Abstract
Carl Robson discusses his experiences as a doctor in Cleveland and elsewhere as well as his deep interest in Ethiopian culture and people. He has lived and worked in the St. Clair Superior neighborhood for several decades. Additionally, he discusses his philanthropic endeavors such as providing housing, jobs, and educations for numerous Ethiopians as well as running an Ethiopian restaurant here in Cleveland.
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Interviewee
Robson, Carl (interviewee)
Interviewer
King, Kris (interviewer); Overman, Mary-Kay (interviewer)
Project
St. Clair - Superior Neighborhood
Date
7-12-2006
Document Type
Oral History
Duration
77 minutes
Recommended Citation
"Carl Robson Interview, 12 July 2006" (2006). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 903003.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/285
Transcript
Kris King [00:00:00] Okay. I'm Chris King, and I'm here with Mary-Kay Overman. We're here to interview doctor Carl Robeson. This is July 12, 2006. Well, as I said, we're very happy that you could come and be part of this interview. And so we're going to be just asking you a series of questions and hoping that you can elaborate on your answers and give us some background about you and your practice and what you find is the most important thing about your practice and where your location is and the community itself. So I guess what we'll do is start off with your background. Where were you born?
Carl Robson [00:00:46] Morristown, New Jersey.
Kris King [00:00:48] You want to tell us a little bit about your background in your family?
Carl Robson [00:00:56] My parents were basically social work type people. My dad was a chemistry major in college, got his masters in chemistry, and then never did chemistry a day in his life. He started running community centers, and my mother's training was in social work. And they were running a community center in Morristown, New Jersey, when I was born there. And then when I was a year old, moved to Rockford, Illinois. And then I remember Montague House was a place they were running there and then to Chicago. And he did a variety of things. And that's where I went my early years in school and then a suburb of Chicago. I graduated from high school and went to the College of Wooster. And when I was going there, figured out that maybe I would try to go into medicine. So I applied to case Western Reserve University and went there. It was then known, of course, as Western Reserve University. It had not yet joined Case, graduated in 66 with an MD degree, and went to Dallas, Texas, where I did what they don't have anymore, a rotating internship. Now, they could just call it residency right from the beginning, but that was an old fashioned rotating internship through all the specialties, internal medicine, surgery, obstetrics, gynecology, pediatrics. And then this was Vietnam era. And being a conscientious objector, I had decided to do alternative service. As it turns out, I wouldn't have needed to because I wasn't going to be drafted at that point. They were stopping the draft, but I went ahead and spent two years on an Indian reservation in North Dakota with the US Public Health Service. By that time, I'd been married, had first child there. My wife was interested in horses. We brought one back with us to Ohio. She was from Massillon, and her father, a surgeon there, had Lou Gehrig disease. So we thought we'd come to this area. I hadn't done...
[damaged audio, unknown duration]
Carl Robson [00:03:14] ...care. You'd see the patients when they were well enough to keep an appointment, but I didn't see them when they were hospitalized. We had a separate walk in system. You didn't see them when they were sick. They couldn't reach you after hours. So I didn't feel really like a doc. It wasn't really the complete, fulfilling experience to be able to provide comprehensive care. So I went into my own private practice in 76, but I was satisfied with the neighborhood, so I didn't go far. I found I didn't have any money to set up a private practice, but I found space that wasn't being used in Eliza Bryant Nursing Home up on the third floor. So I opened a practice there on a shoestring and worked in emergency rooms to help supplement the income till the practice build up. And ended up staying there about eight years and finally found the building I was in until very recently at the corner of E. 62nd street and St. Clair. And that was for sale at a fairly reasonable price from the Croatian Migration Society, Milkovich and Bosilovich. There was a third one, a member of that group, who had passed a little before that. And to me, it was sort of like, you know, you play monopoly. You've got boardwalk and Park Place on one end, and around the corner you have the low rent district, Baltic and Mediterranean Avenue. This was sort of like Baltic and Mediterranean Avenue. But I got the building there on the corner, and the first thing I did was remodel the one half of the downstairs for a dentist and a podiatrist, and they moved in. And then I fixed up the other half for me and started practice there in 1984. And I was seeing any and all comers, you know, a lot of my. I mean, my patients from down the street on Addison Road, where I'd been for the past eight years, of course, followed me up there. A lot of my patients were African Americans, and I didn't have too many of the neighborhood Slovenians, Puerto Ricans, people from Appalachia, originally in the practice early on. But gradually it became more and more mixed as I stayed there and rented out the floors upstairs, the apartments. I was living in Hinkley at the time, where I had been raising two kids, and we had a little room down there. My wife had pursued her interest in horses. In 1982, my mother dragged me to Ethiopia. She had been there a few times on national education association tours to Africa. Ethiopia was always her favorite country. Then it fell to a communist dictator, and she found a tour. All the American tours stopped, but she found one in 1982, saw it advertised from two to 20 people they would take. And she persuaded a girlfriend of hers to go along. April 71. And then she called me up and asked if I would come and take care of these two old ladies on their trip. And I told her I really wasn't interested because I hadn't even really seen that much of the United States yet. What was I interested in going to Ethiopia for? But I went, and it was just a phenomenal experience. Within two days, we were in this town called Lalibela. That had these eleven churches carved out of solid rock in the around 1200. And they were practicing this Ethiopian Christian orthodox religion that had been there since about the year 300. And it looked unchanged. I mean, it was just like walking into the Bible. It was just an unbelievable experience. And I became really fascinated with the country, read a lot about it, became kind of a hobby of mine. On the plane on the way back, I befriended this Ethiopian girl who was just leaving home. She just graduated from high school, and she was going by herself to Arizona to go to college. So I saw that she got there okay, changing planes and kept in touch. And when things got difficult for her, I offered her a place to live in the apartment in the building. She transferred to Cleveland State University and worked part time in the office. Then worked at Tony Roma's various places and worked her way through school. And I had this continuing interest in Ethiopia then. And with a friend of mine who'd been a medical missionary in Ethiopia for 17 years, we arranged to bring some more students, Ethiopian students. And of course, we put them in that building that I was working in. And there was a hall up on the third floor. When a fellow named Knauss had built the building in 1904 as a two story building. That's what was planned. But all the people in the neighborhood persuaded him to build a hall, make a third floor and build a hall, a recreational hall, because really there wasn't any church in the neighborhood. And, you know, there's no tv or anything like that then. So he did. He complied, and he built this big hall up on the third floor, which was always managed by the people who had the bar, which was one of the the storefronts downstairs. And this hall was still there. So we preserved some of the hall. We put a couple apartments on each side of it. And then I decided to, just for fun, we decorated it Ethiopian style. We built a little Ethiopian tukul hut inside. And I called it Menelik Hall. After this famous emperor of Ethiopia. Who had had a big hall where he used to feed thousands of Ethiopians. And that just started a long series of students living in the building. And then we started buffet suppers, Ethiopian buffet suppers, about once every two or three months. We charged $10, developed a mailing list, invite people, come and socialize, and have an Ethiopian buffet supper and a slideshow on something to do with Ethiopia. And it was a lot of fun. People looked forward to it. Things weren't going so well with my marriage. Jean and I got separated, and I moved into an apartment in the building. And then around that time, Doctor Reynolds, my Ethiopian missionary friend, brought a nurse from Ethiopia to my office to see if she could get a job there while she studied to pass her boards in Ohio. And her name was Sunaid. I gave her a job, and then some years later, we got married. And, I mean, she's been a phenomenal helper on there. She's a workaholic as it is. Her brother managed to come in 1989. We'd been having the dinners for a couple of years then, and he thought that we ought to open a restaurant. And I said, mike, restaurants always go belly up. That's not a good business to be in. So the shoe store next door, it used to be Mandel's shoe store for 40 years. Before that, it had been a bowling alley, Bundy's recreation center. When it was built in, I don't know, 1917 or so, it was for sale. So we bought that and spent two years tearing out all the drop ceilings to get back to the original tin ceiling, putting a kitchen in, and made it into an Ethiopian restaurant. And then Mike managed it for a good number of years. And we got special visas for Sunaid's sister. Two of her sisters and her mother and her cousin's maid came, and they were working in the restaurant, which we opened in November of 91. And Sunaid and I were living in an apartment in the building. Eventually, I was able to purchase the shop behind the big building, now that the original building is on the corner, 6129 St. Clair. The restaurant was next door, 6125. And then right behind that, off 62nd street, was a shop where we moved. We remodeled it and made it into a house that we're living in now. There was another little house behind that that had been moved there after the big explosion. When was that? 1944. 61st, 62nd street, when East Ohio Gas Company's defective tanks blew up and then later purchased one more building, a little apartment building, a three suite apartment building at 1052 East 62nd street. So I've got a conglomeration of buildings on the corner there. Anyway, we moved into that one that we remodeled. This had taken some years to do, I think we moved in there in the late nineties, and we'd struggled along with the restaurant the whole time. Mike finally burned out because he was going to grad school full time while he was running the restaurant. And I think Sunaid's sisters did too. You know, they variously left for other jobs, and we hired some more people. The Ethiopian community in town is not very large. It's about 250 people altogether, I would estimate, and really hasn't increased. Some come, some go, but we were lucky enough to be able to find at least waitresses who were living here in Cleveland, who were Ethiopians. And we struggled to get cooks, you know, as our cooks left, we would get. We actually brought a cook from Ethiopia one time and another Ethiopian from Denver. Somehow we managed to stay open. And I was right, it's a difficult business. I don't think we've ever made any significant profit. It's been a nice place. A lot of people in Cleveland like the place. We put a lot of people through school working there, and it's more or less paid its own way, but it hasn't done much more than that since it opened than in 91. Sunaid and I had a daughter, Ainsley, who was born in 92. And meanwhile the practice was busy. I stayed busy, seeing, I don't know what the average number of patients per day, but it became a really busy practice. About, probably 50% were on Medicaid welfare, maybe 15% Medicare, and then the rest all had private insurance. And it was really very satisfying. This was a private practice. I was on call all the time, and I hospitalized my patients at Mount Sinai for 20 years, tried to keep that place open, stayed there. I was one of the last guys out when it finally ceased to be a hospital anymore. That was, what, about 19? This was about 2000, right around that time, and then switched over to St. Vincent Charity Hospital, where I'd been hospitalizing my patients since then. But it's been a very gratifying practice, because I see the patients not only when they're well, but when they're sick, there's just a lot of continuity, put them in the hospital, take care of them. And it's just been very gratifying, I think, for patients as well as for me to see the full spectrum of their care. And this is a full family practice, so I'm taking care of newborns all the way up to people in their nineties. And a couple of them 100 or more. The charts have gotten a lot thicker over the years. I've seen patients and their kids and their grandkids and sometimes great grandkids, but it's been very rewarding, and I think the patients have really appreciated the continuity of care, too. In the past few years, it's been difficult to stay there financially because the insurance company payments have not increased, I would say, for the past six or seven years, whether it's state Medicaid insurance or private insurance. And yet the overhead has dramatically gone up because the, the cost of health insurance for me and the employees, the cost of malpractice insurance, utilities, salaries, everything has dramatically increased. And I found I was living on what meager retirement fund I had tried to set up. So I finally had to, last year, bail out, and I went right back to Hough Norwood, now NEON, still in the area, to see if they could hire me, which they did, and they let me stay right there in my office, seeing all my same patients. But this time, I had a salary, and they could make it work because they have some special billing status, a federal qualified health center status, and they're allowed to charge and receive probably three, four times as much per patient visit as a private physician is. So they were able to pay me a salary and keep the place going. And then they recently moved me around the corner to 55th street, right across the street from the building I started in 69. They've got another building there. So that's where I've been the past few weeks since we moved. And I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do with my old office now. I'm looking for suggestions. Any ideas?
Kris King [00:19:40] Your old office. Now, if I can keep this straight.
Carl Robson [00:19:44] Is in the building 6129 St. Clair, right on the corner of St. Clair and 62nd.
Kris King [00:19:52] You're out of that now, and you're over there. This NEON, as you call it, is this that clinic that's on Euclid Avenue? Is that at the free clinic?
Carl Robson [00:20:05] No, not the free clinic. They have several buildings around town. Now. They have one. Their main building is the one at 8300 Hough that I moved into in 1974. And the original one, a Newton D. Baker center, is pretty much falling apart. It's beyond repair. But the one I'm in now is right across the street from that. In addition, I think they have a facility on Euclid Avenue near Shaw High School. They have one somewhere further out around miles. They have one Collinwood and 123rd and Superior. They have about five centers scattered around town.
Kris King [00:20:56] Now, this Hough Norwood. So you're at the Hough Norwood Clinic now, right. That's where you. This is processed by NEON?
Carl Robson [00:21:06] Yeah, it's. It's. Its name has changed. It's the same outfit.
Kris King [00:21:10] Yeah.
Carl Robson [00:21:10] They're now called NEON.
Kris King [00:21:13] Can we go back to some of your earlier history?
Carl Robson [00:21:17] I mean, it's fantastic.
Kris King [00:21:19] You read like an encyclopedia. It'd be great to have you as a professor because you could take good notes. I like to go back to you. Born in Morristown. And your father was a doctor?
Carl Robson [00:21:41] No.
Kris King [00:21:42] Well, he was in chemistry, but he got interested in working in community centers, right?
Carl Robson [00:21:44] Yeah, community planning. For most of his career, he was a director of what was called Midwest Community Council on Chicago's Near west side, which was primarily, I think, an African American community. And this led up to about the time of the days of Martin Luther King. There are some interesting stories from that era. Around that time, he also got interested. Oh, he'd done other things. He ran a community newspaper for a while, tried that. But he met a physician from India and got interested in rural healthcare problems in India. He somehow he managed to arrange to build a hospital in India and a clinic, a satellite clinic, and start operating a van, a mobile clinic, so to speak. He got donations through his church in Hinsdale, Illinois, the congregational church. And he went to India, to this area around Mysore, talked to some wealthy plantation owners, and somehow persuaded these guys to donate money for this project, too. Now, how do you do that? How do. You don't know the territory at all? He went there. He was very persuasive. And then he got a hospital in McHenry, Illinois, to agree to do residency training for Indian physicians who would go back and staff this hospital. He persuaded a lot of drug companies to donate pharmaceuticals, and he got this thing up and running, and it just boggles my mind how he was able to do that, not even being from the country himself. But he did that. He was, you know, he was always interested in, as my mother was, in social service of one kind and serving the underserved and whatnot.
Kris King [00:24:22] So that's probably how you.
Carl Robson [00:24:24] I think that was pretty strong in my background. Yeah. Yeah.
Kris King [00:24:28] You mentioned about going to this Indian reservation.
Carl Robson [00:24:32] Yeah. In North Dakota.
Kris King [00:24:34] Right. Would you tell us a little bit more about that experience?
Carl Robson [00:24:38] Well, the public health service lost my application, and as time got near for me to finish my internship, and I hadn't heard from them, and I knew other doctors were getting their assignments. You know, I had applied for a reservation, perhaps in Alaska. Alaska or the northwest or the southwest. All these kind of exciting Indian places to go. And they lost my application. So at the last minute, they got together and gave me what was left over, which was a Chippewa reservation in North Dakota, near the Canadian line, which wasn't considered a very exciting place. Then I got there. It was a rainy day. It was very desolate. It's just out in the prairie, some little rolling hills around there they called Turtle mountains, which were barely hills. And I just thought it was just going to be interesting, but not very exciting experience. It was fantastic. We had 10,000 Chippewa Indians, five physicians, a hospital, and the North Dakota skies just grow on you. And the Indians were a lot of fun. They didn't speak their old native language, except for hello and goodbye. They just spoke English, which made it actually very easy to communicate for us, rather than, say, being on a Navajo reservation. And yet they have all the same kind of reservation problems any other Indian group have. And you really have rural poverty, a lot of alcoholism. They were just finishing cleaning up the tuberculosis on the reservation, and very friendly people. And I had a wonderful time, in fact. And that was general practice. For two years. I tried to arrange to stay on the reservation. I had agreed, worked out an arrangement with the tribal council. They were actually going to pay me a salary to be a private physician on the reservation. And if my wife's father hadn't gotten sick, probably would have stayed there and done just that. I know. It's just a good. A good two years. Yeah.
Kris King [00:26:57] And then after you were there, you came back here.
Carl Robson [00:27:02] Correct.
Kris King [00:27:04] And to set up your own practice, is that correct?
Carl Robson [00:27:08] Well, I knew that I could survive working in emergency rooms, so I came without a job, and I figured that we weren't that far from Massillon. I figured Cleveland would be my best choice to find emergency room work. So I just drew a circle on the map with a compass around Cleveland with what I figured would be about a 30 minutes commute. And then just on that compass line, we just started looking around town to find a place where my wife could bring her horses, live in a more rural area. Even though I was going to be working in Cleveland, one place I happened to look was around Gates Mills. I didn't really know the area at all. And I saw this nice little bungalow, and it looked empty. So I went to the house across the street to ask if it might be available, and a butler came to the door. He said, that, sir, is the doghouse. So I knew I was looking the wrong direction. We ended up in Hinkley, and I found a little place there with eight acres, about a half an hour commute. I-71 had recently opened up, or was just about, I think. Yeah, it had just recently. I don't know how long it been open. Lived there and just. I knew of some emergency rooms around town, and I worked in all kind of little emergency rooms. Forest City Hospital. Did you ever hear of that place? It used to be the old Euclid Glenville hospital before it moved to Euclid general. And a black physician by the name of Lambright and some others got together and opened up Forest City Hospital in that location as basically a primarily African American hospital. Not exclusive, but I would say that's what it mostly was. I worked in that emergency room for, you know, part time for a number of years, St. Luke's and other places. But I hadn't been in town more than about a month before. I talked to a young man who was a patient advocate at Mount Sinai, and he said, oh, there's this great government clinic called Hough Norwood. Why don't you try them? So I called them and landed a job with them. That's how I got started there, because that was perfect for me. It was just an area I wanted. I mean, it's underserved area, and that's what I was looking for. I didn't see myself working out in the suburbs anywhere.
Kris King [00:29:44] So you continue to work in this.
Carl Robson [00:29:46] And I just. And I haven't really gone anywhere since then. I mean, look where I am. I'm across the street from where I started in 1969, and I never went further than maybe a mile or two away from that spot. Just a little triangle, you know, from there to 8300 Hough, up to St. Clair, and then back around the corner.
Mary-Kay Overman [00:30:06] If I recall Cleveland history, 1969, that was right after the Hough riots. Wasn't that 68?
Carl Robson [00:30:10] Oh, yeah, that was an interesting time. Well, you know, at that time, it was a lot of fun. I mean, there were, you know, there were a lot of people walking around that part of town wearing dashikis. In fact, we had one guy came in with four or five women that were supportive, like his harem or something, you know. And people were changing their names, getting all these muslim names. And St. Clair out past, all around, what, between 105th and Superior? Between 105th and Euclid. All these muslim bakeries opened up, and you'd see people standing on the corners, like, there'd be these guys wearing the colors, you know, the red and the yellow and green little hats. And there'd be a small platoon on a corner, there'd maybe be a guy who really looked a little more like a wino standing in front of a taller person who would be a teenager, and then maybe a guy who was ten or eleven, maybe even have a six year old. They'd be in line on a small little platoon on the corner, you know, and he was barking out orders to them. And, of course, there was. That was a time when marijuana was pretty popular, and cocaine really didn't make it big yet until the Reagan years came along. And I remember one of the janitors at Hough Norwood was sneakily raising a marijuana plant out front. You know, he would carefully water this thing every day. It's the same janitor. When Ted Kennedy came to visit the Newton D. Baker Health center, which had to be, oh, I don't know, probably 1971 or somewhere around there, the director, medical director, and the administrator were standing by the front door at the end of the sidewalk, waiting for his limousine to pull up. And by mistake, the limousine stopped at the parking lot entrance and opened up, and Ted Kennedy got out. And the janitor, the same one who was carefully cultivating this, he was a little bit of an alcoholic himself. I don't think he even smoked this stuff, but he just thought it would be kind of fashionable to raise a marijuana plant. He ran to the door and grabbed Kennedy's arm, and he had a carpet, a linoleum knife in his back pocket that it was, I guess, he's going to protect the senator with. And he escorted him up to the building, and I think everybody was so surprised they didn't stop him, you know? But we had very interesting times back then.
Mary-Kay Overman [00:33:07] Would you say the neighborhood? I mean, obviously it's changed, but what are some of the changes you note, and are they good or bad?
Carl Robson [00:33:14] You know, there were. I mean, there were still, I guess, some rough elements. I remember one time at Forest City hospital, I arrived for my shift in the evening, and there was no physician there. And they said, well, he had suddenly left. I said, well, what happened? Well, he went out in the parking lot to. To see somebody who was just brought in by ambulance. And this was the era when people were wearing a lot of stacked heels, and he had this big stacked heel, and somebody in the neighborhood shot the heel off his shoe. There was a gunshot, wounded. Boom. His foot went down, the heel went flying off his shoe. I don't know if it was a random shot or a delivery. He totally disregarded whoever was in the ambulance, just jumped in his car and took off. And you'd, you know, you'd hear gunshots in the night. I guess you could still hear them from time to time, but maybe there were a few more.
Mary-Kay Overman [00:34:11] Now, were you around when Parker Bosley had that restaurant right on Sinclair?
Carl Robson [00:34:16] Yeah. Yeah.
Mary-Kay Overman [00:34:17] What was the story behind that? I know that that was.
Carl Robson [00:34:19] I mean, I don't really know. I know it was a pretty popular. Pretty popular place. And then it burned down, and I really don't know the circumstances. Yeah, yeah. I know. One time he called me up to see if I was interested in selling my place. I think he knew somebody. He said he knew somebody who would be interested in coming in there, but I don't. I think he was. He probably opened up around the time we did. Yeah.
Mary-Kay Overman [00:34:54] What about now?
Carl Robson [00:34:57] You know, across the street from our building is St. Vitus church and school. And we had one family of Ethiopians with three kids. And unlike most Ethiopians, these happen to be Catholics. Most Ethiopians are Orthodox Christians. But I thought, well, maybe we can get them into the school. And I hadn't thought about it. I didn't realize that at that time there were no black kids going to that school at all. This had to be around 1986, 87. 100% caucasian. So we went over and. What was his sister's name? Anne Marie, I think so. She was great. She took the three kids around the various classes, and she said, well, now, students, how many of you are from another country? A lot of these are Croatian kids. And a whole bunch of. Would raise their hand. And how many of you have learned English as a second language? Whole bunch of them raised their hand. And how many of you are Catholics? A whole bunch of them raised their hand, of course, said, well, here we have some students who are from another country. They're learning English as a second language, and they're Catholics, too. And here were these three Ethiopian kids. And so the kids. It's fine with them. The kids went right into school. And that was the first black kids in the school. It caused a little tiny bit of a stir. There were some parents who were upset about that. And one of them called the sister, and she said he was complaining about the kids being in the school. And she said, well, this is a Catholic school. These are Catholics. He said, it's not a Catholic school. He said, this is a Croatian school. Get those kids out of here. But for the most part, they were very well accepted. Anyway, that's how we integrated the St. Vitus school back then.
Mary-Kay Overman [00:37:15] Do you have anything to do with the new school?
Carl Robson [00:37:17] I haven't had any official connection. I've been over to visit it, but we haven't made any specific connection with it.
Mary-Kay Overman [00:37:27] Are you currently fostering anyone from state?
Carl Robson [00:37:31] You know, we have Ethiopians living in the building, and some of them are going to school, so [crosstalk], usually they'll. The portal of entry will frequently be Tri-C. Then they may go to Cleveland State or even Case Western reserve. One of our girls went to Case Western reserve. She got a scholarship there, and then she went to medical school. Case Western Reserve? No, no. She went to medical school in. Down near Dayton. What's the school down there? Anyway, so she graduated from medical school there.
Kris King [00:38:23] Wilberforce?
Carl Robson [00:38:25] No, no, not Wilberforce. I'll think of it in a minute. Anyway, we had a couple who've gone on to pharmacy school.
Mary-Kay Overman [00:38:40] Did they stay in the United States? Are they looking for citizenship?
Carl Robson [00:38:42] Yeah. Ethiopia has been a problematic place since the overthrow of Haile Selassie in 74, and it became a communist country, and it was really a difficult place. There was mass killing of students in 76, high school students and college students in Addis Ababa then. And there was a fairly big exodus of Ethiopians starting around that time. Any way they could get out? Some walked out. Some were able to get out legitimately, and that's when the biggest migration to the United States occurred. Also Europe. And probably there were very few Ethiopians living in the country before that time. And now probably there's about. I don't know if it's half a million, 400,000 across the United States. Most people who come, or who came initially, were hoping to stay long enough for the government to change and then go back home, because Ethiopians truly love their country. It's the only country in Africa that was never a European colony. And they have. Ethiopians are really proud, proud of their heritage and their country. But circumstances just haven't worked out then it's. Even though the regime has changed, the new one is still kind of an authoritarian. They have these votes that aren't real democratic votes, so it's still not real desirable for people to go back, although it's a lot safer than it was in the old days. So there's a variety of ways people come. I mean, some have come on visitor visas and then converted them to, you know, made asylum applications and been accepted. Student visas were common, except that the US government doesn't allow them very easily anymore, at least from Ethiopia.
Kris King [00:40:54] Is there any other place here in America that's a center for the Ethiopians like you are?
Carl Robson [00:41:00] Well, you can't call Cleveland the center. I mean, we've got a little mini center on our corner. The center, the big center for Ethiopians in this country is Washington, DC. That's like Addis Ababa, USA. And in that tri-state area around there, there are probably, oh, up to half the Ethiopians in the country will live in that area. There are places in Washington where you think you were in Ethiopia and going through airports and various other places, you hear a lot of Amharic spoken. It's the Ethiopian language. So there are a lot of Ethiopians there. In general, the number of Ethiopians in a community can be calculated by multiplying the number of Ethiopia
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