At first, the police only beat her.
They had come to the two-room stone house where Abeba Hagos Enday lived with her four children to conscript her husband into the Eritrean army. When she told them - truthfully, she says - that she didn't know where he was, they gave her an ultimatum: Find him before we come back, or we will kill you.
"I had to leave," Enday says through an interpreter.
Enday, 39, is one of about four dozen Eritreans who have arrived in Baltimore since July, the first members of a group that resettlement officials expect to rival the current big three - Iraqis, Bhutanese and Burmese - in admissions during the next year.
"This population is coming," says Robert Warwick, director of the Baltimore office of the International Rescue Committee, which is resettling the Eritreans locally. "For years, resettlement was stagnant, but now the U.S. government has identified numbers, and they're being processed."
The Eritreans, many of whom have limited education and speak little or no English, arrive in a job market that is challenging for Americans. So far, only a few have landed jobs - one in retail, others in a sporting-goods warehouse. But two Eritreans who agreed to be interviewed said their pros- pects here were better than back home. They have fled what Human Rights Watch described this year as a human rights crisis in the African country, where a repressive dictatorship is accused of arbitrary detentions, forced labor and torture. Using a border dispute with Ethiopia as a pretext, President Isaias Afwerki has suspended elections, outlawed opposition groups and arrested journalists.
The United States, which typically accepts more refugees annually than the rest of the world's nations combined, took in more than 1,500 Eritreans during the 2009 fiscal year. Countries in which smaller numbers are being resettled include Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Fifty-three Eritreans were resettled in Maryland, where it is hoped that they will connect with the large Ethiopian community in Washington. While Eritreans fought a war of independence with Ethiopia from 1961 to 1991 and the countries waged a border war from 1998 to 2000, their peoples see themselves as brothers and sisters. Ethiopia is a common destination for Eritreans fleeing their country.
