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If you have a photograph of this devotee, |
Initiated
By: Cause
of Death: leukemia |
First Ethiopian devotee
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Memorial By Kripamoya dasa |
In September we lost another pioneering preacher. One of my old companions, Sampradaya dasa, passed away. He was 42 and died after more than a year's struggle with leukemia. His upbringing and his coming to Krishna was very different to mine, but we shared some preaching adventures in 1979-85. Sampradaya was born Haile Araya in Ethiopia. He met devotees while he was a refugee in Nairobi, Kenya, which was where I met him. Sampradaya cared passionately about his troubled country, and when he discovered the teachings of Srila Prabhupada, wanted to do his best to share them with his oppressed brothers and sisters in his homeland. Prabhupada said to his disciples: ‘Try to deliver your countrymen,’ and Sampradya was a great example of someone who tried to do just that. The ancient language of Ethiopia, known as Amharic, has got to be, to western perception at least, one of the strangest to both listen to, and look at. Full of various clicking sounds, and with a unique ‘handwritten’ script, Amharic is the last language anyone would want to translate Srila Prabhupada's books into. But this is what Sampradaya did with considerable determination. His home tongue was Tigray, an Eritrean dialect. (Throughout his childhood the people of Eritrea had been fighting Ethiopia for independence) With the help of BBC broadcasters at Bush House in London, specialist English-Amharic dictionaries, and a lot of perspiration and late nights, he managed to finish one small book: The Transcendental Teachings of Prahlada Maharaja, which came out as Ye Prahlada Maharaja Menfesawi Temhertoche.
Kripamoya dasa
The above is courtesy of http://www.iskcon.org.uk/news/2001/nov/ .