Growing up
Nebiat, whose name means the “word of God” in her native language of Tigrinya, was born in 1948 in the northeast African country of Eritrea.
Nebiat grew up in a large blended family that included eleven brothers and sisters. Nebiat’s family belonged to the Eritrean Orthodox Christian Church- one of the oldest Christian faiths in the world- and consider themselves descendants of the Isrealites of the Old Testament of the Bible. During Nebiat’s childhood, Eritrea’s Muslim and Christian communities peacefully co-existed side by side in a blend of faiths and customs.
In the early 1950’s, Nebiat’s mother had given birth to Nebiat and her sister, and now had to care for 12 children as well as her husband’s extended family. The strain of caring for such a large family caused Nebiat’s father and mother to separate when Nebiat was six years of age.
Rather than going to school, Nebiat now had to work to help her single mother earn money to support Nebiat and her sister. Nebiat’s days were often spent carrying water, gathering wood, making and preparing tea and selling roasted wheat snacks to neighbours and travelers. Helping her mother to make ends meet became a priority and meant that she could not go to school.
Nebiat’s fondest childhood memories were those spent with her girlfriends singing, playing music or reciting poems to one another while gathering wood, selling tea or carrying water from the nearby river. Strong bonds of friendship developed among Nebiat and her childhood friends. Nebiat’s strong cultural and religious traditions, along with those memorable days spent with childhood friends, helped her to rise above the economically harsh realities, giving her a sense of joy that sprang from these basic and simple rituals of daily life.
As Nebiat and her girlfriends reached the age of marriage (usually between 10 to 14 years of age) these young women were now expected to marry and start a new life. They were required to leave their families to live and provide for their husband’s family. Nebiat resisted these expectations of her family and Eritrean society- choosing instead to remain unmarried into her early 20’s. Nebiat, in spite of family pressure, insisted that she would settle down when she was ready and with a man she could love.
At the time of Nebiat’s birth in 1948, Eritrea was not yet an independent country. Her grandparents and parents were raised in an era when Eritrea was an occupied colony of Italy. Eritrea would remain a colony until Italy’s defeat in World War II. Eritrea was then occupied by the British until the late 1950’s. In 1962, Eritrea was taken over and annexed by its neighbour Ethopia. Only in 1991, after a series of wars with Ethiopia, did Eritrea finally gain its independence. Eritrea’s long history of foreign occupation and conflict would come to define Nebiat’s life journey and shape the circumstances that would eventually lead her to seek a new life in Canada.
