About Choices and Values
We are a father/daughter pair.
While we have our individual interests, we share many common ghosts. Three decades of difference in age does not seem to matter much to the questions that haunt us: purpose, identity, culture...and personal productivity.
The broad theme of behavioral psychology and our mutual love of writing inspired this site — which takes its name from the book Choices, Values and Frames by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.
About Azmera Gebre
Hi! I’m Azmera, the firstborn.
I am a swimmer, a pianist, and I spend too much time writing and not enough going outside.
I love reading all things sci-fi/fantasy and painting things I’m obsessed with.
Since I can’t magically appear in a fictional series of my choosing, I’m not really sure what I want to be when I grow up.
About Biniam Gebre
Hi. I'm Biniam, the dad.
Between the ages of 7 and 9, I was smuggled out of Ethiopia dressed as a little girl and delivered to America where I met my mother for the first time.
There were a number of actors in this drama.
There was the mother who left me behind as a toddler and the leaders of the local militia chasing her down.
There was the family with whom I was deposited that fostered me for the proceeding five years.
There was the old lady, the hired smuggler pretending to be my mother, who escorted me across the border to Sudan.
There were the dad and his three boys—the youngest who killed himself—with whom I lived in Sudan before we made our way to New York.
There were the U.S. government employees who processed and approved the paperwork, opening the gates to Paradise.
There was the man my mother married for a ticket into America. The man who stood next to her, playing the role of the father, when I first met her.
I often think about what might have gone on in the minds of all these people.
About what fears kept them up at night? The dreams they might have held close to their hearts. What inspired the choices they made? And why those choices ultimately lead their lives to thread into mine?