Climate refugees are already finding asylum in Seattle
Before his world was thrown into turmoil, Fasil Tekola lived a comfortable life in Ethiopia’s capitol city, Addis Ababa. Born into a wealthy family, his father a colonel, he was one of only a few kids who drove their own cars to school. But his family also had a strong connection to the land: They owned farmland along the Awash River, a few hours south of the city. Tekola remembers his parents planting eucalyptus trees around Addis Ababa because the trees had been cut down.
Outside of Ethiopia’s larger cities, people relied on wood fires to heat their homes and cook. But after years of forest cutting, the Sahara Desert began extending its reach, which caused crops to fail. While deforestation played a part, there were more devastating changes afoot. Sulfate emissions from North America and Europe were cooling the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, which prevented moisture from being swept up in the air and returning to the ground as rain. The decline in rainfall in Africa’s Sahel desert region, combined with forest cutting and a chronic drought that spanned from the 1960s into the 1980s*, claimed the livelihoods of thousands of proud, generational farmers.
Tekola’s life, like those of most city-dwellers, was largely unscathed. But with Ethiopia’s agricultural-based economy in shambles, violence broke out. Militants, disillusioned with the Ethiopian government and newly enamored of communism, swept through Addis Ababa. Catching the city by surprise, they rounded up men of all ages, targeting the educated and wealthy, and gunned them down. Known today as the Red Terror, the genocide claimed more than 10,000 lives in Addis Ababa alone.
Tekola was 19 years old. He and other students were rounded up and jailed. But because his father was a well-known community leader and had left the military in the years preceding the war, he was later released. Two of his friends were not so lucky. After hearing about their murders, Tekola and a friend decided to flee the country.
Their escape began a journey that would send Tekola bouncing across the world in search of asylum. After years of traveling, he’d end up literally a half a world away in Seattle.
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