Ethiopian Pearls of Wisdom

Today the morning project was cancelled as one of the boy’s mother died on Friday and most of the boys attended the funeral.

On the way back home I met guy called Ababa who latched on to me for some conversation in English. He was a computer science student at the local college and invited me for a coffee. He introduced me to a young woman in her early twenties who was the owner of the place. We exchanged a few comments about my work with the street-children and she replied with another of the pearls of wisdom that keep coming at you in Ethiopia, “Thank you for looking after the other half of my body. I have one half and the street-children have the other half”. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting to hear but any doubts about the impact you are having quickly disappear when someone throws this at you.

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The Ethiopian football final tournament for U-15 and U-17 started today in Mekelle. Andy and I were invited into the main stand area as important guests; maybe they thought we were talent scouts for the English Premiership? Five minutes from the end of the opening game the opposition coach took exception to the Ref’s decision and pulled the whole team off and only after police and officials’ involvement did the team trek back on again. The game ended with no further goals or incidents, but it certainly was a very exciting episode in the game.

In the evening we had a visitor, Irene, from Caritas Germany which is the main sponsor for the Street-Children Project. During dinner we were able to exchange experiences and ideas about the project and its work. As a SCIAF volunteer, these discussions are invaluable in helping me understand that the overall problem can’t be fully addressed just by throwing money at it. It’s a combination of identifying key target areas that can make progress and providing skills, experience and obviously the right levels of long-term finance.

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John Bradley has now arrived from Ireland. John has taken leave from his job as an accountant and will be picking up the same work as Andy and myself through till the end of October.

After the walk down from the project at 5pm, we picked up John and went up to the local café for a nice cool fruit juice with seven of the boys. Mogus, who is 12 and looked sad and half asleep. He sleeps in the local restaurant and only gets in near closing time and has to be out during the day. He is one of the boys we have on the project who is homeless. We walked down the street when the juices were finished, us to our nice rooms and dinner that night, the boys to whatever small comforts they could find before night time fell.

Tommy Dobbin
20th August 2007