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And this is Yosef.
Hello, Yosef said to me.
It was my first day of my first job … right out of college. And someone was taking me around and introducing me to the folks in the department. Yosef happened to sit in the cube next to me.
I heard a slight accent and instantly felt comfortable with this 63 year old man that had worked in the company for over 35 years. As the days went by, he would slowly tell me more about himself and ask me where I was from. He was from Palestine. The first person I ever met from there. And he was happy to hear that I am an Ethiopian. The two countries are closer to each other than either were to the US. So we knew we shared a lot of cultural habits. It is also how I came to learn that the language spoken in Ethiopia called Amharic had a lot of words in common with Arabic.
Yosef treated me like a daughter. He had 2 sons — no daughters. He shared his thoughts about culture, politics, corporate America and particularly finance. He always brought food from home and rarely spent money unnecessarily. One day, he brought me a Palestinian dish that he had cooked himself — it was delicious rice with raisons. And he told me, the secret to being a millionaire in the US — is eating home cooked food.
