(Photo by Danielle Elliott)
By Danielle Elliott
Some 7,550 miles separate Chicago from Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa.
For the 10,000 Ethiopians living in Chicago, that distance seems a lot smaller due to the Ethiopian Community Association of Chicago (ECAC), a nonprofit refugee resettlement agency, in Rogers Park.
The familiar smells of incense and coffee linger through the hallways of the center, but the real sense of Ethiopia is felt in a small room, 600 square feet, on the second floor. This is the place where the ECAC is trying to build a museum showcasing Ethiopia’s diversity and history, a symbol of their strong community.
“We want the museum to transfer information to children and share our rich history with the mainstream American community,” said Dr. Erku Yimer, the executive director and one of the founders of ECAC.
Yimer came to Illinois in 1975 for his graduate studies but wasn’t able to return home due to the civil war that broke out there in 1974. A provisional administrative council of military officers took control of the Ethiopian government and started the “Red Terror” genocide to eliminate its enemies. The war lasted over 16 years and left over a million dead. At the same time, a large-scale famine raged through the country. The result was a desperate refugee situation.
“The museum will empower us to some degree,” Yimer said. “Americans know us as a poor, famine-affected country, but we have a glorious history that we want to show.”
Many Ethiopians came to America to escape the political turmoil during the 1970s and 1980s and continued to emigrate in increasing numbers. According to the Migration Policy Institute, an independent think tank that analyzes immigration data, in 1980, nearly 26,000 East Africans lived in the U.S. By 2009, there were more than 423,000.
Many Ethiopian newcomers settled in Washington D.C., Maryland and California. Although Chicago isn’t on the list of top settlement cities, the city has a thriving Ethiopian population. Research from Rob Paral & Associates, a Chicago-based consulting firm that analyzes census data, shows that more than 60 percent of Ethiopians in Chicago live in the North Side resettlement communities of Uptown, Edgewater and Rogers Park.
“As a new community, we go back to Ethiopia if we can,” Yimer said. “People send family to speak the language (Amharic) and cement their relationship with Ethiopia.”
M’aza Dowling-Brown, the youth program director at ECAC, is also helping to establish the museum. She has been a part of the Chicago-Ethiopian community since she first started working for ECAC in 2008. An immigrant herself, she was adopted along with her five siblings from Ethiopia in 1998 by a family from Amherst, Mass., where the Ethiopian community was very small. She attended college in Washington D.C. and Ohio but feels most at home in the community where she works and lives now.
“Even though it doesn’t have a lot of numbers compared to other cities and people have different ethnic groups or political views, this is the only Ethiopian community that has stayed this strong for 30 years without dividing,” Dowling-Brown said.
Read more »
—
Join the conversation on Twitter and Facebook.
