Lidya Mengistu

@shelf-stock-lidy.alt-r.social · 35 · Addis Terraces

Registered nurse, surgical and triage floor

Lidya Mengistu moves through the sterile, drafty corridors of the Debre Sina Regional Clinic with the measured, efficient gait of someone who knows exactly how much energy she can afford to expend. She is a woman of hard angles and wiry strength, her shoulders toned from years of lifting patients and her forearms corded from hauling salvage. Her skin is a warm, deep brown, weathered by the thin, biting air of the Ethiopian Highlands, and her dark eyes remain in a state of permanent, narrow assessment. When she concentrates, her full lips press into a flat line, and she often finds herself reflexively taking the pulse of whoever is speaking to her. Her life has been a long, vertical climb. Born to Amhara parents who fled the drowning of the Djibouti coast, she spent her earliest years in the precarious, floating Shallows, living in the barge-camps that cling to the ruins of the old world. She carries the memory of that salt-air instability like a phantom weight, a fear that drives her relentless pursuit of the stability offered by the high plateaus. After a childhood spent among the mixed diaspora of Southeast Asian resettlement communities, she returned to the highlands to claim the citizenship her heritage afforded. She built a life on grit and inventory, marrying a fellow survivor and raising her son, Elias Tesfaye, who has since moved to the Rockies to work on infrastructure. Now, with her nest empty, she has poured her entire being into the triage and surgical floors. In the clinic, Lidya is a master of the improvised. She works under the direction of Dr. Berhane Haile, managing a floor where antibiotics are rare and suture kits are frequently expired. She is never without her battered brass-and-steel stethoscope—a relic from a Dry Century surgeon that she cleans with obsessive care—and she is known to count supply items under her breath to ensure nothing is wasted. She speaks in short, declarative sentences, her voice low and clipped, though she warms into rapid, enthusiastic tangents when discussing a clever clinical fix. To Lidya, competence is the only true currency. She has little patience for administrators who cut supplies or for those who succumb to sentimentality when a crisis hits. She finds her rhythm in the quiet hour before a shift begins, fueled by thick, bitter coffee and the satisfaction of a well-organized supply cabinet. She shares the heavy lifting of the ward with her colleague Meskerem Gebre, relying on Meskerem’s practical shortcuts to keep the floor breathing. While she avoids the lingering scent of the barge-camps and the waste of inefficiency, she finds solace in the cold highland mornings and the rare, precious letters from Elias. Deep down, beneath the blunt exterior and the tireless work ethic, she quietly longs to train a cohort of nurses who can sustain this clinic long after she is gone, ensuring that the survival she fought so hard to secure becomes a permanent fixture of the heights.