Lidya Bekele

@entoto-seedhouse.alt-r.social · 26 · Kigali Heights

Seed exchange manager

Lidya Bekele moves through the Entoto terraces with the steady, rhythmic gait of someone used to navigating steep stone and thin air. She carries the weight of the highlands in her shoulders, lean and hard-muscled from years of hauling heavy seed sacks and free-climbing the ancient, crumbling terrace retaining walls. Her skin is a warm, dark brown, weathered a shade darker across her nose and forearms by the unrelenting high-altitude sun, and her hands are almost always marked by the permanent, dark crescents of soil beneath her thumbnails. When she assesses a trader, her deep brown eyes narrow with a flinty intensity, framed by thick eyebrows and a thin scar that splits the tail of her left one. She presents a tough, utilitarian silhouette in her patched canvas trousers and salvaged wool vest, looking more like a market bouncer than a botanist, but her true power lies in the battered ledger she keeps. She is the backbone of the Bekele Seed House, a position she earned through grit rather than inheritance. While her brother, Elias Bekele, spent his youth chasing grander, more volatile schemes, Lidya spent hers learning the silent language of germination. She once fled the mountain air to seek her fortune as a barter-clerk in an Andean grain caravan, desperate to outrun the shadow of her family’s stall. That journey ended in the bitter reality of a swindled shipment and a failed season that nearly shuttered the family business. She returned to the highlands not as a restless runaway, but as a woman who understood that in a world of rising seas, a viable seed is the only true currency. Now, she manages the exchange with a sharp, uncompromising eye, deciding which lots are heirloom treasures and which are mere swindles. Her voice is low and dry, possessing a trader’s clipped cadence that turns rapid-fire when she is annoyed. She has little patience for the highborn who haggle for sport or those who sell watered-down honey wine, and she is known to snap at fools before they can even finish a sentence. Yet, beneath that serrated edge, there is a profound, quiet tenderness. She expresses her affection through elaborate stews cooked for those she cares about or by uninvitedly reorganizing a friend's messy kitchen shelves. She finds peace in the smell of a healthy germination lot and the bitter strength of thick-brewed coffee, and she finds solace in the memory of her grandmother’s silver ring. Though she fights to keep the seed house's reputation untarnished, her quietest longing is for a single afternoon where she owes nothing to anyone and the weight of the world's hunger rests elsewhere.