Introduction

Approximately 20 percent of Canada's population are immigrants. Along with Eritrea, Uganda, Ghana, and Nigeria, Ethiopia has become one of the primary countries sending immigrants to Canada. As a result, a growing Ethiopian immigrant community is beginning to form a significant diaspora within the Canadian population. Immigrant economic integration has become a key government priority; however, the processes of immigration and settlement are inherently stressful, and therefore integration necessitates that the psychosocial well-being of immigrants be considered. As one of the largest groups of African immigrants to Canada, Ethiopians address well-being for the most part by opting to utilize and contribute to communal mechanisms in their diasporic community that support health and well-being. For Ethiopians, health is derived both from a state of equilibrium within the body and a balance between the individual and the external world. Communal mechanisms are integral in settlement and integration because, being aligned with Ethiopians’ traditional social roots, they attend to their mental, physical, spiritual, and emotional well-being, which are disrupted as a result of migration.

This chapter will explore the ways in which a series of communal mechanisms— the forming of a diasporic community, the establishment of religious institutions within that community, Mehaber (a collection of individuals with a common interest or identity that meet regularly) and Iddir (informal insurance)—exist as systems of support that offset the mental health risk factors associated with migration and integration. This exploration focuses on how these practices are shaped by the ways in which their well-being is threaded between their homeland and the host country through their interactions with transnational social fields. This chapter will discuss how these multidimensional (social to economic) communal mechanisms organize well-being, and how well-being is symbiotically organized by community. This chapter has important implications for: (a) how well-being is conceptualized, understood, and practiced cross-culturally in settlement and integration work; (b) the way well-being, as lived through community practices, structures responses that support further well-being; and (c) how cultural mental health interventions can be advanced through community mental health approaches that conceptualize community as transnational. Last, readers should note that there is not a one-dimensional story of the Ethiopian immigration experience. This work acknowledges the complicated, nuanced, and diverse experiences that make up the Ethiopian immigrant story and, as such, this chapter presents one aspect of a vital part of diaspora life seldom researched.