Hermela Kebede is consumed by worry. It pinches her forehead and tugs at her throat, making her voice sound tight. She sits in a small, airless office under a poster that shows a smiling girl with cocoa skin. "Ethiopia," it says. "Thirteen months of sunshine."
More than 30 years ago, Kebede left Ethiopia to study business administration in the United States. Now, at 56, she is the leader of the Ethiopian Community Center, which she said is the country's oldest organization of its kind. It offers English classes and more elementary help to the nation's largest Ethiopian community.
This should be a happy time. In November, the center will celebrate its 25th anniversary. Kebede is planning the party. But things are so expensive these days in the District, and money is so tight. The big hotels once charged $1,500 for a room and let you bring your own food. Now they charge $3,000 and want money for catering, too.
"I really want to do a celebration. Not just of the community center, but of the whole community," Kebede said. "The problem in the District is finding space."
Lately, finding space has been Kebede's focus and the source of her anxiety. Four years ago, rising rent forced the center to move from 14th and K streets NW to its present location, a warren of cramped offices on a shabby stretch of Georgia Avenue. There's a computer lab and an office for a social services coordinator. But there's no room for so many other things Kebede would like to have: a day-care center. After-school programs. Even the center's English classes had to be moved to borrowed classrooms on the grounds of Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
Now, with property values skyrocketing across the region, the center stands to lose even this humble home. The building is owned by a real estate speculator who paid about $900,000 for the property, along with the building next door, three years ago. In July, he plans to execute a contract to sell the properties for four times that amount. The buyer plans to tear down both buildings and replace them with a "mixed-use" development, which sounds to Kebede like a code word for "fancy condominiums."
She is tortured by those facts. First, because the center tried to buy the building in 2001 but failed to raise the down payment. Second, because the speculator is himself an Ethiopian immigrant, and a relatively new one at that.
"He is lucky," Kebede said bitterly. "He told us, once it's sold, he will give us three months. In not more than six months, we will be out of here."
The building's owner, Seid Omer, visits the center often. On a recent morning, he sat in Kebede's office and offered assurances that demolition wouldn't begin until April, so Kebede has nearly a year to find a new building. And he will help her do it, he said, because the center is a "very special place."
Eight years ago, Omer left Ethiopia to study at Grambling State University. He didn't speak much English. But in Louisiana, there was no Ethiopian network, no community center to assist him. "I wish this kind of place had been there," he said, "because it's hard moving to the U.S., trying to understand the system. It's really difficult."
At 27, Omer appears to have the system figured out. He moved to the District and bought his first condo in 1997, before the real estate boom, using credit cards for much of the down payment. He sold it for a "good profit" and bought more land, including the building on Georgia Avenue.
In 2002, the place had been on the market for three years without drawing a serious offer. Rundown and damp in the basement, wedged between a huge liquor store and a parking lot with a rusty chain-link fence, the building doesn't look like much. But it lies two blocks south of the Georgia Avenue-Petworth Metro station and not far from the rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods of Mount Pleasant, Adams Morgan and Columbia Heights.
