The table is set with a coffee pot and tiny cups. Under these lie a tablecloth and green herbs: a green reed called Seti and an aromatic herb called Adam’s Scent. Sonya comes to the table wearing the Ethiopian woman’s traditional white dress and headband. The ceremony begins by burning some myrrh, which fills the restaurant with sweet pine-like fragrance. She roasts the green coffee beans in a small long-handled pan over an electric burner. The skins on the coffee beans pop and then the beans become shiny as natural oils rise to the surface.

 

          The smell of roasting coffee fills the typical Ethiopian home every day, as the women perform the traditional coffee ceremony. It is one of the skills that women teach their daughters, and which show a woman’s quality: how to butcher a chicken into 12 perfect pieces, how to make perfect chicken stew; how to make injera (a flatbread) perfectly; how to make beer or honey wine; and how to make perfect coffee.

 

          But Sonya came from a very non-traditional Eritrean family, and she never learned the coffee ceremony from her mother. Her mother was a nurse and her father an oil company executive, and her mother wanted her to get a good education, not just learn how to be a traditional wife.

 

          Her family lived in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, in the 1970s, when the Derg, a “committee” of military officers, overthrew the government. The Derg quickly adopted communism, denounced the wealthy and educated, and began executing its opponents. The Derg killed hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians and Eritreans in order to consolidate its rule.

 

          Her father, an Eritrean, was accused of discriminating against Ethiopians in hiring at his company. To avoid attracting attention to his family, he moved them from their large home into a small condominium. Soon after, some government officials moved into the same building. The family worried, but Sonya’s father always said that the best place to hide was right under their noses.

 

The government worked to indoctrinate young people into communist ideology, and organized neighborhood cells where the youth had to attend meetings . But even though the government tried to control everything, young people loved modern culture.

 

          “I’d grown up with all things American, you know: TV, music,” says Sonya. “So when I was 16, I decided I wanted to go to America.” Her parents found her some people to stay with in England while they looked for someone to take her in. Eventually, they found a family in Salem, Oregon. The father was the recently-retired Superintendent of Schools in Salem. Sonya loved them.

 

Two years later, her father’s company moved the rest of the family to West Africa – Ethiopia wasn’t safe for them.

 

          “I promised my father that if I went to America, I wouldn’t get married – I would get my education first,” she says. But she got married in Salem at 18 and had her first son, Alex. When Alex was 4 years old, she entered Oregon State University, taking Alex to classes with her.

 

          It was Alex who later got interested in the tradition of the coffee ceremony. He learned how to do it, and then taught his mother. Sonya consults him on how dark to roast the coffee. When the coffee is roasted just right, Sonya pours it onto a woven mat to cool. Although a mortar and pestle is the traditional method, she grinds the beans in a little electric coffee grinder. Then she fills the earthenware pot with a measure of water and spoons coffee into the pot’s neck. She sets the pot on the electric burner.

 

          After graduation, she volunteered working with and translating for Eritrean refugees. She volunteered with IRCO, the Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization, and eventually became a staff member. Sonya met immigrants from all over Africa through her volunteering and her work.

 

          “I would be driving a woman to the doctor or some errand, and she would say, ‘That reminds me of my daughter,’’’ says Sonya. “So I would ask about that, and she might say ‘Oh, I lost her when we were driven out of our home,’ and she would have a horrible, horrible story about her daughter being killed. I learned just to listen and let them talk. It was very hard.”

 

          “I would ask them ‘How did you survive?’ and they all said one thing: ‘I have hope. Hope and faith in America, because none of these horrible things could happen there,’” she says.

 

          Everything changed for these immigrants on 9/11. The terror attacks of 9/11 opened immigrants’ wounds, because they realized that the violence can follow them to America. Sonya says that this led to a big surge in psychological distress among immigrants, such as depression, suicide attempts, and family abuse. Many African cultures place a huge stigma on any sort of psychotherapy. But people need a place to talk. People need to tell their stories.

 

          “If we don’t tell the stories, it can happen over and over again,” she says. This is why Sonya plans to open an African cultural center, a center where immigrants from all over Africa can come. She dreams of having a small café with African food, galleries for visual arts, but especially of having storytelling, writing, and film programs. People could tell their stories and get help from writers, artists, or filmmakers in recording them. It would be a place for people from all over Africa to share their stories, their culture, and their art.

 

          It hasn’t been easy to interest African immigrants in cultural exchange with each other. Africa is a continent with many countries and many ethnic groups, some of which have long-held grudges and feuds. Sonya and many others have been working on bringing people together, and it’s beginning to happen.

 

          The coffee is ready. Sonya carefully pours it into the tiny cups. Coffee originated in Ethiopia – in fact, it’s named for Kaffa, an Ethiopian city. In the countryside, Ethiopians put salt or spices into their coffee, but here Alex adds sugar and milk. He hands me a cup, and I smell the rich coffee aroma. I sip, and it is sweet and smooth, with hints of flowers and lemons.

 

          The coffee ceremony is a way for people to relax, to talk, to share with each other. Every culture has its own way of sharing, and this is Ethiopia’s. We each have three cups of the dark, flowery, and bittersweet coffee. The third cup is called baraka, which means blessing. Sonya’s African cultural center could be a place where people can bring their ways of sharing together. It could be baraka – a blessing – for the people of Portland.

 

Sonya’s café is the E’Njoni Café at 910 N Killingsworth St.

 

Visit her website at http://enjoni.cafe.googlepages.com

The café does coffee ceremony Saturdays and Sundays between 4 and 5 PM.

 

See other stories about Portland and its people at http://tomsportland.wordpress.com.