Tigrayትግራይ

Stories were collected in Mekelle, the regional capital, in March 1997 with the assistance of Mesele Zeleke of the Regional Education Bureau, under the direction of Atakilti Hagag. Uniquely in this region, no stories for the project were narrated directly to Elizabeth Laird by storytellers. Mesele Zeleke had set up a story collecting project which was carried out by Tsehaynesh Gebre Yohannes. School children had been asked to write down stories told them by their elders, and had sent them in to the Regional Educational Bureau. Mesele Zeleke kindly translated a selection of stories from this collection into English for the readers project. The names of the children who had written the stories down were not recorded at the time of Elizabeth Laird's visit, and consequently cannot be given here.

The resulting stories represent the written work (in Tigrinya) of schoolchildren, some of whom wrote better and more fully than others. Some stories therefore read like précis. The narrative voice of a storyteller, engaging his/her audience by using little rhymes and flourishes, is necessarily lost in this section.