Yonas Oukubamichael 1, 2014 June 22

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Digital-materials RL11613-SET-0009, Image-file RL.11613-TIFF-0539

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Original file id: _ZL_0624

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Yonas Oukubamichael works at his Eritrean cuisine restaurant Selam, in Hamrun, Malta June 22, 2014. Yonas was 20 when he fled war and persecution in Eritrea in 2004. He paid smugglers to take him across the Sahara to Libya and then got on a rickety boat of immigrants all searching for a better life in Europe. The boat made it as far as Malta. After spending several months in a detention camp, Yonas started working 18 hours a day at a vegetable shop in the daytime and as a dishwasher at night. By 2011, he had saved up enough to open his own restaurant, Selma, serving Ethiopian and Eritrean cuisine in Hamrun, a small town just outside Malta's capital, Valletta. "My Maltese friends would always ask me what Eritrean food was like, so I would cook for them. Eventually I was cooking so much that it just made sense to open a restaurant., " he says. Today he employs three staff, with his Maltese girlfriend Stephanie helping out whenever things get particularly busy. He still works long hours, getting up at 5am each morning then spending the rest of the day hurrying between his restaurant, its kitchen and a chill-out lounge and internet cafe he's opened next door. Photo: Darrin Zammit Lupi

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