Our collective success will not occur overnight, progress is an incremental process where successive generations improve upon the work that came before them.

by Teddy Fikre.  Posted:  Monday, June 28, 2010


During the Ethiopian-American Youth Initiative yesterday, I saw something which gave me hope that we are heading in the right direction as a community.  I saw a lot of young Ethiopian men and women, who came together to make a change as they best could.  This happened over a three day conference, where there were plenty of distractions that could have kept these young men and women away.  This was the weekend of the Caribbean festival, world cup pandemonium with Ghanaian Black Stars taking on the United States, and of course the allure of that the DC nightlife provides.  Instead, these young men and women came out to meet other young men and women just like them—young Ethiopians who want to make a difference.

The one thing that I learned above all this weekend was the virtue of patience.  In my enthusiasm to see the realization of the potential that exists within our community to deliver a profound change with the Ethiopian community in the United States and back home in Ethiopia, I somehow missed the progress that we are making towards the realization of that goal.  We are a young community in the larger scope of the history of the United States.  It took immigrants like the Irish-American or the Italian-American communities generations to fully integrate within the United States and become a fabric of the American culture.  While our history in America dates back to the 1800s, the overwhelming majority of Ethiopians immigrated to America only in the past 20-30 years.  In that time, our community has become a dynamic part of the landscapes in big cities such as Washington DC, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Seattle to name a few.  Furthermore, Ethiopians continue to make tremendous contributions entrepreneurially, intellectually, and culturally in places that one would not imagine many Ethiopians would reside.

If you think about it, the generation before us had to grapple with surviving as new immigrants in a new land.  Our fathers and mothers did not have the luxury of making a change in America; they were busy coping with the changes of being in America.  In the process, they gave their children—our generation—the tools and opportunities to thing beyond making the next paycheck and to conceptualize the transformational shift in the way Ethiopians conceptualize our place in America.  And the younger generation has in fact taken up that mantle; it is easy to overlook the countless Ethiopians who are accomplishing some amazing feats.  There are Ethiopians around the worlds who are leading non-profit organizations, technical geniuses who are developing applications and services that are literally enabling Ethiopians world-wide to network as if they are next door neighbors, and business men and women who are expanding the reach of our community into ventures that our parents would have never fathomed.

The key to our collective success will not occur overnight, progress is an incremental process where successive generations improve upon the work that came before them.  As Gash Tebabu stated to me yesterday at the conferences, we have to learn to appreciate the process and stop looking only for the end product.  We are transitioning from being a generation that survived a maiden journey to America to being a generation that is sustaining and succeeding upon the achievements that our parents enabled us to attain.  As much progress as we have yet in front of us and however imperfect our ways might be as we set out to achieve our goals, it is important to recognize and celebrate our successes in America.  We are accomplishing what other communities took generations to attain in less than two generations.  That is a profound change indeed; let us hope for continued sustainment of this momentum in our generation and generations to come.