperor Haile Selassie, when the U.S. community in Ethiopia numbered more than 20,000, many of them in the military.
In 1974, Ethiopia was convulsed by a bloody revolution that brought a Marxist government to power, and many records were lost or destroyed.
Rose hired Abebe Worke, one of Ethiopia's most distinguished lawyers and a former member of the country's High Court, to investigate.
She also notified the Ethiopian Foreign Ministry, which turned the matter over to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Neither Worke nor the ministry has turned up any trace of the parents.
A search of newspaper records by The Associated Press found no mention of the disappearance.
The absence of records suggests that the father was a military man who had the children with an Ethiopian woman, then abandoned her and them.
"Under those circumstances, in this society, the woman most certainly would have tried to place the children with relatives," said Worke. "The stigma of raising them alone would have been too great."
While Rose admits that scenario is possible, she doesn't believe it. Her cable to the State Department said consular officials were convinced the two "are telling the truth as they know it. Their skin is scarred from sunburn and the scarring has caused some distortion of their facial features. They both have light brown eyes and curly light brown-dark blond hair."
Their skin is not brown or black, but bronze. Adds Gustavo Delgado, an embassy political officer: "I think they are as white as the porcelain on your kitchen sink."
With no record of their birth or nationality, there is little that Rose and the U.S. government can do for Haile Mariam and Tegest.
As the search continues for their parents, they live together in a mud hut in the village of Sebeta, about 25 miles from Addis Ababa.
There, Tegest cares for her 3-year-old son, Astoy, born out of wedlock, while Haile Mariam supports them with odd jobs, earning about 15 Ethiopian birr a month, the equivalent of $8.
And they recall the distant past: "I have a memory, it is almost like a dream, very indistinct," Haile Mariam says. "It is of my mother. She is very tall and white. And we lived in a house made of bricks."