Ethiopian School Takes Shape

Good news, even if it is late in coming, is still good news. The Maru-Chebot First Cycle Elementary School in the Berga wetland area of Ethiopia is expanding its classroom space with a new building as you can see in this progressive triptych. The authorities are planning to add a grade level a year starting with 5th this year and going up to 8th. As we must remind ourselves, these simple additions will make a world of difference in the lives of the kids, the little girls especially. The walk to the nearest school with the higher grades is 5km, a distance tantalizingly close but out of reach for many and again, for many of the girls. So many good things come with the education of young girls and women, a set of correlations that others have firmly established through the heart-wrenching stories of individual girls or through the coldly analytical quantitative analysis. Both ways to tell the story can be effective, often to different audiences, and both are necessary. In this case, we hope to see it for a group of kids whose faces have shown through on these pages time and time again.

As I wrote last fall, it was some of our support that directly helped make this building take shape. Modest funds earlier this year went directly to purchased the corrugated steel sheets that constitute the roof. Some subsequent support, just a few hundreds of dollars from some who wanted to advance their donations, went over this fall to help outfit the new building with windows.

At the same time, Geremew highlights continuing challenges for different aspects of this integrated development program. The health extension workers, two women with one year of training apiece, have knowledge but little in the way of supplies to dispense to the needy population. When I visited in November 2007, their one room was stocked with a range of supplies provided by UNICEF. No longer. Geremew writes that they are mostly without health commodities and supplies to give out. I’ve talked to some good friends in Ethiopia who work in health services and we are hoping to find some stop gap assistance. But stock outs as they call them continue to be a long term challenge.

Two Forward, One Back

This blog features two types of posts.

One catalogs the needs of a particular community in the Ethiopian highlands a few hours drive from the capital Addis Ababa. I visited over a year ago and was humbled and impressed with their diversified approach to providing for the community’s residents young and old, male and female. Building on support from conservation organizations interested initially in their wetland area as one of two homes for an otherwise unremarkable ground nesting bird, the White-winged Fluffftail, this community and its partners fashioned a program that provided health, education, micro-credit, and livelihood services. I’ve tried to provide a glimpse of their struggles and ingenuity in meeting those challenges.

The second type of post has been about my effort, a contrivance really, to help motivate myself to get in shape. I set out to lose weight and convince fiends and family to make per pounds lost pledges that would be donated to this community. I started at the beginning of May 2008 and set myself an end of December 2008 deadline. Summer and the early fall showed some gradual but appreciable success in losing weight as previous posts and the right column counter has documented.

Then October and work and travel kicked in. The gains from what can only be defined as sublime food in Barcelona were not sufficiently balanced by Delhi belly the next week. The results on the weight loss front plateaued and eventually starting falling back. I had reached 27 pounds lost at one point which is a lot by many measures but little more than a good start for someone who started this effort in the high 200s.

And sadly my most recent weigh in (the first in over a month) put me ending the year at just 17 down. I weighed in December 29th at my mother in-laws in Ringe, Denmark. While it is appealing to highlight all the temptations spending two weeks in Germany and Denmark with friends and family, that would be a temporarily satisfying but ultimately counterproductive dead end rationalization. Same for the “I’m too busy (or tired) to exercise” -- comprehensible but unconvincing. And counter-productive on so many levels.

So like so many others as well as my own previous bouts with weigh loss (for it feels constantly like a fight), pounds lost come with pounds gained back. I’ll be in touch with all of you who have so kindly pledged support to figure out whether to continue what really should be two life-long efforts: supporting communities in need and taking care of one’s own health. I have appreciated all the kind words and support throughout.