After years of wrestling with oppression
and poverty in Ethiopia and Kenya, 33-year-old Solomon Tamrat
says he’s finally come to terms with his turbulent past.
He has found meaning through caring for Ottawa’s sick and
elderly.
Tamrat grew up in Ethiopia, a country torn by bloody coups, uprisings,
wide-scale drought and famine. As a Falasha-Mura Jew, Tamrat
also endured oppression and cruelty from the Muslim and Ethiopian
Orthodox majorities.
“To be a Jew in Ethiopia was to be in hell,” Tamrat
says. “Everyone was brainwashed to hate you. People thought
they’d get sick just looking at you. It was no way to live.”
If Tamrat had stayed in Addis Ababa a few months longer, he could
have been part of Operation Solomon, a project executed by the
State of Israel that helped 14,000 Jews flee the country in 1990.
Instead, Tamrat took a longer route to freedom.
When he finished high school, his mother bought him a forged
driver’s license and he traveled to Kenya in a truck transporting
supplies.
After eight or nine months travelling, he settled in the United
Nations’ Marafa Refugee Camp in Mombasa, Kenya where he
would remain three years.
In Mombasa, Tamrat had to get up every morning at 6:30 a.m. to
stand in line for two slices of bread and a cup of tea. By 1
p.m., he was in line, again, waiting for his only other meal
of the day.
Though life was difficult in the camp, Tamrat was getting by,
taking things “one day at a time.”
Then, he caught malaria. What stands out most in Tamrat’s
mind about this sickness is the smell. “I smelled so bad
— so bad — because I was sweating so much.”
He also couldn’t eat anything since he was constantly feverish
and nauseous.
“Soon I was skin and bones,” he recalls.
Tamrat’s bouts of malaria would come and go, usually lasting
about 10 days at a time. The UN dispensed medicine for this sickness,
but Tamrat says it didn’t help much.
“What I really needed was to eat better,” he says.
“But of course, there was never enough food for the refugees.”
To keep himself busy, Tamrat decided to volunteer as a gardener
on the grounds of the UN’s High Commission for Refugees
building.
At first, he gardened in the daytime, but changed his plan when
other refugees began giving him a hard time for working for free.
“For some reason, they thought it was better to be idle,
than to work without pay,” says Tamrat.
Tamrat soon began his work after sunset to avoid having to explain
his actions to nay sayers, and also because it was more comfortable
to work under the cool shelter of night.
After a few weeks operating like this, Jean Paterson, a UN social
counselor, searched him out in the camp, demanding to know who
had been paying him for his labour.
Once he convinced her he had been gardening only for the sake
of being useful, she was impressed by his strong work ethic —
so impressed in fact, that she hired him to help her complete
a refugee census.
Tamrat says he was ecstatic to be paid 600 shillings a week for
his services.
“In Kenya, that is a lot of money,” he says.
Tamrat’s job was to interview all the people in the camp,
and identify the criminals, the fanatics, and those with military
ties. These people are not permitted in UN refugee camps.
Often, Tamrat used his wages to bribe people and find out the
refugees’ stories.
He made enemies this way, though. He recalls one particularly
frightening night.
“I just knew something was wrong,” he says.
“Some Somalis asked me to spend the night with them, and
even though I always slept in my own tent, I decided to stay
with them.”
It’s fortunate he did.
“The next morning, I found my tent burned to the ground,”
Tamrat says. “Someone had set my tent on fire thinking I
was inside it.”
After that, he stopped sleeping in the camp, instead staying
in a house he purchased in a nearby town. His refugee days were
behind him.
However, Tamrat’s UN employment was quickly coming to an
end.
On the last day of his contract, Paterson called him to her office.
“I had no idea what was going to happen, but she asked me,
‘would you rather go to Canada or the United States?’
”
“As soon as she asked me that, I knew I was getting out,”
Tamrat says.
Paterson was an American, but she recommended he go to Canada
since she said it’s safer and has a better health care system.
Other UN officials were also happy to assist with his immigration.
Roseline Ukpa Okoro, a UN associate protection officer Tamrat
met while in Mombasa, says:
“Tamrat was invaluable to us in facilitating the smooth
operation of staff activities in the field — helping him
move was the least we could do.”
Tamrat says he was amazed how fast the immigration procedures
got underway.
He quickly went through the necessary medical tests and, remarkably,
became a landed Canadian immigrant within two weeks.
Almost as soon as he arrived in Ottawa, Tamrat began attending
school to improve his English. After working at several odd jobs,
he went to Ottawa’s Mican College.
He studied to become a certified personal support worker, his
dream being to care for the ill and sickly in their homes.
“It was time to do my part and help people as much as I
had been helped,” says Tamrat. Zelda Freedman has been Tamrat’s
client for several years.
She says she is grateful to have Tamrat as her care giver: “I
believe in angels and that is what Solomon has been to me.
He is the kindest, most compassionate person I have ever met,
and there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t thank
God for meeting him.”
Tamrat says the feelings are mutual between him and his clients.
“Every time I help someone I know this is what I’m
supposed to be doing,” he says. “I’m just happy
to be free.” |