Ethiopians who fled war and famine can now lend a hand to new immigrants in Chicago 30 years after upheaval, they are building a $3 million community center to help Africans and others from war-torn nations

By Antonio Olivo, The Chicago Tribune

Nearly 30 years after one of the worst famines in history drove thousands of Ethiopians from their homeland, the Ethiopian Community Association of Chicago is still helping refugees survive in their strange new city.

Only now, most of those newcomers hail from Burundi, Sudan or even Myanmar—evidence of the emerging role of leadership being played by one of the Midwest’s oldest African refugee communities.

Ethiopians—once the rail-thin embodiment of the violence and hunger raging through Africa—have for decades been quietly building their lives in Chicago, with many in the community of some 10,000 now working professionals and suburban homeowners.

With that comfort has come what some describe as a moral responsibility to reach out to other struggling immigrants.

“A lot of us, when we got here, received help from a lot of good people,” said Mawi Asgedom, a Chicago-based Ethiopian motivational speaker whose 2000 memoir “Of Beetles and Angels” tells of his rise from being a child refugee in suburban Wheaton to graduating from Harvard University in 1999.

“Now, we’re at the point where we’re saying: ‘We can help other people,’ ” Asgedom said. “That’s a tremendous testament.”

A campaign to build a new $3 million Ethiopian community center, what would be the first such African institution of its size in Chicago, shows how far Ethiopians have come since they arrived, leaders say.

As the community has grown, so has its yearning to make a deeper imprint on the city, said Erku Yimer, director of the Ethiopian Community Association, which would occupy the new center. The 14-year-old organization rents offices at the Institute of Cultural Affairs, an incubator in Uptown for community groups.

“It’s time we owned something,” Yimer said at a recent $100-per-plate fundraiser for the center, drawing loud applause from the 250 Ethiopians there.

Besides aiding new refugees, the center would house an Ethiopian museum, senior services, a child-care facility, an after-school program and other services, Yimer said. The center would be located in the Rogers Park area, where many refugees first landed in the wake of civil war in their homeland and, during the mid-1980s, the famine that seared into America’s conscience the image of starving Ethiopian children with bloated bellies. War with Eritrea during the late 1990s sparked another exodus from both countries.

Many recall how bewildering it felt to arrive in the Midwest, where barely any other Africans lived.

“There was almost no one else to relate to,” Asgedom recalled of his childhood. “Now, there is a great support network in place.”

Today, Africans are among the fastest growing immigrant groups in the Chicago area, more than doubling in size to 23,000 during the 1990s, according to figures from the Metro Chicago Immigration Fact Book.

In the late 1970s, just 37 Ethiopians lived in the Midwest, said Aberra Sewdie, who was among that original group of mostly university students.

Finding homes and services for the thousands who would later arrive was daunting, he said, recalling intense grief in the community when one refugee died in a car accident and nobody knew how to plan for a funeral.

“We felt overwhelmed,” he said.

That sense of helplessness triggered the birth in 1984 of the Ethiopian Community Association, the first African nonprofit in the Midwest.

The group’s efforts have resonated through the city’s increasingly diverse African diaspora, which includes Nigerians, Ghanians, Liberians and, most recently, refugees from war-torn Burundi.

Though just about $120,000 has so far been raised for the community center, the effort has generated excitement among other African immigrants, who see it as a first step toward deeper acceptance, said Alie Kabba, director of the United African Organization, one of two Pan-African groups in the city.

“If they can build themselves up like that from nothing, the rest of us have something to strive for,” said Kabba, of Sierra Leone.

Kabba said African immigrants are eager to assert their ethnic identity in Chicago, partly due to their increasing numbers but also out of frustration about volatile conditions in their homelands that make returning too dangerous. Recent arrests by Immigration authorities of non-refugee Africans who overstayed visas have fanned that desire, Kabba said.

“Many of us came with the idea that we would get an education here and go back to help improve our countries,” said Kabba, whose organization recently began publishing a monthly newspaper, the African Advocate, that’s meant as a forum for such frustrations. “For some of us, there’s nothing to go back to.”

Yusuf Adem’s experiences illustrate the path others are walking.

In 1978, he escaped a bloody “Red Terror” campaign waged by the Ethiopian government against suspected rebels.

Today, he and his family live in a comfortable home in Skokie. Adem, 52, commutes to a job in Chicago processing claims for the federal Social Security Administration, a position he took in 2000 after abandoning a master’s degree in economics he had intended to use in Ethiopia.

Adem, who walked the Ethiopian desert to escape, said his greatest worries now include the cultural gap widening between him and his youngest daughter, Lia, 11—a tobogganing enthusiast who was born in the U.S.

“Once you have a family, you have a house and you have a job, you are anchored,” Adem said, smiling. “There’s no going back. Only forward.”
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