90 Day Fiancé: The Other Way star Ariela Weinberg reflected on her move to Ethiopia and love story with fiancé Biniyam Shibre amid their reality TV drama.
“I first arrived in Ethiopia in January 2017. I flew Ethiopian airlines from Israel,” the mom of one, 30, wrote while reminiscing on her cross-cultural journey on Wednesday, November 3. “I had vague notions of what it might be like in this new country. Of course, I was wrong. Ethiopia is hard to imagine if you haven’t been. All the Nat Geo documentaries and googling won’t help much either.”
“After that first trip, I just had to keep going back,” she confessed. “There is something about the air that is different in Ethiopia. It hits me every time I walk out the doors of Bole Airport. I fell in love with a land and a culture. Then, I fell in love with a man. And now, I am falling in love every day with my baby Avi.”
Tension between the couple reached a breaking point, however, in recent episodes of the TLC spinoff, during which she accused her fiancé, 32, of cheating on her while she was in America with their infant son to undergo an operation.
“You took the home that I had and you turned it into a party house,” Ariela said while on a video call with Biniyam during the October 31 episode. “You had girls over my house. You had all kinds of people over. I don’t know who is sleeping in my bed, who is sleeping in me and Avi’s bed. What you are doing, it’s so shameful.”
Due to her suspicions, Ariela told Biniyam she wouldn’t move back to Ethiopia after 22-month-old Avi finished recovering, suggesting they either move together to the neighboring country of Kenya or call it quits and figure out a coparenting arrangement for their son.
Fans watched as the long-distance couple got engaged during the 90 Day Fiancé: The Other Way season 2 finale in November 2020, with Biniyam getting down on one knee and proposing to Ariela on Timkat, which is the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo celebration of the baptism of Jesus Christ.
The New Jersey native and Biniyam had welcomed their baby boy on December 17, 2019, and cameras captured her emergency c-section in Ethiopia in an October 2020 episode, which aired 10 months after Aviel’s birth.
90 Day Fiancé: The Other Way airs on TLC Sundays at 8 p.m. ET. For spoilers and to find out if Ariela and Biniyam are still going strong, click here.