"In Ethiopia, coffee is like wine is to the French," Assefa said. "It's a ritual."
At the tender age of 15, Tebabu Assefa fled his well-to-do home in his native city of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, disguised as a peasant boy.
He sought to escape the chaos, executions and imprisonments that followed the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie's government by a military junta in the mid-1970s.
"A lot of students were talking about going to the jungle and organizing a violent rebellion," said Assefa, 50, one of the first business owners to incorporate through Maryland's benefit corporation law that started in the fall. "People were being arrested and killed. I lost some friends but not family members. ... It was just too crazy of a time."
So without his parents' knowledge, he and a few friends made it out to Kenya, where he stayed with a friend and finished high school. Assefa assumed he'd return home in a year or two, but he said the situation in Ethiopia deteriorated. He later moved to the Netherlands and Italy, finally immigrating to the U.S. in 1980.
On a trip home in 2003, he befriended coffee farmers, who he said are poor and are paid in pennies while some coffee brands sell for $13 or more per pound in local stores...Read more
At the tender age of 15, Tebabu Assefa fled his well-to-do home in his native city of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, disguised as a peasant boy.
He sought to escape the chaos, executions and imprisonments that followed the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie's government by a military junta in the mid-1970s.
"A lot of students were talking about going to the jungle and organizing a violent rebellion," said Assefa, 50, one of the first business owners to incorporate through Maryland's benefit corporation law that started in the fall. "People were being arrested and killed. I lost some friends but not family members. ... It was just too crazy of a time."
So without his parents' knowledge, he and a few friends made it out to Kenya, where he stayed with a friend and finished high school. Assefa assumed he'd return home in a year or two, but he said the situation in Ethiopia deteriorated. He later moved to the Netherlands and Italy, finally immigrating to the U.S. in 1980.
On a trip home in 2003, he befriended coffee farmers, who he said are poor and are paid in pennies while some coffee brands sell for $13 or more per pound in local stores...Read more