Neighborhood Resurrection: Reunion Trajectories

This project was inspired by Part 1, Neighborhood Corridor: Estimating Historical Refugee Routes, established in Fall 2025.

Oral History & Personal Archives: The primary sources for this project is from semi-structured interviews with each of the three to document their individual migration narratives in their own voices. Personal photographs, documents, and artifacts are digitized and curated, and geopolitical sources related to refugee camps, conflict zones, and migration routes are contextualized with their experiences.

Ethical and Critical Analysis: Reflective essays and research explore tensions between personal memory and institutional archives, and the

Spatial & Temporal Modeling: GIS tools model the parallel and intersecting trajectories of all three subjects, layered with historical conflict zones, environmental barriers, refugee camp locations, and shifting political boundaries (See: Neighborhood Corridor: Estimating Historical Refugee Routes)

Digital Visualization & Narrative Design: Interviews and geo-tagged archival material guide the building of synchronized maps to explore their simultaneous movements, as well as network diagrams representing memory and decision inflection points. To explore memory and tension in their experiences, the participants create cognition maps of the places and routes they’d taken.

As teenagers, all three were involved in student and youth organizing in Addis Abeba during the Derg regime, each imprisoned separately as young as fifteen for their resistance to the government. In their early twenties, two fled together on foot toward Khartoum, Sudan — a journey of many weeks through wrong routes, under constant risk of capture. The third stayed behind, intending to follow when he could, wanting to provide for his family while he could.

In Khartoum, the pair lived first in refugee camps, working for the IRC, then in a shared home with other young refugees. This period was rocked by illness (typhoid) and poverty, yes, but the pair also regard this time as an incubator for liberatory theories and principles. After nearly 5 years, they found resettlement in Toronto, building families and lives, eventually settling in Minnesota and North Carolina respectively, all the while staying in contact.

During this time, the third made his way to Jerusalem, where he lived for roughly a decade before eventually settling in Washington, D.C.

For decades, all three sought each other; with the emergence of the internet, they each searched relentlessly to no avail. Phone calls to families in Ethiopia yielded nothing. Facebook searches went cold.

In 2018, the third returned to Addis Ababa for the first time since leaving in the 1980s. He found the elderly mother of one still living in the same home; weeping, he went to her door, asking only to know the truth on if the two had passed away in Khartoum, so he could finally mourn them properly. Within a week he had called them, and within days they had gathered in his DC home, now old men. By then, they had unknowingly been living in the same country for at least fifteen years.

Neighborhood Resurrection is informed by and in conversation with related documentation efforts, including the DC Public Library’s Documenting the Ethiopian Communities of DC project.

In the process, it has also led to further research inquiries:

1. The Stake of Surveillance & The Cycle of Refuge: An exploration of surveillance, digital anonymity, and the rights of migrants and refugees to online community and self-determination; inspired by the methods migrants and refugees may employ in searching for one another.
2. Landscaping and Documentation: Study of the cultural landscape of migrant communities across 1980s–2000s Minnesota, Jerusalem, Toronto, D.C., and Khartoum; inspired by the participants’ cited extensive engagement with music and film while in Khartoum and Jerusalem, noting these periods and mediums as being pivotal for developing their liberatory practices.