Serekalem Alemu is crocheting a basket.
Wearing a gray fleece jacket and a long gray skirt speckled with blue flowers, Alemu sits on a sofa on the second floor of a former warehouse in the industrial section of Tel Aviv. A damp Mediterranean winter breeze blows in through the open window. Traffic whizzes by on the boulevard below. With her thick, black hair held back in a ponytail, the 28-year-old winds long, narrow strips of teal-colored fabric into a ball, which will eventually become a basket.
When she's finished — it takes her about three hours to make a basket about 10 inches in diameter — her handiwork will go on sale for $25 in a boutique. She'll keep half of that and the rest goes to keep the program going.
But for Alemu, the basket isn't just about earning some money. It's therapy. It makes her feel better. And she has a lot of reasons to feel bad.
Alemu is one of 43,000 African asylum-seekers, mainly from Eritrea, Ethiopia and Sudan, who traveled by foot and vehicle many hundreds of miles to reach Israel. They're part of the largest global wave of asylum seekers since World War II.
[For more of this story, written by Sara Toth Stub, go to http://www.npr.org/sections/go...began-making-baskets]
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