As the Capital District began to think about the Christmas season and the celebration of this holy time, a young family of four began their journey to a new life in a new country.
The family arrived from Eritrea, a small country wedged between Sudan, Ethiopia and the Red Sea, arrived at the Albany County airport carrying meager personal belongings and knowing but a few words of English.
The come from a refugee camp where they have lived for four years. The two little girls, Zebib, 5, and Samira, 2, know little of the world outside of the camp. Samira was born there and Zebib was an infant when her mother and father were settled there.
This is the story of the cultural shock and the Christian love they encounter as they start a new life in a modern American city. Catholic Charities will oversee the core of resettlement services for this family. Parishioners from St. Edwards in Clifton Park are providing the day-to-day support they will need for this incredible journey.
Where they came from . . . Eritrea
Eritrea is a small country with 670 miles of coastline along the Red Sea. There is Ethiopia to the South and Sudan to the West.
It was granted independence from Ethiopia in 1993. But the country’s economy was stalled by the Ethiopian-Eritrea war from 1998-2000. The economy is largely based on subsistence agriculture, with 80 percent of the workforce engaged as farmers. The gross domestic product of the tiny nation of 2.7 million was $700 per capita in 2008, according to the CIA’s Factbook.
The history of the land that is now called Eritrea, in one way or another, is associated with its coastline on the Red Sea, which extends more than 1000 km or 600 miles.
One of the oldest hominids, representing a possible link between Homo erectus and an archaic Homo sapiens, was found in Buya (Eritrean Danakil) in 1995 by Italian scientists. The cranium was found to be over 1 million years old. Furthermore, in 1999, the Eritrean Research Project Team discovered some of the earliest evidence of human tool-use in the harvesting of marine resources. The site contained obsidian tools dated to the paleolithic era, over 125,000 years old.
Epipaleolithic or mesolithic cave paintings in central and northern Eritrea attest to early hunter-gatherers in this region. An American paleontologist, William Sanders of the University of Michigan, also discovered a possible missing link between ancient and modern elephants in the form of the fossilized remains of a pig-sized creature in Eritrea. The fossil, which is 27 million years old, pushes the origins of elephants and mastodons five million years further into the past and indicates that modern elephants originated in Africa.
How they came to Albany
The family was sponsored by Catholic Charities and their first plane ride brought them to Albany, N.Y. where they have been set up with a small apartment.ASt the Albany County Airport, they made their first cell phone call to one of the few persons they knew in the area who spoke their language – Tigrinya, which is a Semitic language spoken by the Tigray-Tigrinya people in central Eritrea, where it is one of the two dominant languages of Eritrea
St. Edward’s parish in nearby Clifton Park has “adopted” the family and a small committee will work to make them feel welcome in a new land.
The following posts to this blog will follow the family’s progress. To respect the family’s privacy, we will not identify them by their full names, nor will we reveal exactly where they live. The following posts are based on reports by members of the committee who make frequent visits to their apartment to help them in this period of incredible adjustment and assimilation in a new country.
