By Afarin Dadkhah and Samuel Otieno in Tunaydbah, Sudan | 03 February 2023
The smoky aroma of coffee permeates the air as Freweyni Tadese, 48, roasts beans over a charcoal stove. With a wooden pestle and mortar, she then grinds the darkened beans into a fine ground which she carefully pours into a Jebena, a traditional clay coffee-pot she carried with her when she fled Ethiopia’s Tigray region.
“Back at home, coffee is highly regarded and we grow it ourselves. We all have it in our homes,” says Freweyni, adding that every cup reminds her of home.
Soon, the coffee pot sizzles and Freweyni pours the dark liquid from a height into traditional handleless mugs without stopping until all the cups are filled. Her traditional methods of coffee-making have been passed down through generations.
“This first round is called awel,” she says, adding that awel is the strongest of the three rounds she’ll brew from her freshly ground coffee. She serves each cup with a small dish of popcorn.
As she works, she describes her life back home in Tigray where she sold homemade fruit popsicles from her own shop. The business allowed her to provide a comfortable life for her family while bringing joy and sweetness to her community.
“We were at peace, everyone was happy,” says Freweyni. “With the income from the popsicle shop, I could send my kids to school, even to university.”
But everything changed overnight when conflict broke out in the Tigray region in November 2020, eventually forcing approximately 60,000 men, women and children to cross the border into Sudan and displacing millions of others within Ethiopia.
As the fighting came close to her home in December 2020, Freweyni and her four children left everything behind and fled on foot towards Sudan. They walked for two straight days before crossing the border to safety.
“We had no money, no clothes and were starving,” she says.
It was not the first time that Freweyni had been forced to flee. She was a young child when she first came to Sudan as a refugee with her family in the mid-1980s, fleeing the civil war and devastating famine in Ethiopia.
Later, she lived and worked in Eritrea for 16 years before she was forced to flee again when war broke out between Ethiopia and Eritrea in the late 1990s. She eventually found her way home, this time to Humera, Tigray, where she re-established her life and set up her business, not knowing that she would have to leave it all behind once more.
Now safely settled with her family in the Tunaydbah refugee camp in Gedaref State, eastern Sudan, Freweyni has managed to set up a small coffee shop driven by her love of coffee and memories of home.
Source: UN High Commissioner for Refugees