For refugees, a plea: You can’t beat a pandemic by leaving people out
Eden Gebre spends every day crammed into a single room of a Tel Aviv apartment with her husband, their 6-year-old twins, and 4-year-old daughter.
In the same apartment live two fellow Eritrean asylum-seekers with whom Ms. Gebre is fearful to interact, because she says she is immunocompromised following a liver transplant. She tries to strictly isolate, wary of adding to what is already a mountain of medical debt if she becomes infected with COVID-19.
There is no safety net for Ms. Gebre – or for the 30,000 asylum-seekers from Eritrea and Sudan in Israel and many of their fellow refugees around the globe. She and her husband have no medical insurance, nor have they unemployment insurance to compensate for the jobs they lost in this age of lockdown.
To earn money, the couple sews masks and Ms. Gebre crochets baskets to sell through Kuchinate, a Tel Aviv collective of asylum-seeking women. The name means “crochet” in Tigrinya, a Semitic language spoken in Eritrea and Ethiopia.
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