Addendum to Yesterday's Post

So it turns out I posted the blog a little too early because something really interesting happened last night. Mara (another ENP intern) and I went to Tel Aviv to have dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant that also has dancers every Thursday night. As great as Ethiopian food is, the dancing is even cooler. It's impossible to explain what it looks like. you just have to see it. As we were walking past the security guard to get into the restaurant, he just stared at us. We held out our bags for him to check and he just kept staring.
"Oh you are going in here?" he asked us. We told him yes.
"Do you know what this is?"
"It's a restaurant, right?"
"Yes, it's an Ethiopian restaurant"
"Yea, we know" He couldn't get over his shock and didn't end up checking our bags. It was so bizarre to him that two young white girls would want to go to an Ethiopian restaurant. But we went and the food was really good. I had actually first heard about this restaurant from the Ethiopians who lived in my absorption center in Natzrat Ilit who all loved it. I only found it because it is right next to a gelato stand on the beach that a friend and I went to last week and I happened to sit in the right position so that I was staring right at the restaurant. I have been to that gelato stand so many times this year and I've never noticed it before.

While we were eating, we were talking about how even though the Ethiopian community is poor in Israel, it is a world away from the black community in the US. Each community's problems are completely different. But Ethiopians feel a connection to black people in the US, they don't realize there's such a difference. In Israel it's normal for everyone to really want to move to the US; people have asked me if I could give them my green card multiple times (I think they think we just carry green cards with us in case we feel like handing them out.) But Ethiopians really want to go to the US. I only learned why recently. Kendall, another intern for ENP is black and he does a lot of work in the community centers. He realized that the reason Ethiopians want to go to the US so much is because they only see Oprah, Will Smith, Akon (he's a singer for the older crowd), and Obama. They think that in the US the black community is rich and has everything because that's all they see. Once I heard this, it made total sense. In the Ethiopian teen centers I worked in they were so curious about America. A few kids asked us if we see black people dancing in the street (They watch the movie Step Up a lot). They didn't believe us when we said no.