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The Ethiopian American
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I have been blessed, these last five years, to see my life enriched in many ways by Ethiopia.
Several years ago, my husband Don Samuel and I, and our five children, welcomed into our family a small girl named Helen, age five, orphaned by HIV/AIDS, who had been living in an orphanage in Addis Ababa.
In 2001, I flew over to meet Helen and at the same time to report a story for The New York Times Magazine (I am a journalist and author).
That article, "What Will Happen to Africa's AIDS Orphans" appeared on 12/22/02 and can be read at nytimes.com or here: http://www.melissafaygreene.com/pages/afraidsorph.html.
Helen came to Atlanta on February 14, 2002, a very shy and very cute little girl with a head full of beads and braids. Within a few days we discovered that Helen was reading and writing in both Amharic and English. When she gained enough courage to whisper to us, she confided that her late mother, Bogalech, had taught her to read Amharic at age four and English at five. Within months of arriving in the U.S., Helen scored straight 99s on the standardized tests, skipped ESOL classes, and went directly to school courses for the gifted.
Today, at ten, Helen is the light of our lives: beautiful, athletic, funny, musical. She plays two instruments, is learning three languages, and is a soccer star and a dancer. Most of all she is a loving and religious little girl, who was forced to watch her precious mother die from a treatable disease.
Two years ago we adopted 10-year-old Fisseha who came from Jimma where he'd worked as a goat-herder all his childhood. More recently he lived with an elderly woman he called Grandmother, in Addis. He, too, has incredibly enriched our lives. He is handsome, athletic, funny, smart, and loving. We stay in touch with Grandmother — Tsehaye — and we sponsor Fisseha's older sister to go to school, whereas previously she was working ten-hour days in a brick factory in Addis.
Our three oldest children — Molly, 24, Seth, 22, and Lee, 18 — all have spent time in Addis (and all pay polite visits to Tsehaye, who greets each one of them like a long-lost grandchild). Our son Lee spent four months in Addis this past year, volunteering in several orphanages; on his own, he created an orphanage soccer league, made many Ethiopian friends, learned to do Guragge dancing, ate raw meat with his Ethiopian friends, got tapeworm, got ringworm, thought it was all thrilling, and now speaks Amharic. He is spending the current academic year in Israel, where he has immediately made friends with Ethiopian-Israelis who never met an Amharic-speaking white person before.
Finally, in personal news, we are in the process of adopting a pair of brothers — Yosef and Daniel Gizaw — who currently reside at the foster home described in my book. They'll arrive this fall. They are 10 and 12 years old.
On the professional front, I'm the author of three award-winning books of nonfiction. The first, PRAYING FOR SHEETROCK, was named to a list of the 100 top works of English-language journalism of the 20th century.
The new book, THERE IS NO ME WITHOUT YOU, is a portrait of a middle-aged widow named Haregewoin Teferra who accidentally became a foster mother to hundreds of children. I wanted to create a portrait of what HIV/AIDS is doing to Ethiopia's children which was also a portrait of the Ethiopian adults on the frontlines, trying to save as many lives as possible. W/o Haregewoin is not a saint; she has hard times; she messes up; she gets in trouble; but she has a good heart and she is doing the best she can. She is still, right now, today, on the frontlines, hauling in more children from the streets than she can honestly manage. I hope the book will alert outsiders that the crisis is happening right now, before our eyes.
Here in the West, we have the funds, we have the drugs, and we have the tools to turn back this devouring plague. Western nations have plundered Africa for centuries; the same rich nations now make elaborate promises (as at the G-8 last summer), but lag in payments. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria faces a billion-dollar shortfall next year.
W/o Haregewoin shows that — even fallibly, non-professionally, even accidentally — it is possible for normal citizens to intervene.
What can Diaspora Ethiopians do to help?
I am always struck by the passionate concern of Diaspora Ethiopians I meet in the U.S. and I am often asked, "What can we do??" A few thoughts come to mind: For those interested in adoption of the adoption of an orphaned relative, or of an unrelated orphan child — the process is not insurmountable.
Fingerprinting, home visits by a social worker, and gathering tax records, bank records, employment records, residential records, medical reports it's tedious, time-consuming, but do-able. About half-a-dozen American adoption agencies have been approved by the Ethiopian government to perform inter-country adoptions; non-agency adoptions can happen, too, but make sure you find a trustworthy facilitator in Ethiopia who can confirm that the child in question is truly an orphan in need of adoptive placement. http://travel.state.gov/family/adoption/country/country_380.html will give you the U.S. government outline of the process.
The sponsorship of a child or young adult also is life-saving. This can be done through an organization, such as AHOPE ahopeforchildren.org], or it can be done more informally, personally. After a recent trip to Addis, my 18-year-old son Lee brought home some pencil sketches done by a guy his age living in a poor shed off a mud road, with whom he'd become friendly. They were astoundingly beautiful sketches. Our neighbor in Atlanta saw them spread across our dining room table and Exclaimed over them. Then she said: Give me this project. I can do this. I can't adopt, but I can do this.
When Lee flew back to Addis, he took a small duffle-bag from our neighbor for the young man, full of sketch-books, pens, paints, and words of encouragement. This young man now is selling his work through my friend in Atlanta; she, in turn, is helping him to assemble a portfolio and will help him apply, maybe a year from now, to the art department of Addis Ababa University.
For my middle-class white American friends, we're talking a time-commitment of less than an hour a month. For this young man, Desta, who had no way to turn his dreams of being an artist into reality, it means the difference between despair and hope.
As you all know, Ethiopia's economy is listless; the unemployment picture is one of the worst in the world. Whatever you can imagine to do, to promote education and/or generate jobs, would save lives as well. If you have a business and can out-source work that would be life-saving.
The Government is distributing free anti-retrovirals [ARVs], the anti-AIDS drugs, to Thousands of people; but the people must be well-fed for the medication to work and there are no free food distribution points, as far as I know. People come to me all the time begging not for hand-outs but for work. If you have a shop that can sell products created by Ethiopian artisans; if you can export your product to Ethiopian merchants (though it's hard to compete against Chinese goods), these can help destitute people earn a living.
Health workers and teachers are desperately needed across Ethiopia. If you can go for three months, six months, a year, sharing your skills with children, with patients, and with professional peers, to leave behind better-trained colleagues than you found any of these actions would be remarkable gifts.
I list, on my website, a few organizations in the front-lines of trying to help. All need money. Money, finally, is what drives the world; money decides who will get drugs and who will die; money dictates that the pharmaceutical company's research cures for baldness, while millions of people die of TB and malaria. Give, give, and give.
Contact the organizations by email, letter, or phone, and join one. NGOs (non-governmental organizations) are driving a lot of the change for good in poor countries. If I had to say the main thing my research has taught me, it's this: we are not separate; we don't live in different worlds. We can reach out to the people who are faltering under tremendous and unfair burdens. We can assume part of those burdens. Ethiopian-Americans know this far better than most.
