Ethiopian Folktales

Narrated by Bonsamo Miesso

Once upon a time a mouse met a frog and they decided to be friends; they made friends.

So they went for a walk and they spent the day roaming and they made friends. So the mouse decided to take the frog to his house. So he took the frog to his house, and because he was his guest he offered him all that he had stored. He offered him grain, barley, wheat and all sorts of other cereals.

First the frog took in a piece of wheat but as he put it in his mouth the chaff pricked his throat.

“What lousy, spiky food! Don’t you have anything else?” the frog asked.

So the mouse gave him a chick pea. He rolled it about in his mouth but it just wouldn’t dissolve and he had to spit it out.

And he said, “How hard it is! It’s not very good. Don’t you have anything soft?”

And the mouse said, “No, we’ve become strong and agile because we eat strong food."

So on another day they decided to go to the frog’s house. When they went to the frog, the frog was living in a pond, so he jumped into the pond and called out to the mouse. So the mouse also jumped into the pond, but because he couldn’t swim, he began gasping and struggling in the water.

And the frog said, “How strange! You’ve become drunk without even drinking anything. And I was planning to give you so much food and so much to drink.”

And he pushed the frog out on to the side of the pond. Then he began bringing him all the food that he’d stored, and he brought him worms and insects, and the mouse took everything into his mouth but it was all very watery, and lacked any spices.

“What’s all this trash?” said the mouse. “How do you manage to eat this?”

“Oh, we’ve become soft and slimy because that’s exactly what we eat,” said the frog.

Two possible interpretations are, "You are what you eat", or, "You should not mix with people who aren’t like you."