Nunu Kidane is a textbook example of peacefulness. She exhibits a quiet, soothing spirit. When I visited her at her home in California, she was standing over the stove, brewing a pot of coffee from her native Ethiopia. (For caffeine lovers, legend tells us it was in the forested Ethiopian plateau where a goat herder picked beans and fed them to his animals who were overcome with a sleepless night.)
Kidane is in charge of a nonprofit called Priority Africa Network. In her work, she focuses on the importance of ensuring that residents in her homeland get medicine and supplies and taste the fruits of social justice. It's a big, seemingly impossible order, but the effervescent new grandmother is durable and a doer. Her vocabulary doesn't include the words "give" and "up."
Now 59, Kidane moved to the U.S. to attend college. She liked it enough to settle here. Landing in an alien world as a 20-year-old flummoxed her, she said, her hands in motion, her thoughts linear and intact.
"What I remember most clearly was Huey Newtown, was in jail," she said, referring to the leader of the Black Panther Party.
Along with learning about the collateral damage done by the Vietnam War, her arrival here coincided with hot-button issues like the busing of school children to achieve racial balance.
"That was almost impossible for me, as an immigrant, to understand," she said. "When I grew up in Ethiopia, I knew America was crazy, but in a good sense."
Kidane, who lives in Berkeley and was our gracious airbnb host, also addressed her initial battle with English idioms.
Abstract notions like "red herring," "left field" and "the 64,000 question" left her outside of the vernacular, looking in. Landing a job waiting tables at a restaurant in nearby Oakland with a majority black clientele at first didn't help matters, she recalled as we spoke in her kitchen, whose walls were festooned with a melange of homemade knickknacks reflecting her culture. "After church, a family came in and ordered grits. I said, 'What are grits?' You try to learn English, but you're processing it in your own language."
Life in the U.S. is no longer confusing, she said. In her job at Priority Africa Network, Kidane said she has helped formulate a program called Diaspora Dialogue. Its mission: to help tear down the walls that exist between some African Americans and black immigrants.
"We're the only ones that do racial discussion in an all-black race," she noted. As is her style, Kidane didn't sugar-coat the enmity. "There are disparaging comments from black immigrants and from black Americans. Both have to listen. Some result in near fights." She said the best way to deal with the bubbling anger is to "leave your ego in a safe space. Titles don't mean anything."
As much as Kidane loves her adopted country, she's also a pragmatist. Inevitably, as her family back home ages, illnesses will creep in.
"There's a realization," she whispered, "we'll probably need to transition back there" permanently and tend to the most important things in life."
Her parting comment came lightning fast, like a shot across the bow: "The cost of getting old here is astronomical."
Note to Trump and Clinton. Dial down the incomprehensible patter about beauty pageants and lost emails that leave most voters tramping through the tall grass of incomprehension. Instead, instruct your driver and your security details to pull over. Then, get out and get low to the street level. Take a minute to whiff the perfumed grass roots of autumn. That's where Nunu Kidane lives and thrives and keeps energized. That and the fresh ground Arabica coffee beans from her beloved Ethiopia.