By Evelyn Ratigan
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS – Though most people rang in 2001 eight years ago with paper hats, noisemakers and champagne, hundreds of Ethiopians officially started partying this past weekend in Cambridge.
[Photo by David Gordon]
Wegene Wells-Bogue (a U.N.H. student) dances in traditional Ethiopian dress during the Ethiopian Community Mutual Assistance Association sponsored “Enkutatash” (Ethiopian New Years) celebration on Saturday night at the St. Paul AME Christian Life Center.
That’s because Ethiopia uses the Julian calendar, which has 12 30-day-long months and a 13th month of five days, putting it about eight years behind the West’s Gregorian calendar. Enkutatash is celebrated with music and dancing on Sept. 11 and marks the end of the rainy season in Ethiopia.
The skies were clear at the St. Paul AME Christian Life Center last Saturday, where the Ethiopian Community Mutual Assistance Association, a networking and support group for recent Ethiopian immigrants, hosted its annual Enkutatash celebration.
Misrak Assefa, the association’s board president, said many of the families at the Enkutatash celebration were there to connect with each other and immerse their children in the culture.
“It will strengthen them,” she said of the immigrant families. “You’re American, you’re Ethiopian. This is how you survive; you keep both cultures.”
Cambridge boasts the highest concentration of Ethiopians in Massachusetts, said Mayor Denise Simmons during her “proclamation” at the celebration. In fact, there are 4,000 Ethiopians living in Cambridge, according to one estimate. “It’s wonderful to watch how the Ethiopian community has grown,” she said.
Ethiopians are a relatively new group in the U.S. compared to other refugee and immigrant communities, said Binyam Tamene, the association’s executive director. Many Ethiopians in Cambridge are political refugees who may come to the United States on a work or student visa and then request political asylum, he said, and are “mostly law-abiding citizens that aspire to take advantage of the American Dream.”
One Ethiopian, Ashebir Gubir, an Ethiopia native and former Cambridge resident, moved to the United States when his family “won the visa lottery” in 1997.
For him, America means possibility, a place where one of his daughters became a doctor and the other an assistant researcher at MIT.
“[Cantabrigians] allow this community to live a decent life,” Gubir said. “No doubt about it. It’s a land of many opportunities.”
Enkutatash is a time for Gubir to reflect on the hardships and triumphs of past years, but also celebrate the prospects for the future. “We don’t want to forget what we had or what we inherited from our parents,” he said. “We want to keep going with that tradition.”
Traditional Ethiopian families were not the only ones trying to connect to the culture last week. Rick Wheeler, the adoptive father of two Ethiopian children, heard about the event through a network of other adoptive parents, and traveled from his Connecticut home to ring in the New Year with his family.
“We do want the boys to know some of their culture,” Wheeler said. “We want them to be exposed to their culture, even if we don’t know a whole lot about it yet.”