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Denver metro home to 30 Ethiopians, Eritreans By Joey Bunch July 27, 2013 As America counted down to the bicentennial of its Declaration of Independence in 1976, Yoseph Tafari was taking the first steps toward winning his own freedom. The 21-year-old organizer in the anti-Marxist movement in Ethiopia staggered alone toward the Sahara Desert, the mountains of his native Ethiopia shrinking behind him with each stride. To escape the military junta that had marked him for death, Tafari spent four days in the wilderness, until goatherds found him and took him to the dry riverbed that marked the Sudan border near Kurmuk. He risked death because death seemed certain. “It’s not death that you fear,” he explained. “It’s the torture. These were very brutal people.” Like other refugees, Tafari never returned, though he continues to look back in his mind. A bloody, 17-year civil war that began in 1974 drove a mass migration to the United States. Church groups helped at least 2,700 refugees from Ethiopia and Eritrea, the province that split off after the war ended in 1991, resettle in Denver. Others followed to join families, for education, for job opportunities. Today, activists and academics estimate there are more than 30,000 Ethiopians and Eritreans among the seven-county metro area’s nearly 2.9 million people. The Denver Ethiopian Yellow Pages includes 118 Ethiopian-owned businesses, and their 17 metro-area restaurants are fixtures not only for countrymen, but a trendy favorite of foodies as well. But for all their growth and enterprise, Denver’s newer demographic has struggled for cohesion, fragmented by 84 mostly tribal languages and dialects, old-country politics and
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