Abdul Kamus, head of the Ethiopian Community Development Council in the District, was struggling recently with a budget shortfall and realized he'd have to cut a member of his staff.
So he made a dramatic decision.
"I terminated myself," he said.
Kamus, 47, has been one of the city's most prominent advocates for African immigrants. In the nearly four years since he became head of the development council, known as ECDC, he has helped resettle hundreds of refugees, assisted immigrants who lost their jobs after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and pushed for a new language access act, which requires city agencies to hire bilingual employees and translate documents.
Kamus said he decided to leave ECDC because he wanted to preserve the group's core functions despite the budget cuts. He also felt he was ready for a new challenge.
"I really want to do more advocacy than direct services," said Kamus, who finished up last Friday.
The Washington area boasts the second-biggest concentration of African immigrants in the country, after New York. In the District, one out of every eight foreign-born residents is from Africa, with the largest group from Ethiopia.
Kamus himself was a refugee from Ethiopia. After he finished a master's degree in engineering, he decided to flee his homeland, which had come under the rule of a Marxist regime. He arrived in New York in 1984.
"It was not really my dream to come to the USA. My dream was to go back home and build factories," he said. But when he reached the United States, he said, "I just felt the freedom." He never looked back.
After a series of short-term jobs, Kamus was offered a position at the International Rescue Committee in New York, helping to resettle a growing number of Ethiopian refugees.
"I found my calling. I enjoy helping people," said Kamus.
Kamus moved to the District in early 2001, hoping to provide his two children the chance to grow up in an area full of parks and trees. ECDC, whose national office is in Arlington, was opening a D.C. branch to help newly arrived refugees and African immigrants, and it hired him to be program manager.
Since then, said Kamus, "We have assisted over 1,000 people, getting them jobs, guiding them to be self-sufficient, and sending them to have skills."
There have been difficult moments. Worst was the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath, a period in which thousands of local immigrants lost their jobs due to a near-collapse of the travel industry. Many African immigrants were fired from their positions as airport security screeners, as new rules restricted the jobs to U.S. citizens.
