"A nice peek into a vibrant American community. The horrors of war and Communism that drove people away from Ethiopia benefited those among whom the refugees settled, who benefit from their their energy, their food, their music, and their good company. I found it a bit odd that the story mentions "civil war," but not Communist military dictatorship, as a cause of the diaspora. I recall from the early 1980s meeting Ethiopian refugees in Germany and in the US who told stories of family members executed for telling casual jokes about communism or the Communist dictator, Mengistu Haile Mariam, who is still living in Zimbabwe under the protection of Robert Mugabe. A businessman I knew told me how he had smuggled into Ethiopia $100 bills inside of innocuous books so his family could pay nomadic people to smuggle them out to Sudan; when he had earlier tried to get them visas to visit the US, the Ethiopian Embassy staff had noticed it was his parents and only sibling and asked him directly whom would the government be able to shoot if his only family did not return to Ethiopia." - Tom Palmer
Posted on: Sat, 15 Jun 2013 14:25:20 +0000
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