A Refugee of Love

This blog is dedicated to my sister (sister-in-law) Eileen O'Bray who passed away a few weeks ago. I missed two blog posts on Fridays because of this great and sudden loss. So, this post is to share her story and how very special she was as a person.

When I first met Eileen, I was nineteen years old and newly arrived in America to pursue my college education. By then, my brother, Tamrat had completed his master's degree at Syracuse University and Eileen had moved to New York City to pursue her career as a physical therapist. Eileen met Tamrat at the information desk in Ithaca College. They were both freshmen then and Eileen would become his significant other since.

When I went to visit Eileen at her apartment in Queens, NY during Christmas break, I found her sitting by the window working on a kuta. The kuta is a hand woven cotton shawl with a colorful border. It is produced in two panels of 10x4ft and joined by a delicate needle work that resembles a crow's feet. The cotton strands after the border are twined to make fringes. That is what I found Eileen working on. I had seen women in Ethiopia do the tedious work of taking three threads and twining into a single thicker strand. This is how the fringes are made to decorate the colorful border on both ends of the kuta. In order to make sure the frills do not come undone one has to twine really tight. It is tiring and boring work, but Eileen was going about it solemn and determined. I was greatly impressed. While twining her kuta she also listened to an Amharic tape she had bought from the US state department to study her vocabulary and pronunciation. She was preparing for her trip to Ethiopia. This was my first close encounter with Eileen. Of course, there would be many many more close encounters over the course of her life and fifty three years of marriage.

Eileen and her best friend, Mary set out to Ethiopia six months after I had visited her in Queens, NY in fall of 1969. When they arrived in Asmara, the capital of Eritrea (it was then part of Ethiopia), the plan was for Tamrat to meet them and they would spend a few days exploring the city perhaps even go to Masawa, the port on the Red Sea before going to Addis Ababa. As fate would have it, Tamrat was arrested the day he was to depart for Asmara accused of plotting to overthrow the Haile Selassie Government. A friend of Tamrat's went to meet Eileen and Mary and his idea was they would be tourists for a short while and they would return to America. Eileen had other plans, she would stay until Tamrat would be released. There was a kangaroo court trial; he and two others accused of attempting to overthrow the government were each sentenced to seven years in prison. Knowing he will be incarcerated, Tamrat asked Eileen to return to America, but Eileen was firm that she would wait it out. Now imagine, a young twenty something year old from Schenectady, NY who had never been away from home except to go to school within New York state had traveled in 1970 all the way to Ethiopia, East Africa. It was truly monumental the difference she had encountered, even with all the preparations she had made. The food, the language, the culture, and the lifestyle, everything was nothing like she had ever been exposed to before. To make matters worse, mother wanted her only son to marry a nice Ethiopian girl and she had presented many young, pretty, educated ladies for his attention, but Tamrat was not in the least interested. Mother was not going to make it easy for Eileen to stay as she did not want her son to marry a foreigner. Back in the day, it was very rare that an Ethiopian man would bring a foreign wife, it would separate him from his family and from the rest of society. It was certainly unheard of for an Ethiopian woman to marry a foreigner.

Mary returned to America after a few months, and by then money had ran out. Eileen was left without her friend, with no money, no work permit and with very little support while Tamrat remained in prison, his future seeming bleak. Eileen soldiered through the most difficult living circumstances for quite sometime and visited Tamrat in prison once a week while trying to get a residency and work permit. Eileen wrote her memoire before passing and we will read the details of just how she managed until her breakthrough, but it took a very long while.

Through mother's relentless pleas to the Orthodox Church to convince the Emperor, Tamrat and his prison mates were released on pardon two years later. Eileen had survived and her dream and hope to be with her beloved had come true.

Eileen left everything behind for an improbable journey that would take her through the tyranny of DERG and the Red Terror in Ethiopia when her husband's life was at risk and she was unwelcome as an Imperialist American. At one point Eileen even put her own life on the line when armed soldiers invaded their small apartment at The Piazza on a door-to-door search for arms. She stood with a gun behind the door while they interrogated Tamrat resolved to shoot if they attempted to take him away. As fate would have it they left without him and she lived to see another day.

I've watched Eileen over the decades navigate her career and her marriage, her relationships with family and her sojourn in Ethiopia. One of the things that would get her goat was that in Ethiopia she would always be a "faranji". A faranji is an outsider, a foreigner but it is most often a reference to white colonialists. "I've lived among them, I've been a neighbor, I've had coffee in their homes, and yet when I step out in the streets, I'm always greeted with children shouting "ferenji, ferenji." Eileen had intimated her disappointment very long ago. However, over the many decades she worked and lived in Ethiopia, Eileen became highly respected and admired for her selfless dedicated service as a physical therapist. She was very much loved by all who knew her for her warmth, her sense of humor and her generosity of spirit. She spoke the language quite fluently albeit with an accent, and she knew the nuances of the culture even better than many Ethiopians. She explored, she learned and she adopted Ethiopia as her home. She enjoyed her life through all its twists and turns because her laser like focus was being with the one she loved. She crossed oceans and gave up her family, her home, her culture and everything else that came with it to share a life with someone she fell in love with at the information desk in freshman year at Ithaca College. In reminiscing his beloved wife, Tamrat said, "Eileen was a refugee of love!"

We are refugees many in our extended family living in different parts of the world. We fled from a tyrannical dictatorship in the 1970s. I've often pondered the many reasons why people get uprooted from their native land, some even for cultural dissonance. Often we hear about economic and political refugees, and even cultural refugees being those who could no longer relate to the prevailing values once they've found their authentic selves. But here is a refugee for love, who left home and country to be with someone she could not be without. We will miss her as we celebrate her life and cherish her memory our comfort lies in that love never dies.