In Pictures: adopted from Ethiopia to future Obama?

Jimma Times

Hundreds of Ethiopian children are adopted by Americans every year. Being born in Ethiopia might not allow them, according to current laws, to acquire the highest office of presidency in America but they are not exactly going into the same frightening America of old days. Especially, since the recent election of the first African-American U.S. president Obama, which shattered a "racial ceiling" in the country.

Around five decades ago when Bulcha Debosie, a top member of the Ethiopian Air Force during Haile Selassie I, went to America for his pilot training, he was in a hurry to get out of America and return back to Ethiopia. The racial issues in the wealthy America was unbearable enough to blind him from America's attractive economic opportunities and political stability that did not exist back home in Ethiopia.

Speaking in Afaan Oromo, his native Ethiopian language, Bulcha still recalls the racial segregation in America and the various moments that terrified him. In fact, all of his close friends who were sent for training to America with him came back to Ethiopia with big relief, some pledging never to return West, others feeling guilty for abandoning black friends stuck in America.

That was the old United States.

This week, decades after the civil rights movement, an African American man with a black muslim father got inaugurated as America's forty-fourth president. Now, it is no more impossible for blacks in America to dream for the highest platform in politics, as the country took a big step forward in reducing discrimination and inequalities. And unlike what past immigrants faced, adopted Ethiopian children crossing over the atlantic toward Obama's America will grow up in a new, more welcoming and more tolerant America.

The efficient adoption system in Ethiopia today - as well as the growing supply of orphaned children who mostly lost parents due to poverty, wars and AIDS - have made Ethiopia one of the top destinations for Americans and Europeans who seek to find their first child or show compassion for kids in need of a loving family. The thousands of Ethiopian children who have been adopted the last few years have thus found new homes and new beginning in life.

Ethiopia was consistently in the top three pro-Obama country in the world, percentage wise, according to many international surveys and polls. But the only way Ethiopians can imitate Kenya to call Obama as one of their own was if they traced back the ancestors of the Luo ethnicity of Obama's father, which is a Nilotic group that shares lineages with the Western Ethiopian Anuak community.

But if the Austria-born Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California succeeds in promoting and passing U.S. constitutional amendments to legalize naturalized citizens, like adopted Ethiopians and immigrants, to run for the U.S. presidency, then the world could see an Ethiopian-American U.S. President sooner than later.

CLICK HERE to view pictures sent to Jimma Times from parents of the youngest Ethiopian Diaspora