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family snapshot
Mergitu Argo
“I’ve really changed,” says Mergitu Argo. “I color my hair and wear jeans, but I’m not fully Americanized. I still keep my culture.” She regularly visits her family, and attends church and other community events.
Mergitu was born in 1976 in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, and raised in Nazrat, the country’s “second” capital. She was born into the Oromo tribe, the largest ethnic group in Ethiopia.
According to Mergitu, most Ethiopian parents do not communicate with their children very much, and the usual way to discipline children is to spank them. But her parents were atypical. “They were open with us,” she says, “and we were never spanked.”
Mergitu’s parents spent a lot of time with their seven children (she is their second-born). “They did not own a car,” she says, “but they took all of us in a taxi to places of recreation.”
In 1989, Mergitu’s father came to Seattle to visit his ailing brother. While he was gone, war broke out between Ethiopia and Eritrea. The changed political climate in Ethiopia endangered his return, and he was granted political asylum in the United States. In 1992, he sponsored his family to join him in Seattle. Mergitu was 16.
“America is full of opportunities,” she says. “There are lots of choices here.” Eventually she attended South Seattle Community College and earned an Associate Arts degree in Administrative Assistance, which led to a job with the Refugee Women’s Alliance.
She also graduated from the Barbizon Modeling School, which has led to a variety of local modeling jobs.
When she was 21, she married. The union had been arranged by her and her husband’s parents, who had known each other back in Ethiopia, where arranged marriages are common. The couple was married in a traditional Ethiopian ceremony, during which they were blessed by their parents, who took turns offering them milk from a beaded pot.
Two years later, Mergitu gave birth to a daughter, Ebany (which means “blessing” in Oromo). Not long afterward, in 2002, Mergitu and her husband parted ways.
Now a single mom, Mergitu parents much like her own parents did. “I explain everything to Ebany,” she says, “I hide nothing. I never hit her.” Ebany speaks English, Oromo, and Cambodian, because her longtime babysitter was Cambodian.
What does Mergitu do differently than her parents? She answers emphatically in the future tense: “I will not arrange Ebany’s marriage.”
– Teru Osato
(Reprinted with permission from January 2006 issue of the ColorsNW magazine: www.colorsnw.com)
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