Above: Daniel Yohannes, new chief of the Millennium Challenge
Corporation, is the highest ranking Ethiopian American in the
Obama administration. (Photo: Daniel Yohannes is sworn in
as chief executive officer of MCC on December 1, 2009.)

Voice of America
By Yeheyes Wuhib
20 January 2010
An Ethiopian immigrant is making history as the highest Ethiopian-American official in the Obama administration. Daniel Yohannes was born in the Ethiopian capital. He completed his elementary school at Addis Ababa’s Nativity Boy’s School and later transferred to St. Joseph’s, a prestigious Catholic high school in Addis Ababa. “In those days people of my generation were idealistic, full of energy, with a lot of love for each other, as well as love and respect for our parents, elders, and teachers,” Yohannes says. “Growing up in Ethiopia, we had a wonderful awareness of our country as well as the world. We were more advanced in some ways than most teenagers today,” he says. Read more.