In 1972 a severe famine broke out in Ethiopia, leading to the deaths of roughly 60,000 individuals. Amidst unrest, the Marxist Derg assassinated the Emperor Haile Selassie, leading to the start of civil war in 1974. hree years later the war reached the town of Axum in northern Ethiopia, where a toddler named Milka lived with her mother. Together, Milka and her mother walked into Sudanese territory where, she explains, she grew up learning:

In 2003, frustrated by the xenophobia she had experienced her whole life, she paid smugglers to take her by bus to Wadi Halfa, and then by boat to Egypt, and then by Jeep to the Sinai Desert, eventually reaching the border fence with Israel. She climbed the fence, dropped onto a mound of sand on the other side, and brushed herself off, hailing a cab to Tel Aviv an hour later. Once there, she worked on the black market for over a decade, cleaning rooms in hotels, and then selling fresh Ethiopian injera bread to locals in the surrounding neighborhoods. She married, had two children, and divorced in 2011, the same year her injera business began floundering. She struggled to pay rent or purchase food for herself or her children, and considered returning to Ethiopia. She felt it would be safe, and had extensive knowledge about her hometown, her sister having moved back several years earlier.

As Milka considered whether to repatriate, an Israeli Member of Knesset stepped onto a podium in South Tel Aviv. Standing before thousands of anti-immigration protesters, she declared that Africans were “a cancer to the body,” an opinion shared by most in Israel. Shortly after her speech citizens smashed windows of African-owned shops, a protester threw a grenade at a nursery with African children, and three Eritreans were stabbed to death walking home from work.