06/11/2026
We are one team
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The 2026 FIFA World Cup has officially begun and billions of people will turn their attention to the same event. The World Cup will begin, and for a brief period the world will slow down just enough to watch something together. Families will gather in homes, friends will meet in crowded cafés, and strangers will sit side by side in public places, reacting to the same moments at the same time. It is one of the rare occasions when the world shares a common rhythm, even if only for a short while. There is something quietly powerful about that. It is not only about sport. It is about attention, emotion, and the simple fact that people who may never agree on anything else can still be moved by the same unfolding story.
As I reflect on this, my thoughts return to Ethiopia. I think about a country with deep history and extraordinary diversity. A place where languages, cultures, and faiths have lived side by side for centuries. A society shaped by resilience and struggle, held together by countless unseen acts of everyday coexistence. At the same time, I cannot ignore what has been happening in recent years. Communities have been torn by violence. Families have been displaced. Places of worship have been destroyed. Entire villages have been caught in cycles of fear and retaliation. Ethnic identity, which once lived quietly within the fabric of daily life, has increasingly become a line that separates people. Religious differences, once part of a shared national landscape, have too often been drawn into conflict. The human cost of this is not abstract. It is felt in empty homes, in unanswered phone calls, in graves that arrive too early, and in the long silence that follows loss. It is difficult to speak about this without a sense of heaviness. What makes it even harder is how familiar it has begun to feel. Events that should shake a society to its core are increasingly processed as routine updates. That normalization itself is a warning sign.
Ethiopia has never lacked diversity. Diversity has always been part of its identity. The deeper question is how that diversity is held together, and what happens when trust begins to weaken. When trust erodes, people stop seeing one another through the lens of shared life. Daily interaction becomes filtered through suspicion. Differences that once existed naturally begin to feel like boundaries. Over time, shared belonging becomes harder to feel, and easier to forget. Yet even in this reality, there are moments that suggest something different is still possible. In many places, neighbours still protect one another. Communities still share resources in times of hardship. Individuals still act across lines of ethnicity and religion in ways that defy the narratives of division. These moments do not always make headlines, but they matter more than they are often credited for. They point to a truth that is easy to overlook. Societies are not held together only by institutions or political arrangements. They are held together by the everyday decision of ordinary people to remain connected, even when circumstances encourage distance.
This is where soccer comes back to mind. I have spent much of my early childhood around the game, not in its professional form, but in its simplest version. The kind played in open spaces, where the field is uneven and the rules are agreed upon in real time. Where participation mattered more than perfection, and where the game only worked if people chose to cooperate. No one needed to explain belonging in those moments. It was lived through action. You learned quickly that the game continued only as long as people chose to remain part of it together. That experience stays with me because it reveals something fundamental about human life. Cooperation is not an ideal we occasionally reach for. It is a condition for anything shared to continue. Societies function in much the same way. They depend on a quiet agreement that people are still part of something larger than themselves. When that agreement weakens, everything becomes more fragile, even if institutions remain in place. It is often assumed that countries are permanent. Yet history shows that what endures is not guaranteed by borders or names. It is sustained by the willingness of people to continue imagining a shared future, even when they disagree. When that imagination fades, fragmentation begins long before collapse becomes visible.
Looking further back in time, there is a theory that humanity once passed through an extreme bottleneck, where only a small population survived a catastrophic volcanic event. Whether the exact numbers are precise or not, the broader idea remains important. Human survival has always depended on the ability to remain connected under pressure. It was not individual strength that carried humanity forward. It was coordination, mutual dependence, and the capacity to endure uncertainty together. That lesson has not changed. Today, the world is more connected than ever in technological terms, yet emotional and social distance often feels greater. People are exposed to more information, more voices, and more perspectives, but not always to deeper understanding. In such a world, the ability to remain connected across differences becomes more important, not less. Ethiopia is not outside this global reality. It is part of it. The pressures of identity, politics, and social fragmentation are not unique, but they are experienced in a deeply personal and painful way. Still, there is nothing inevitable about division becoming permanent. What is required is not the erasure of difference, but the rebuilding of trust across it. A recognition that no group carries the whole truth alone, and no community can build a future in isolation from others.
As the World Cup begins and the world gathers in shared attention, there is a small reminder in that moment. For all our differences, we are still capable of collective experience. We are still capable of feeling together, even if only briefly. That possibility exists far beyond sport. It exists in how societies choose to treat one another when the cameras are not watching, when there is no global event to unite attention, and when the ordinary work of coexistence must carry everything forward. Ethiopia’s future will not be defined only by its challenges, but by how it responds to them. Whether it allows division to become its defining language, or whether it slowly rebuilds the habits of trust that make shared life possible. In the end, the lesson is simple, even if the practice is difficult. No society survives by separating itself into pieces that no longer recognize each other. No future is built by forgetting that, at the most basic level, we are part of the same human story. We are one team.
Learn, Relearn, Unlearn
