Of Beetles and Angels: A Boy’s Remarkable Journey from a Refugee Camp to Harvard

Chapter 7 opens with a memory from Mawi’s childhood in the refugee camp in Sudan, when his “little village erupted into a sea of flames” as a celebration of the new year (47). Called Hoyo Hoyo, the villagers, on this night, would create a huge bonfire and exchange gifts. The author uses the habesha tradition of Hoyo Hoyo as an entry point for talking about the American tradition of Halloween, a holiday beloved by Mawi and his siblings. In fact, given the copious amounts of free candy, the children declare Halloween their favorite American holiday. 

Confronted with the excesses of this American tradition, the children are overwhelmed. As we learn in this chapter, Mawi and his siblings cannot help but want to capitalize on the abundance of free sweets, and so they are sometimes driven to youthful mischief. Mawi has his brother Tewolde devise a strategy to get the most candy possible. In this strategy, Mawi and Tewolde traverse their neighborhood in two rounds: in the first round, they target houses with unsupervised baskets of candy outside the home with a “please take one” sign, and simply dump those into their bags. In the second round, they trick-or-treat by going house to house in the usual manner.