Lake Tana Monasteries, Ethiopia

Imagine it’s 10:00 pm. You hear a noise outside and open the door to find your house surrounded by armed militia. You are dragged forcefully from your home, away from your wife and young children.  Thrown into a dark cell and tortured for 3 weeks before you are released with a warning to cease doing your job or face death.

Because you are educated. And you live in Ethiopia.

Because the reigning party fears your education. Because you are doing your job as a regional administrator meeting and supporting principals from 60 schools for which you are responsible. If you continue doing your job, you face imprisonment, torture and death. Because the reigning party doesn’t like you. You are “conspiring” with other educated people. 

Stay and be murdered. Stay and lose your job. Either way your family is in jeopardy. There is no choice if you want your family to live. You escape across the border with just the clothes on your back to seek political asylum. But you must leave your family behind. All you can do is pray they will be safe.

Fast forward through 3 years in a Kenya refugee camp without family contact. You finally arrive in the U.S. to find you have missed your family at the same Kenya refugee camp only weeks after your departure.

The only job open to you in Seattle is cleaning hotel rooms. You finally make contact with your family who spend two more years in the Kenya Refugee camp and you are unable to help them. The system takes over.

Finally, you graduate from cleaning hotel rooms to pushing a wheelchair for passengers at SeaTac. A woman gives you her business card and tells you to call her. You forget about this woman.

One day you hear of a woman living in a tent on a roof and you recognize her. It’s a year since you pushed her in that wheelchair at SeaTac airport.

THE REST OF THE STORY…

Wat and Injera

Tsegaye, joins me on the roof for a traditional Ethiopian meal of wat and injera and shares his story.  He still pushes wheelchairs at SeaTac.  Yet, Tsegaye is grinning from ear to ear as he shares that in April, he found his family and became an America citizen. April is a good month.

It should be a fairy tale ending but it’s not – - YET.

After 8 years Tsegaye saw his wife and children for the first time in April, after he received his American citizenship. While this allowed him to leave and re-enter the United States, there is still much paper work to do before his family can join him. And the costs are high.

And Tsegaye is still pushing wheelchairs. Pushing wheelchairs doesn’t afford extra money to bring his wife and four children to Seattle.

Despite everything that has happened, he is still hopeful about the future.  I know Tsegaye will reunite with his family, permanently. He wants to use his education administrative gifts in his newly adopted country. And he is very proud to be an American citizen.

Look around you. How many educated, smart refugees in menial jobs cannot use their talents.  Often their less than perfect accents cause refugees to be misperceived.

The next time you meet a foreigner caregiving a family member at a nursing home or pushing a wheelchair at the airport or a hotel employee cleaning your room who speaks with an accent what will you think of them? 

They might just be an engineer or a doctor waiting to be reunited with their loved ones.

It’s a rainy night here in Edmonds. Unlike many, I will sleep well tonight because my grandparents immigrated to America where anything is possible.

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