Worku Bedasso came to the Soviet Union in the 1980s as a young Ethiopian Navy lieutenant on a study exchange and ended up driving trains on the Moscow Metro, Russia Beyond reported in August 2019.
A Moscow Metro train at Krylatskoye station, photographed in April 2005. (Svetlov Artem / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0) [file photo]
Worku first studied in Georgia in 1985 and, a couple of years later, in Azerbaijan, the Russian outlet reported in a feature by Anna Sorokina on the metro’s train drivers. While he was abroad, civil war in Ethiopia brought down the Derg government in 1991, and the new authorities no longer wanted “old-school” officers. His wife and children stayed in Ethiopia and did not want to move to Russia.
When the Soviet Union collapsed weeks later, foreign students based in Baku were sent to Moscow. Worku was granted refugee status and a work permit there, but jobs were hard to find during Russia’s 1998 economic crisis. His Russian girlfriend, Olga, suggested he try a metro depot because he was good with machinery.
After six months of training he became an assistant train driver. “The first time felt strange and even scary,” he told Russia Beyond. “But a military background helps. A metro driver needs to have stress tolerance, army discipline and a desire to work hard.”
He enrolled at the Moscow railway engineering institute, MIIT, but found it too hard to combine work and study and left the metro in 1999. He then worked for a logistics company in Moscow and Sochi, married Olga and received a Russian passport.
When he returned to the metro in 2010, he had to work his way up again from assistant to a Category 1 driver. He said he had never had an accident and credited luck. At 62, he told the outlet he was thinking of moving to a job at a metro depot. “When you are young, you don’t feel the workload, but at my age it’s getting a bit hard,” he said. “I don’t want to part with the metro. I have seen everything there is to see overground.”
The navy Worku left behind did not survive the change of government either. Founded in 1955, with its main base at Massawa, it lost its coastline when Eritrea became independent in 1993 and was disbanded in 1996, leaving Ethiopia landlocked. Ethiopia re-established a navy in 2019, based on Lake Tana in Bahir Dar.
Sources: Russia Beyond: “Why this Ethiopian navy officer ended up as a metro driver” by Anna Sorokina (Aug. 2019), Wikipedia: Ethiopian Navy