Day One
Saba would have preferred to be an architect. A young woman who exuded effortless cool and liked aviator glasses and Pink Floyd T-shirts, she had instead been thrust into studying medicine by her upwardly mobile family. Saba was the eldest daughter, and the first in her family to go to college. In Ethiopia, that meant that she was expected to become a doctor or engineer. Her family chose medicine.
Born and raised in Addis Ababa, Saba Tewoldebrihan Goitom attended medical school in Mekelle, the capital of Ethiopia’s Tigray region. Her family is part of the Tigrayan ethnic group, but she never felt particularly Tigrayan. Saba considered herself a citizen of her nation, one of the pluralistically minded youth who would inherit the empire of dozens of ethnic groups that the world called Ethiopia. Read more