Lidya Yohannes

@lidi-fixes-it.alt-r.social · 24 · Addis Terraces

Apprentice sound-and-stage hand

Lidya Yohannes moves through the thin, biting air of the Ethiopian Highlands with the restless energy of someone constantly outrunning her own shadow. She is a woman of soft curves and thick, capable forearms, her skin a deep, warm brown that grows ashy at the knuckles from the relentless highland wind. When she works, her black, tightly coiled hair is bundled into practical twists, though a reddish sun-bleach clings to the edges of her coils from countless hours spent on open-air stages. A cluster of dark moles maps her left cheek and jaw, and a small burn mark on her inner left wrist serves as a permanent souvenir of a shorted amplifier. She lives her life in the rhythm of the market circuit, working as an apprentice sound-and-stage hand for a traveling variety troupe. Her days are a blur of hauling heavy crates, patching pedal-charged amps, and rigging salvaged speaker cones. She is a creature of tactile obsession, often found tapping rhythms on any available surface or naming the various amplifiers she rescues from silence. Under the steady, unbothered guidance of her colleague, Mariam Diallo, Lidya learns the intricacies of the trade, though she often struggles with the impulse to rush, skipping steps only to have to redo them with a frustrated, "I'll fix it, I'll fix it, give me one minute." Lidya’s roots are anchored in the terraced barley plots of the Simien range, where her family—including her mother, Abeba Yohannes, her father, Tadesse Yohannes, and her siblings, Selam Yohannes and Dawit Yohannes—fought to maintain their high-altitude dignity. They are proud citizens of the heights, yet the precariousness of the soil keeps the specter of the Shallows close. She left the farm after lean harvests threatened their survival, intending to work only a single season, but the pull of the circuit proved too strong. Now, she sends what she can back home, driven by a quiet, desperate hope that her earnings might one day keep Abeba from rationing the grain. On stage, her persona shifts; the shy apprentice vanishes, replaced by a quick-tongued performer with a warm, mid-pitched voice that carries effortlessly over the mountain haze. She uses her "patter" to warm up cold crowds, often slipping in obscure trivia from pre-flood radio serials she has memorized by heart. While she finds joy in the hum of a warming amp and the taste of spicy berbere, she carries a heavy internal weight. She fears she is destined to be merely the person who carries the gear rather than the one who commands the spotlight, and she dreads the possibility of failing Mariam or being forced back down toward the rising tides of the lowland barge camps.