During an afternoon lull between customers, Haiget Yosef took a break from work and sat down at a wooden table inside her Edmond restaurant.

Her 2-year-old son, Avishai Karoki, who would normally be napping, sat on her lap and watched an educational program on a cell phone that Yosef propped up against a sugar dispenser to distract him. 

Occasionally the restaurant phone would ring. When it did, Yosef, 32, popped out of her seat and ran across the room to answer the call.

“I never thought I could own my own business,” she said, wearing a black apron over her striped blouse. “ … I’m very thankful for that. I don’t take that lightly.”

Yosef came to the U.S. as a refugee in 2004 with her mom and eight of her 10 siblings. They fled Ethiopia in 1998, when Yosef was a teenager and traveled to Kenya, where Yosef said they lived “one day at a time” until they were granted permission to come to the U.S.

Yosef’s mom is Ethiopian, and her dad is Eritrean. The two countries, located on the Horn of Africa, have a bloody history. A 30-year war ended in 1993 with Eritrea’s independence, but violence began anew in 1998 with a two-year border war that resulted in an estimated 100,000 people dead and hundreds of thousands of people displaced.

Yosef’s father and two of her brothers had fled Ethiopia before the rest of the family. For years, Yosef's family didn’t know her father’s whereabouts. After they arrived in the U.S., she learned that her father was in Great Britain. In 2008, her father was reunited with his family in Oklahoma. Yosef's other two siblings live in France and South Korea.

The only jobs her father could find in Oklahoma were ones that were taxing for someone his age, so he wound up moving to Georgia after he was offered a job preaching at an Eritrean church there, Yosef said.

Yosef started her first job as a baker and a cashier at an Oklahoma City restaurant within weeks of arriving here. She’s grateful to her former boss, who took a chance and hired her without any experience and showed her the ropes of the restaurant business. Her siblings who were old enough to work also got jobs to help support the family, and Yosef’s mom worked at an Oklahoma City museum and earned a nurse’s aid license.

Yosef eventually enrolled in school and earned a bachelor’s degree in networking and computer science from Southern Nazarene University.

In 2011, she started her own catering business. About two years later, she and her husband opened the restaurant, Haiget’s Catering and Restaurant, in Edmond. They serve Ethiopian and Kenyan cuisine, including injera, a type of sourdough bread that is a staple in Ethiopia.

Coming to the U.S. meant “a second chance at life” for her family, Yosef said.

“There are lots and lots of people sitting in war-torn countries, sitting in refugee camps,” she said. “You don't know if you're going to eat. You don’t know if you’re going to sleep safely at night. You don’t know if you’re going to hear gunshots or be bombed at night. And for us to be able to overcome all of that and have a safe place where we can safely wake up in the morning, come to work, earn your living, that means a lot.”