special projects
Throughout my professional career, I have
I As a student of the Otherwise School, I completed a project Lorem Ipsum...Lorem Ipsum...When 70K refugees from Tigray fled to Sudan following the start of the Tigray Genocide in Nov 2020, a handful of people in the Tigrayan diaspora made the journey to Sudan to visit our displaced people. In August 2021, I ventured to Sudan with Jerusaliem G. to interview Tigrayan refugees and conduct a needs assessment. We intereviewed about 30 people. We heard stories from women in their 70s who fled to Sudan twice before, a young woman who developed a auto-immune disorder from the stress of her experience, and farmers who had no choice but to abandon their lands. For my undergraduate thesis, I developed a film regarding identity formation amongst youth in the Ethiopian diaspora. This film interviewed about a dozen youth, ages 17 - 26, in individual and group settings. We explored the anti-black narratives akin to Ethiopian Exceptionalism, how our parents informed our Black identity, and what it meant to be an African so far from Africa. The film was screen at the Tigray Communicty Center and followed by an intergenerational discussion. For many in the community, it was their first time every having these reflections and conversations and we still discuss it, years later.