Photo: Family Photo Clockwise from left to right: Wogene Debele with her husband, Yilma Tadesse, and their children Naod, 10, Mihret, 17 and Asher, 4, at home in Takoma Park, Md. Debele, 43, died Tuesday after giving birth to a newborn son, Levi, whom she never got to see.
Wogene Debele was eight months pregnant when, coughing and weak, she decided to return to the hospital a second time. Before leaving her family’s small high-rise apartment in Takoma Park, Maryland, she turned to her two sons, Naod, 10, and Asher, 4.
“I’m just going to get a checkup. I’ll be right back,” her 17-year-old daughter, Mihret, later recalled her telling them.
That was on March 25, the last time Debele’s children would have her in their midst. On Tuesday, after nearly a month of struggle, first at a local hospital and then at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore, Debele died of covid-19. She was 43.
She left behind not only Naod, Asher, Mihret and her husband, Yilma Asfaw Tadesse, 50, but a newborn son, Levi. Born a month premature the day Debele was admitted to the hospital, the baby was whisked into the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), free of the virus, his mother unable to hold him or even see his face.
The family immigrated from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia almost a decade ago and quickly became a warm and familiar presence within Washington area’s large Ethiopian community and among their Takoma Park neighbors. There, families in million-dollar bungalows live alongside immigrants and others of lesser means who occupy apartments, where Debele and Tadesse raised their family. All their children go to school together and play on the same soccer teams.
That is how Anne Snouck-Hurgronje came to know Debele, a stay-at-home mother, and Tadesse, a school bus driver who sometimes worked more than one job. Snouck-Hurgronje’s son, Gabriel, and Naod are both in fifth grade and have played soccer together for years on a local rec league and then on a travel league.
Snouck-Hurgronje said she mostly ran into Tadesse on carpool runs, but was impressed by Debele’s warm graciousness when she invited Snouck-Hurgronje’s family to dinner one evening. Debele made a spicy Ethiopian stew and performed the traditional Ethiopian coffee ceremony afterward, roasting and grinding the beans before her guests. On another visit, when Snouck-Hurgronje stopped by for the Ethiopian epiphany after Asher’s birth four years ago, “I was really struck by how many people came and went and could see they were part of a strong and loving community,” she said.
Takoma Park Mayor Kate Stewart has publicly expressed sorrow over Debele’s death, beginning Wednesday’s virtual city council meeting with a moment of silence in her memory, and thousands have contributed to a gofundme fundraiser set up for the famil