we were getting e mails and phone calls from victims of the disease as well as their families most were reluctant to give up and eager to learn more about the deadly virus prevention is the best form of health care so x myself why not get more involved with that with the t v station and use it as a tool to teach the community about different diseases in two thousand and eleven and in my very first show i talked about struck the feedback from viewers was very positive the show after that was about healthy eating it incorporated the whole pyramid and how it applies to our ethnic food in the proceeding years i invited various health professionals and discuss different topics such as diabetes hiv carbon monoxide poisoning and so on and these are the other guests from different trips aside from health related shows i also had the privilege of interviewing the current and previous mayor and famous artists as someone who had no experience in the field of journalism i was pretty bad when i first started for instance when i was into when i was interviewing these comedians axed one question and spent the rest of the time laughing at their jokes which is probably why the you tube video has two hundred seventy views with about fifty five likes and forty seven dislikes and then i was interviewing king county executive gal constantine i was so nervous that i dropped the mike thank god as i you was able to get to edit that part out of come a long way so i'm not as bad anymore the highlight of my journalistic journey was what do proactively this year we have accomplished a very great educational session every month on sunday event at the ethiopian community center the first sunday of the month partnering with swedish hospital residence we brought a lot of different education topics health screening while nest day so we really encourage you to attend those event the events are the first sunday of the month from four pm cancer screening cervical cancer screening nutrition oneness information mental health substance abuse domestic abuse hepatitis a screening so we really encourage everyone every family member to attend this event the eventis free will have a great food we tr helped by a great ethiopian professionals as well as the swedish residence so we really encourage you to come on may tenth bring your mother or father or the whole family and spent time with us also i like to give a message for th ethiopian professionals who are in the health field we really encourage you to come and see what we have done and also we really need your help to volunteer on in our health event you will come to volunteer once a year or you will come to volunteer on our sunday event so i really encourage everyone to come i'm a ten hour addresses will be eight three two three rainier avenue south seattle washington one eight lot of activity i just gave you the highlights a lot of things going on we look forward to see you thing you so much bill and i believe the florist going to be disseminated throughout the community run businesses as well just church mosque on the sunday i believe right yes definitely so will be distributing it everywhere from north to south to east to west everywhere in seattle we really hope that you can make it and this is an event that you know we've been planning on for a year and we do it every year everything is free so hopefully hopefully that you guys will be able to make it yes we'll put the flyers out on the different churches and the different  who you are you know your background and history i was born in detroit but inside of the city of detroit is another city  completely organized separately from detroit and when i was a child it was about fifty thousand people almost all of them were polish immigrants so my parents moved from georgia they had been share croppers in in georgia sharecroppers someone who lives on someone else's land and they have to give part of what they grow to the owner of the land and so they always are they're always poor and so my parents left that situation moved to detroit where the automobile plants were going strong and in fact after a few years they were there the automobile plant started to pay five dollars a day which was really really big money in the nineteen around one nine hundred twenty and they might my parents had ten children eight boys and two girls and i'm the eighth child the seventh son son number seven sons yes and they moved rate across the street from chevrolet plant so my father only had to walk across the street every day for thirty seven years to get to go to work and and all of the people our neighbors were from europe they were immigrants every single one was  family was from it and they also worked in the factory and so hundreds of them walked across the street early in the morning before the sunrise and then in the evening they came back across the street so i grew up in that kind of community and they accept me but he expected us to also go to the factory so assoon as i turned eighteen years a vase the very same day i went in applied for a job and i got a job in the plymouth factory after i finished high school and plymouth effect plymouth was made by chrysler it was a chrysler product at that time so almost all of us my brothers and my father everybody worked in the automobile plants and i grew up in their situation but one of the things i think that made me interested in ethiopians is that we we black people were refugees in the sense that we moved into a community that was own and control the language was polish the signs were in polish the newspaper was polish the music was polish it was a foreign country for us and so i had the refugee experience because we had the problem of learning their language and adjusting to their customs and being refused of course to because we we didn't fit into their lifestyle so how did you continue i mean ok you were a high school so you went to see the job market ok and how how did i get out of there ok the way i got out of the situation is i got this job and i made fifty dollars a week my mother charged me twenty dollars a week to live at home so i had thirty dollars a week for my transportation and everything to my job and for my lunch and all my other expenses and then i could save some money maybe twenty dollars a week to try to go to college but because in a big family there are always illnesses and always problems said there were always a shortage of money because there were so many people every time i would say some money for college my mother would say i need your money you know it was like your money is the family money it's not your money even though you're saving it  so i said to myself i'm never going to go to college unless i do something else so i got to i made a different plan i went to another factory and got a second job so i worked from like seven in the morning to four thirty in the afternoon then i took a bus across town and i worked from maybe five o'clock until eleven or twelve o'clock at night and now i had i was working sixteen hours a day and the this time i said to myself if my mother takes my first job money i'm going to refuse to give my second job money because i want to go to college you know so that's how i got out of out of the factory is that i saved enough money to to actually go away to school to start school and  plane was i would work for one semester i mean i would study for one semester come back to the factory work sixty you know is that day and then and then go back and study and i would in eight years i would be able to finish four years of school that was my playing when i got to college i discovered that i could get a job cleaning toilets in the field house this is the recreation area of the college for seventy five cents an hour so if i worked one hundred hours a month i could have enough money to pay for my tuition and my books and so forth and i also because i got very good grades they gave me an academic scholarship that paid tuition so no i had to wait to go to college because as long as i made good grades my two issue would be paid for and as long as i kept my job i could pay for my room and board and other expenses and so i finished college in four years actually had my college and i graduated with honors when i graduated with honors i got an assistant ship to indiana university to go to graduate school so i graduated went to indiana university on those assistantship and that as long as i maintain good grades i could get this i could keep the assistantship and so that's what i did until i finished my doctor period because it was very hard work it is like my first job in the factory he put me in a box car you know how big a box car is it was full of steel each piece of steel weigh twenty five pounds and they said to me on the first day they i want this box car empty at four o'clock well i thought that's impossible for a human being to empty a box car of steel in just eight hours or seven and a half hours if you take a lunch but i couldn't go home until my father who had been working in the factory for thirty seven years i can't do this work i couldn't go home and tell my brothers who were working in some of the factories i kid do this w so there i was in a situation where i couldn't hide it i could run and so i worked almost to my death to empty the box car and then i did that every day until i got stronger and stronger and stronger and stronger and that's how i survived as a factory worker but that motivated me never to go back to the factory again that my w interesting even though my parents were dirt we call it dirt poor because you know they were dismayed to see the minimum wage basically my dad my mother had called it the cleaning and everything to do believe it or not eight of us two in children's started college four of us four of us finished college the four of us who finished college had earned master's degrees or in my case i was the only one who'd to earn a doctorate so i think everybody had the save idea baby if they  military and s and for two years i had to go to the military and then i had to do six years and active reserve after i finished that my first job believe it or not was at the university of kent i was the only black this is what they told me at the time and in the one nine hundred sixty six i was the only black a tenure track position in the whole self university of mississippi alabama all of those southern schools were not hiring blacks the only school that hired a black person at that time was university of kentucky so i stayed there for two years my mother kept getting sicker and sicker and sicker so i been moved to the university of toledo which is only fifty miles from detroit because that way i could go live in my parents house one weekend per month to take care of my parents because  could no longer afford medical help you know on a twenty four hour basis so we children had to take turns living in their house in order to take care of our parents you know that tradition and so i did that for three years until my mother had to be put in a convalescent home where she could get twenty four hour medical attention she could no longer be at home and needing medical attention and that was after that then i went to university of notre dame for fifteen years and then after fifteen years at notre dame i moved to university of washington and i was i was here for from one thousand nine hundred eighty five to two thousand and five twenty years so that's how i got to seattle and that's how i got to university of washington but it's more difficult than that because you have to have publications and you have to have a very good academic record to be hired by notre dame and then to be hired by the university of washington you know that kind of thing so i had to do a lot of work and writing and doing all of those things publishing in order to get to the university of washington and then to stay because it's a university of washington is a publish or perish institution you while they are living with your parents if they come good school this is a good lesson and it's a very good lesson but most most children don't think that they should work sixteen hours a day you know but if they were really really want to get ahead they might have to do that emperor haile selassie was still in power and of course i had no idea that there was going to be a revolution two years later you know i was i was just visiting ethiopia and i was i took my children with me because we had been we had been in nigeria for the academic year so i first became interested in ethiopia because of my interest in in nigeria and then so many things were going on in africa for example in cooma had just come to power but he died young and so he had just died in one nine hundred seventy two forth so all of these revolutionary leaders were either just dying or were still in power and so africa was was developing in changing so much so it was a very exciting time to be in africa and that's how i get became very interested in africa because it was like a future was being developed a future was happening right before my  here you know of course i know some of the people that i met years ago when when i first started to interview people and i was introduced to the restaurants you know some other rest of these restaurants and so forth and of course i've stayed in touch with maybe it and samrat wheat her daughter you know and of course i've stayed in touch with  th solomon and his daughter alina and and even and of course when solomon was here he took me to to the church when you used to rent a church part of a church to have church service that kind of thing so and then he took me once to a wake someone in the community had died and we went to a wake and that kind of thing so that's how i got introduced to the local and i came university of washington brought me here to start a new department called american american ethnic studies his asian american studies african american studies chicano led teano studies and then we used the courses from anthropology that were american indian courses studies courses in developing our major and i was chair of that department for five for five years so i've always been interested in the issues of ethnology and the ethnography and all the different ethnic groups and how they were surviving or thriving in seattle in fact i served on a research team where we went around and we interviewed all of the we interviewed the leaders of the different mental health centers you others so we interviewed these people to learn how they were applying mental health services in a culturally specific way and what specific cultural things they were using in order to help people immigrants then this this whole movement of black africans was so new historically so no and it's so important because america did not allow asylum from black africa or refugees from black africa to be settled in the united states until night after nine hundred eighty they signed the legislation in one nine hundred eighty so we wanted to capture this historical moment and we wanted to capture a picture of what was happening to these people good and bad how were they adjusting to new language situations new culture beliefs and feelings and all these kinds of things that make up culture how were they adjusting and if they were adjusting well we wanted to know how they were just doing well if they were not adjusting well we wanted to know how they were not adjusting well and what you know what were the psychological and physical problems that came from not being able to adjust to this culture so that's what we started to do to capture this this this picture this like a photograph for that historical moment of these people who were the first to arrive there were no institutions there were no were they didn't even have one church it had to be getting of course they didn't have businesses at the beginning and they didn't have you know just many things they just didn't have them  so we were able to capture this the beginning literally the beginning i said i don't think any book like that has been written in other communities in the united states yeah how did you come up with the title you know or  forth and but the title little ethiopia of the pacific northwest so we thought it was a very very defining a very defining title because it was like people were had had transplanted think about this they were transplanting ethiopian culture in was like they would develop into little a little ethiopia for themselves so that they could find some comfort and some peace peace of mind and so it seemed like an appropriate title i overall this is the whole community and all of the best development of all the different institution it's not even seattle it's a pretty big northwest right you mention one of the stories that is existing in seattle writing the believe it or not it was easy to get the book published because it's so different there's nothing out there like and i said to to this one publisher and they said of course we will publish favorite because first of all when you collect about seventy interviews from older people maybe in their sixty's you know some of these people that have been here in their sixty's and i want to even mention their name but did not want to be named because they many of them were being they said they were in danger from the communist government has took over and eat an some of them are running from the government you know they went to sudan and they went to kenya they went to europe they went to many places in order to save their lives some of the people as you know the very first story right at the beginning kind of a part of the introduction that person was imprisoned for a while you did you recognize that person probably not right i see it i can't