Your family fled the violent revolution in Addis Ababa in 1974. What impact did that have on you?
You grow up with a mix of stories and silences. This is the legacy of any political upheaval. I left when I was two years old. I realized when I was 21 and visited the country for the first time as an adult that so many of my ideas of Ethiopia had been filtered through the stories of my parents, and I understood the country is much more than that. There were so many other aspects of the country and culture I didn’t know.
