u/BalanceGlad8001

I will try my best to translate for those who don't understand Amharic. she is basically saying:

Her father is Tigrayan and her mother is Amhara. When she was a child, she visited her grandmother in Tigray, and one day a mother with three children came to their door to beg. What surprised her was that this woman was wearing a gold helix earring. She asked her grandmother: why is a woman with literal gold on her ear begging? Growing up in Amhara, an Amhara mother sells everything she owns before she resorts to begging. Her grandmother replied: for a Tigrayan woman, that earring is her dignity, and under no circumstances will she sell her dignity. From that day on, whenever she saw a Tigrayan woman wearing that earring, she was reminded of what it represented.

Post war, she frequently sees mothers who had come from Tigray to beg on the streets of Addis Ababa. Whenever she hears them speaking Tigrinya, or realize they're Tigrayan, the first thing she looks for is that earring.

It is gone. It's not there anymore.

She says the war didn't only take a Tigrayan mother's husband, her son, her brother, it took her dignity. And somehow, the absence of that very symbolic earring shocks her more than anything else.

To the Tigrayan diaspora, she says: we know you have resources. We saw the videos, the parades of expensive cars draped in the Tigrayan flag, the energy, the mobilization. You mobilized during the war. Now mobilize to rebuild Tigray, so that the mothers begging in Addis Ababa can go home and send their children to school.

During the war, the diaspora gave money. But poor Tigrayans inside Tigray gave themselves. you can probably earn the money back, but they sacrificed something irreplaceable.

You can't bring back her dead son, her husband or her brother. But you can give a Tigrayan mother her dignity back.

(I don't know why it sounds so dull in English, but that's roughly what she says)