BURLINGTON, Vermont (May 2023) — As rain waited to fall above downtown Burlington on Saturday, dozens of protesters held red and yellow Tigrayan flags up against the clouded sky. 

Marching down Church Street, the group had come together to speak out against genocide in a northern region of Ethiopia called Tigray, which has killed over half a million people in just over two years and received strikingly little global attention.

The demonstration, co-led by Burlington High School graduate Meron “Alex” Segar-Reid and others, marked the third such event in Burlington since war in Tigray began on Nov. 3, 2020 — a moment at which much of the Western world was focused on the U.S. presidential election. 

Since then, a staggering number of Tigrayans — members of an ethnic minority that make up some 7% of Ethiopia’s population — have been murdered at the hands of the Ethiopian government and allied Eritrean forces, experiencing a level of brutality that Human Rights Watch has said amounts to ethnic cleansing.

BRATTLEBORO, Vermont (Feb 2023) — U.S. Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., has seen many hopeful stories of refugees fleeing oppression for new lives in her home state. On Monday, she heard the flip side. Take the Afghan mother and father now in Bennington who’ve waited a year and counting to be reunited with two of their children still half a world away. “Boys, ages 14 and 15,” they said through a translator. “There is no one to take care of them.”

Or consider the Guatemalan woman, trained as a lawyer, who arrived in Brattleboro to learn she had to delay English lessons to find a job or risk deportation. “Right now, I’m working as a packer,” she said in Spanish. “I can’t look for better opportunities because I can’t speak the language.” 

Southern Vermont has welcomed almost 120 refugees in the past year with the help of the Ethiopian Community Development Council, a resettlement agency funded by the U.S. State Department.