Traveling to Ethiopia changed me forever. In the two months I worked there in 2008 I met a proud country that fought off Italian colonialists, a diverse nation that communicates in over 80 languages and a complex people who challenged my assumptions and helped shape how I see the world today.
But that wasn’t what I was expecting. I grew up in the 1980s and 90s, decades that saw famine and political unrest in Ethiopia, as well as growth to our region’s significant Ethiopian-American population. For me Ethiopia was a country that evoked images of starving children, refugees and war.
And I’m not alone. Many Americans think in broad, and often grim, generalizations about Ethiopia specifically and Africa overall. But one local Ethiopian-American filmmaker and a small group of college students are hoping to help challenge those stereotypes.
“Some students…all they knew of Africa was famine, terrorism, a lion and a tree,” says 25-year-old Amen Gibreab over strong cups of Ethiopian coffee at Gojo— an incense saturated restaurant tucked into a strip mall in north Seattle.
Two years ago a group of fifteen UW Bothell students met with Gibreab and the founder of the program, professor Panagiotis “Panos” Hatziandreas, in this very spot to discuss the first Seattle-area study-abroad program to Ethiopia. It was a trip that would focus on re-imagining Ethiopia for a new generation and Amen, a Media and Communication major and aspiring filmmaker, knew he had to document it.
But that wasn’t what I was expecting. I grew up in the 1980s and 90s, decades that saw famine and political unrest in Ethiopia, as well as growth to our region’s significant Ethiopian-American population. For me Ethiopia was a country that evoked images of starving children, refugees and war.
And I’m not alone. Many Americans think in broad, and often grim, generalizations about Ethiopia specifically and Africa overall. But one local Ethiopian-American filmmaker and a small group of college students are hoping to help challenge those stereotypes.
“Some students…all they knew of Africa was famine, terrorism, a lion and a tree,” says 25-year-old Amen Gibreab over strong cups of Ethiopian coffee at Gojo— an incense saturated restaurant tucked into a strip mall in north Seattle.
Two years ago a group of fifteen UW Bothell students met with Gibreab and the founder of the program, professor Panagiotis “Panos” Hatziandreas, in this very spot to discuss the first Seattle-area study-abroad program to Ethiopia. It was a trip that would focus on re-imagining Ethiopia for a new generation and Amen, a Media and Communication major and aspiring filmmaker, knew he had to document it.
