In the dark alleys behind the hustle and bustle of Harvard Square hangs a blue neon sign that beckons evening stragglers into a coffee paradise. Getting to it from the heart of Harvard Square, on a breezy Spring night, requires artful maneuvers around scattered semi-circles of rowdy spectators. On warm Spring nights, when daylight hovers longer, and when the last snowfall has melted into a distant memory, when the lilacs haven't yet bloomed, but the street bums, punks and panhandlers have returned to signal the coming of Spring, Harvard Square explodes into an outdoor circus. Street performers sprout along shop fronts, mark out semi-circular territories, and re-channel the crowd flow into scattered island clusters.

The tune of Peruvian flutes greets you as you emerge from the subway tunnel. A square-evangelist donning a cardboard vest calls out to you to accept Jesus. A pre-teen solo drummer captures his way into your wallet. A morose looking old man, with a campers' bag at his feet, stands motionless a few feet away hugging a cardboard sign that promises recitals at 50 cents apiece. Further back, armies of disheveled chess junkies combat it out on the expansive patio of the Au Bon Pain café. To the right, The Out of Town News store, favored mostly for its repertoire of porn magazines stands like the quiet epicenter of the swirling commotion. The tune of a solo guitarist draws you across the street to a belly-buttoned young blonde with high-rise platform shoes. Another circle of spectators suckers you further to the black-suited magician who tap-taps the bottoms of empty metal cups and gets coins, lemons and tennis balls to drop out. Then you move on to the torch and machete juggler balanced on a rope suspension, and just when you're through and teetering on the edge of tourist-worthy Harvard Square, you come to the blue neon sign.

Caffè Paradiso, it says. And just in case you are blue-blind, it beckons you again with a white neon sign that hangs right above the glass door. Caffè Paradiso. In the dark, it looks like a trapezoidal capsule of light soldered to the side of a cruiser. In daylight, with outward-facing sides entirely in glass, it looks more like a greenhouse sheltering vegetating social drinkers and pathetic pastry junkies.

As you stand at the register at the tail end of a long line, you steal a casual glance at the revolving dessert stand, and you're taunted by the 'Paradiso torte' that flashes past every five seconds. But it is not the sinful dessert selection that draws you in. It is not the potent smell of gourmet Italian coffee. It's the look of the clientele that draws you in. In a city where cafés tend to be study joints for laptop-hugging and mobile-library-hauling grad students from the multitude of local universities, in a city where most cafés are characterized by the institutional affiliation of their favored clientele, Caffè Paradiso is a rarity -- what draws you in is the scattered islands of unmistakable habesha faces spilled over adjacent tables.

If you've ever noticed the unlikelihood of meeting habeshas in the touristy sections of western cities, you're puzzled out of your wits at the coincidence. A coincidence, you'll soon come to learn, it isn't. Despite its location away from enclaves of habesha residence, Caffè Paradiso serves as the hub of the Horn -- A routing center for the social network of young folks from Eritrea, Ethiopia, and, lately, even Somalia. An Italian coffee store, run by Brazilian barristas, and loyally frequented by clientele from the Horn of Africa.

People of the Horn straggle to Paradiso in tuples, driven by the cliquish impulse of their cultures, and their prideful hunger for the company of other compatriots. Here, they congregate to trade stock tips, to exchange dating wisdoms, to weave tales of past lives in the boondocks and in the refugee camps, with drama accentuated by the whooshing and humming of the cappuccino machine. Here, they raise and drop national politics. Exchange risqué jokes with much brouhaha. Here, amid sips of fuming Americano and Earl Grey, the idealism of those who left Ethiopia at the twilight of their teenage years is cross-hatched with the pragmatism of those who left Ethiopia with the bitter taste of adulthood stunted by kowtowing, back-biting and corrupt protocols of the work place. Here, envigorated by a serving of tiramisu or a gulp of black espresso, those with F-1 and H-1B visas who camp out in dreary labs and cubicles and who've always kept one eye homeward preach to those with green cards and US passports who own property in affluent suburbs and who've vowed never to reach back except with helping hands.

Caffeine is merely the catalyst, and Paradiso merely the backdrop. The smell of coffee brew hovers like a cap of wisdom above every head. There it merges with the hot air spewed from all the jinjenna and all the subdued romantic whispers and all the loud, animated, condescending lectures offered by bespectacled self-declared scholars to sucker companions, and creates a warm and hazy embrace that gives Paradiso a sublime and uplifting ambiance as though it were the brightly lit interior of a lonely vessel afloat on the high seas on a moonless night.

True that not everybody knows your name at Paradiso. But it's a homey joint where many will know your face. It's the trading floor for mergers and acquisitions of habesha friendship. Here, strands of habesha networks are woven into mega connections. You, a habesha friend of mine, pop in with two of your cousins while I, having gratified my Caffeine craving more than an hour before, linger around in a circle of three other habeshoch. By the time we've pulled together two adjacent tables and several neighboring chairs and plop down to mingle and schmooze, we will have triggered 12 distinct handshakes. If your name is Marta and your cousins are female, the greetings will have given way to a whopping total of 36 distinct mPuwa's to the cheeks. If, instead, you were the Marta who thinks of me as a perverted, gutless, slime to be avoided at all cost, you probably would not walk in in the first place, because you would know about the free preview feature that Paradiso affords. One long sweeping scan inward through the glass exterior will, when appropriate, set off your Undesired-Persons-Present (UPP) alarm or your Desired-Persons-Not-Present (DPNP) alarm, and you turn away gracefully under the camouflage of darkness, and make do with a lesser paradise.

In the absence of Amanuel Hospital, EnToTo Mariam, and Hibret Meredaja Iddir, Paradiso fills multiple social voids. It's the iddir to those who have mishaps to share, the iqub to those who wish to cross-fertilize business ideas, the Tej bEt to those who need that sublime, embracing, warmth of being transported to distant memories of home. It is the mender coffee commune of home to those who come for the caffeine and stay for the company, the shrink central to those who need the services of verbal therapy, a secular shrine to those who seek sermons on worldly wisdom.

Above all, Caffè Paradiso is just the watering hole you wish you could find when the ever burning fire beneath your seat launches you off, again, to a new career in a strange city.