In May 2019 the Norwegian Refugee Council published the testimony of Abraham Dube, a Gedeo coffee farmer displaced twice by violence in West Guji, who said that after authorities pushed returns and then blocked aid, there was no one to help his family.
Abraham described walking six hours with his wife and five children, losing a shop and farms, living in a crowded site, and earning less than a dollar a day as a laborer while people around him starved. NRC later negotiated access to Gotiti and delivered shelter and hygiene kits to more than twelve thousand people after an advocacy fight with local officials.
The Gedeo-Guji displacement wave of 2018 already showed how quickly ethnic border fights could create million-scale flight inside Ethiopia.
As humanitarian archive, Abraham’s words remain plainer than any dashboard: returns without safety, and aid bans without food, turn civilians into the quiet dead.
Sources: Norwegian Refugee Council