Foreign take on the election
Politics was never one of Ledet Gebre’s interests.
Like most of her peers, the 18-year-old from Ethiopia’s capital city of Addis Ababa keeps her opinion of her government quiet.
“We can’t talk about elections,” said Gebre. “We just prefer not to say anything.”
Gebre, who came to the United States in August to study at Washington & Jefferson College’s English Language Institute, became fascinated by the spectacle of the presidential election.
She hasn’t missed a televised debate.
“You’re free to say whatever you want, and that’s very interesting to me,” she said.
As ELI students, Gebre, Keisuke Mimura and Cristobal Arancibia engage in an extensive English-for-academic-purposes curriculum. Through field trips and volunteerism, the students also engage in their community.
Being in the United States during a particularly contentious election, they agreed, is like nothing they’ve witnessed before.
Though election proceedings are similar in his home country, Arancibia, 21, of Valparaíso, Chile, is not accustomed to the “level of competition” between candidates.
“(Candidates) might say, ‘He did something bad,’ not ‘I’m going to put you in jail,'” said Arancibia. “It brings the competition to a bad level.”
The length of campaigning and amount of advertising devoted to candidates surprised Mimura, 36, of Hiroshima, Japan.
“I was so amazed at what I saw … how people are excited for the elections (here),” said Mimura.
The first time he paid attention to U.S. politics was during the 2000 election – the year of the hanging chad – when George W. Bush won by a narrow margin in the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote to Al Gore.
But the exchanges between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are even more fascinating to Mimura.
“I think maybe people in the U.S. have difficulty deciding which candidate to vote (for),” he said.
While he’s not completely in Clinton’s camp, Arancibia said he would choose the Democratic if he could.
“I’ve seen some of (Trump’s) bad behavior,” he said. “I don’t know if he has certain abilities. Maybe Hillary is the best option.”
Gebre, who said women can’t run for political office in Ethiopia, is excited by the prospect of the country’s first-ever female president. Though many are seeking change in the political process through protests in Ethiopia, she’s doesn’t believe it will happen anytime soon.
“It’s good that a woman can be president here,” she said. “In Ethiopia, we don’t even know when it’s election day.”