It will take a whole book to write about the Ethiopian Diaspora (specfically in US), so I should be humbled by yor insights, and limit myself to a few generalizations (at the risk of offending someone). Here are my observations.

1. The problem with Ethiopians is not political apathy, in fact, it is the opposite. It is obsession with “politics”. Almost every Ethiopian in the Diaspora thinks they are “politicians”.

2. We come taditionally from an authoritarian society (though a beautiful country). Many still believe in “leaders” to win. They look for someone to lead them (collect $, say hateful words and raise emotions). The politics we know is so destructive and backward in many ways filled with hatred and sectarianism (local, ethnic, political background etc).

3. We are a young community and are embroiled with so much nostalgia about our native country, the motherland we left (except the young generation, which includes you)

4. Ethiopians inherently have become suspicious and don’t even a concerted effort by forming alliance to safegurad their common interests

5. We are not used to positive feelings, and self assured confidence to work hard and win. Many still like short cuts to win or look for someone to do it for them

Above are some of the negative traits we have as a young community, whch hopefully will overcome in due course of time, especially with young and dynamic youth like you (the young generation of Ethiopian-Americans).

How about the positive things for energy to change? What good traits we have?

1. We all love our native country (I mean all, but with exceptions), Ethiopia

2. Many Ethiopians are not lazy. We are hard working people, full of good faith and hope to change our lives and raise good citizens (like yoyur great father!)

3. We try to help our country in our own way (like sending $ to family) and there are many Ethiopians who quietly do miracles to help their country. Most of these people don’t waste their time in unproductive politics (like the Buna sippers you mentioned).

4. It could be difficult and laborious to organize Ethiopians for a cause, but it is easy to rally them (e.g. famine relief, fund raising funerals, short-run politics etc). This could be transformed into great energy, if one finds the centrigual force. That is the main challenge.

Recommendations:

1. Focus your mission – e.g. the Obama campaign was good but you should have known it is transient. After all thousands of Ethiopians voted for Obama, but for many reasons, primarily because he embodied our difficult history as balacks, gave us hope for a new era, inspired our youth and children etc

Now, you should make yor goals clear and focused. Most importantly, develop a good strategy.

2. Show the community what services you can bring to them. “What is it for me” is a tough questions you need to address continuously to attract supporters. Don’t be naive, and don’t lose hope. Tackle the problems by making a critical assessment of your strategies and goals (short and long term).

3. Finally, don’t blame the community. That is not a good strategy. You will be shooting yourself on the foot. Learn from gallant leaders like Mandella, Dr. King and others, what made them do lasting noble causes and succeed.

4. Remember, you are doing the right thing and you are on the right track. Your journey is difficult, winding and ups and downs, but you will win! Keep that in mind!

I will keep looking out on your progress and I will try to do my best to help you, because I believe in your great cause!

Best of Luck

Fikir

I hate to rain on our fledgling partnership, but what do you mean by “I will try my best to identify SIX wide eyed youngsters…” You can’t have your cake and eat it too. You just arm wrestled me into writing an article, much to the chagrin of your poor readers. We are ONE down and FIVE to go.

I’ll email soon.

While I admire your humility, I am sure your prose has substance, the measure of substance is not in what you write but in the way it is processed by the reader. Thus, I will lay down one more trap door for you, how about you and I be the guinea pigs on this and we co-author the first article, you pick the topic and we can figure out the rest. In the meantime, I look forward to you wrestling up some wise sages and I will try my best to identify six wide eyed youngsters to team up with them.

Teddy

Teddy Fikre

It is payback time, eh? I was wondering how many more highfalutin posts you were going to take from me before the gloves came off… didn’t take all that many! I swear there must have been a half chewed cigar hanging off your molars when you snarled at your laptop “Awwwright lady, put up or shut up!” All in clean MBA speak of course…

And thank you for that trap door, in case I needed to quietly melt into the cyber ether. You know, like the countless PhD type efforts that I am involved in. I have to tell you it was an attractive cop out, except I would have had to doctor up a few facts – like the PhD, for starters. But don’t even think I didn’t think about it. OK, now that I have that off my chest, on to the hard stuff.

Um, so you think I should write. Here we go again, payback time – big time. After piously posting about frauds on conveyor belts, I have had a sleepless night facing this one. Do I just say ok and subject your readers to prose sans substance, or do I come clean in front of (how many readers did you say? 10,000?) people? Better come clean.

So, after I came to terms with all of that, I actually started thinking about this. You’ve been, shall we say, less than impressed by the efforts of the old geezers in encouraging and supporting the up and coming. I’ve maintained the old folk are actually generous with their time and resources once you get them cranked up. Why don’t I find you six ancients who may actually have something to say and you find me six young’uns who may also have something to say? We pair ‘em up and they each co-author one article for your blog. Space this out say every two months, and you have six articles over the course of a year.

Substance or not, this is definitely a WHOLE lot more than you will ever get out of me. Also, if it succeeds, you would have inched towards Hebret, and if it fails, you can legitimately be pissed off and I promise to shut up.

What do you say? Deal?

Do I come across as a bit condescending? Maybe. Do I come across a bit judgmental? Probably. Do I come across as a bit impatient? Most likely. And based on your response, I am sure that this is the totality of what you think of my article. You have a keen ability to write effortlessly, behind beautiful prose is devastating truth, and because of that, I am truly amazed by your writing, no I say that with all sincerity.

Now, let me respond to some of your explicit points as well as to some of your more subtle and nuanced thrust and parries. First, my role is not to educate anyone, I have way too much learning and way too much undoing some of my “miseducation” before I can ascend to the position of “teaching” others. I do not mean to preach, I am not a sage for my people, nor am I seeking the role of a leader—we have enough leaders in our community. My role starts and ends as that of a simple organizer, an organizer who also happens to be addicted to buna—thus when I blast buna sippers, well sadly I am also blasting myself.

My voice is no more important, and a thousand times less powerful, than thousands of others who have been at this a lot longer than I have. Pillars in our community who have been waging the same battle to unite our community since before I was born. So really, I don’t have any right to be upset or be impatient, there are hundreds of others who would rightly tell me “what do you know about the struggle, you are but a rookie to this game”. And I would bow my hat and defer to their wisdom.

And these leaders come in all forms and shapes; some have a Doctor in front of their names and a Phd after their last. Some are taxi drivers and others are parking lot attendants; who you are as a leader is not determined or constrained by your station in life. My letter was not aimed at dismissing the contributions of the older generation—if anything, I was beseeching that they help to push the younger generation towards a greater purpose and a great success. Does that mean that all of the older generation does not do that; of course not, we would not be here if it was not for the older generation. However, collectively, is the older generation M.I.A. when it comes to supporting the endeavors of the younger generation with respect to supporting various entrepreneurs, political organizers, artists, ect—that is debatable. I think you know where my answer is already in this area.

Neither am I being derisive of Doctors and those that have attained their MBA. I am not telling people that have MBAs to string themselves by their degree—for I would be telling my own self to do the same with my MBA if that was the case. However, I am saying that folks that have advanced degrees have an advanced level of responsibility. WE.B Du Bois said it best:

“All men cannot go to college but some men must; every isolated group or nation must have its yeast, must have for the talented few centers of training where men are not so mystified and befuddled by the hard and necessary toil of earning a living, as to have no aims higher than their bellies, and no God greater than Gold.”

So yes, I am saying that those that have an advanced degree do have a responsibility to Ethiopia and her children beyond aims higher than their bellies and a God greater than Gold.

Lastly, with respect to those who sip buna and talk idle chit chat. Well let me say this, what seems like idle chit chat to me might just be a way of coping to those who have been plucked out of Ethiopia and find themselves in a strange and foreign country. Maybe, just maybe, the idle chit chat in Starbucks with some friends reminds them of the buna bet in Addis. Maybe the idle chit chat is a form of therapy for the daily struggles to keep up with their bills and to feed their children.

I am not callous or indifferent to these possibilities, like I said, I grew up in a house where my father struggled to pay the bills and feed his children. However, I do know this, if we are able to unite and participate politically in the United States, the things that we sorely lack in our community could be addressed. Maybe there is a particular sickness that impacts our community disproportionately, if we organize, we can seek funding to study this issue, and then find an effective way to mitigate this risk. Maybe more of our children can go to college, maybe the cab drivers in DC can get their voices heard, maybe the Doctor or professor who is writing a book can get more readers or reach more students to learn at his/her lap.

So while I understand the underlying cause, there is no excuse to not take action. We can sit down and explain away why things are why they are, but there is no reason not to vote, there is no reason not to organize, and there is no reason not to support the next generation, for Ethiopia’s future is through those that come after you and come after me.

Now Almaz, I will give you credit, you are a brilliant writer, and again, I say this with all sincerity. You have managed to turn the tables on me. You have managed to make me the story. So I will admit, just like you, I too am a buna addict, I too love to talk about politics, I too enjoy drinks at a bar with my friends, I too do not support my own generation as much as I should—though I try. Thus, they say, when you point a finger, there are three pointing back at you. I am not innocent of the charges I blast others for, however, occasionally, I like to think that I go beyond sipping buna and actually get in the trenches to make change happen instead of wishing for it or debating about it—and based on what I glean from your writing, I am sure that you are of the same cloth.

Somehow, I suspect that you are a lot more than a buna addict. I suspect that you have a doctor in front of your name or a PHd after your last. And I suspect that your writing is not so much to expose me as a fraud rather to give me encouragement through eloquent words, if that is the case, I thank you. I shall be more patient, I have a lot to learn, but occasionally, I will get irritated, but whenever I talk about buna sipping, idle chit chatting Ethiopians, just keep in mind that I am a person who is casting stones from a glass house, but maybe the glass house is a prison and the stones I throw are ways to break down the walls of our mental imprisonment.

All that said, I ask one last thing of you Almaz. You obviously have a gift to write, we at Ethiopian-Americans for Change are continuously looking for guest bloggers to write about our community. Maybe you can balance my ire and offer a different perspective to our readership. Most likely, you already have countless efforts that you are working on—a lot more than sipping buna I am sure—but we would love for you to be a guest blogger with EA4C. If the answer is yes, you can email us at info@ea4c.org and will follow up with additional info. I’ll even throw in a free cup of buna to sweeten the deal.

Regardless of your answer, I do thank you for giving me pause to think, I appreciate your honesty and candor. We hope you continue to follow the various events that we are planning, and will always look forward to your responses. Lastly, leave you with one thought, this was my response to an activist who was beseeching me two years ago to leave Obama alone and talk instead about Ethiopia only. To which I responded, “two streams follow different paths but invariably meet at a lake named Tana” No matter what our aim, our strategy, our age, our status, our profession, our calling, our ambitions, we all share the same ideal—the enrichment of Ethiopia and her children.

To that, I toast my buna to meeting at Lake Tana, may we all succeed in our mission and may we all work as one people.

Teddy Fikre

I am glad to learn you are healthy, blessed, and hopefully, happy. I am also very happy you enjoy the love and support of your family and friends. If you are indeed to actually deliver on your promise of “UNDETTERED”, trust me, you will need all the health, faith, support and love you can get. So, it is all good, but frankly (and I don’t mean to be disrespectful here….) all beside the point.

The point is: Let’s start with paragraphs three and four of your response. It seems you are not upset with all of us. Those of us who are gainfully employed in demanding jobs and are struggling to make ends meet are thankfully excused for not showing up at the events. But those of us who have found the meaning of life addictively brewed in steaming coffee and idle talk are the guilty targets of your justified ire and fury. Now let me ask you this. Which group has the most to gain by showing up? Or better still, who would you rather have show up?

I don’t know what you’d answer, but this reminds me of my grandma and the life lesson she taught me. You see, a very loooong time ago (and I mean really, really long time ago), I was sobbing all over telling my grandma about some heartless, careless, no good, jerk of a boyfriend who dumped me. There I was firing away the long laundry list of heartless injustices when my grandma, barely looking up from her needlework, flat out told me not to waste her time. We have established the man has no heart, she said, so unless we are to somehow miraculously extract some love and care from his liver, I suggest you stop wasting my time.

You may very well have a decision to make here – find the poor heart that is currently under caffeine assault or declare it liver and move on. No amount of proclaiming ire is going to boost your grassroots efforts. While you are at it, it may make sense to engage those rich old geezers you kindly told to go string themselves on their Phds and MBAs. Good thing they are a forgiving bunch, show them a little respect and you will be surprised how generous they can be with their time and resources– really, some of them are my friends.

Lastly, you said transferring responsibility would be an indication of quitting. I disagree. But how I wish you were right! There are those of us who are forever parked on an endless conveyor belt dishing out guilt and blame, all in the name of this or that cause. In any case, I am glad you are staying put, for despite your ire and unhappiness with us caffeine addicts, you at least want to educate us.