71 pages • 2 hours read
Mawi AsgedomOf Beetles and Angels: A Boy’s Remarkable Journey from a Refugee Camp to Harvard
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | YA | Published in 2001A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: A New Life
Mawi and his family spend their first two weeks in America in a Chicago motel room, all six of them packed into two rooms. World Relief assigns the family a caseworker named Beth, who is tasked with finding them a church sponsor to help the family get their footing in their new country.
After several weeks, Beth finally gets the Bethel Presbyterian Church in Wheaton, Illinois to serve as Mawi’s family sponsor. The family is in awe of the church: “Like the rest of Wheaton, the church was almost all white, and from our standpoint, all haftamat, or crazy-rich. Bethel went to work immediately on finding us an affordable home—no small task in Wheaton” (22).
While the church searches for housing, the family continues to adjust to their new life in America, encountering new cultural experiences at every turn. Mawi and his family rarely leave their motel room without a World Relief caseworker to guide them, so Haileab does not understand that pedestrians do not usually walk on the shoulder of the highway, and leads the family down Route 38. Mawi and his family are also unaccustomed to living in a country with ready access to TV, and they are transfixed by the “dots” (pixels) that come together to form moving images on the screen (25).
Bethel Presbyterian Church does eventually find a home for Mawi and his family in Wheaton. The family rents the entire upstairs of a two-story house, and Haileab finds work as a janitor to help cover rent and other living expenses (26). Soon after they move into the home, Tsege gives birth to a baby boy named Hntsa. Of the new baby’s name, Haileab says: “His name shall be Hntsa-Eyesus, but he will also be known as Temesgen, or ‘thank you.’ For we are thankful to have made it here safely, and thankful for our new life in this land” (26).
Chapter 5 Summary: God’s Angels
Haileab teaches his children that they should always treat strangers kindly, and to always offer charity to those in need, even to the most destitute and downtroddenof people. Haileab tells his children religious fables about “angels and beetles,” in which God sends angels down to earth to mingle among humans, but God disguises these angels as the lowliest of creatures: beggars, vagrants, and misfits. As Haileab explains, sending angels disguised as beetles is a trial of human empathy “given to us by God to test the deepest sentiments of our heart” (29). Putting the moral of this fable into practice, Haileab invites a homeless man into their Wheaton home, and the family clothes and shelters him. Having benefited from the kindness of others, Haileab is eager to pay that generosity forward.
In this chapter, we also learn about another “angel” who bestows kindness on the Asgedom family: a local college student by the name of Martha, who often looks after the children. With few friends, Mawi and his siblings are grateful for Martha’s company.
Chapter 6 Summary: Playground Warfare
Settling into their life in America, Mawi’s parents emphasize the importance of education to their children. As Haileab frames it for Mawi, education is the key to excelling in American society and one of the only ways – if not the only way – to overcome the unfair disadvantage bestowed upon African refugees due to their race and background. Still, Haileab is aware that a university education is an expense he is unable to afford on a janitor’s salary, and so he impresses it upon his children that they must receive scholarships in order to attend college. Starting as early as elementary school, Mawi and his siblings are aware they must perform well in school.
Mawi and his siblings are unable to focus on their studies because they are bullied incessantly by other children at school. This chapter details the violence inflicted upon – and also enacted by – Mawi and his siblings during their time at Longfellow Elementary School in Wheaton. The majority of their classmates are white, and these bullies do not only harm Mawi and his siblings physically, they also taunt them with racially-charged verbal insults. Ironically, Mawi and his siblings do not only fight with white students. A pair of Nigerian refugee brothers are also students at Longfellow Elementary, and Mawi and his siblings fight with them as well. Having lived with the threat of violence their entire lives, Mawi and his siblings are not hesitant to fight brutality with brutality.
With Tewolde so close in age to Mawi, the pair often findsitself on the schoolyard together, and therefore are able to form a team to defend themselves against bullies. The violence at school continues until finally school administrators notify Mawi’s parents that the altercations must stop or both brothers will be expelled. To the surprise of Mawi and Tewolde, Haileab tells the boys that they must accept the beatings inflicted by other students without fighting back. Though Haileab is their “model of toughness,” in this circumstance Haileab knows that, in order to stay in school, the boys must not fight whatsoever.
Around the time the problem with school violence was at its peak, Tewolde begins to make up stories for Mawi about five Chinese brothers. The five Chinese brothersare experts in martial arts and live in a town where they are attacked by the townspeople for no apparent reason. Every one of Tewolde’s stories about the Chinese brothers ends with them defeating – violently – the people who did harm unto them. In retrospect, Mawi understands that these stories were their “kid way” of dealing with a hostile environment, as well as a way of emotionally processing the bullies they encounter at school.
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
dignity” (22). By including Beth’s perspective, Mawi helps engender a greater degree of compassion and understanding from an American audience.
Also in Chapter 4, there is foreshadowing of a tragedy to come. Without knowing exactly how vehicles will factor into the tragedy, the reader feels a sense of foreboding when Haileab expresses awe over how many vehicles are on American roads: “If he could have read his future, my father might have feared the headlights. He might have seen the destructive power behind them, power that would someday alter his life” (23).
In Chapter 5, the author introduces the concept of “beetles” and “angels,” a major theme throughout the book. The concept comes from a religious fable, one that Haileab tells the children to encourage their compassion toward all of humanity, no matter how desperate or unsightly:
People always mistreated the angels, my father said, because the angels never looked like angels. They were always disguised as the lowliest of beetles: beggars, vagrants, and misfits. But no matter how much the strangers resembled beetles, my father always maintained that they could be angels, given to us by God to test the deepest sentiments of our hearts (29).
The inter-African conflict at Longfellow Elementary mirrors a larger-scale battle: “Even though we were from different countries, we still should have been brothers, defending and helping each other. But like our brothers in Africa, we were making war when we should have been making peace” (37).
