A Down Home Meal For These Difficult Times

Meron Hadero | Ethiopia

People have been moving between countries forever, searching for a place to call home or to make a home where better opportunities exist for them and their families. The concept of immigration and how it feels to be an immigrant in a different country, is very complex and

nuanced. In A Down Home Meal For These Difficult Times, Ethiopian author Meron Hadero gives an expansive look at the lives of various immigrants as they grapple with the concept of home, assimilation, loss, community, dictatorship and much more.

Across 15 stories Hadero’s characters are in some way searching for something better. Yet when they arrive, they are faced with an American culture that they must learn about and adapt to quickly. Some characters are in Ethiopia and are struggling to deal with the changes impacting their communities by foreign investment, while still others are dealing with regret and personal demons. Each character is however, telling their own individual experience within the context of their environment, whether it’s located in America or Ethiopia.

But each story takes you through a unique experience that will immerse you in a theme that immigrants face when trying to create a new life. Experiences that are vivid, complex, angering, hopeful and beautiful. Overall, I feel that this collection is a wholesome curation of the many voices that deserve to be heard. These characters give voice to the pain, the uncertainty, the heaviness, the misunderstandings, the sadness, the fear, and above all the hope, that immigrants must constantly juggle in order to find a space and a place to call home.