Although my fellowship is in international Jewish communal service, you might be surprised to know that my project in Ethiopia chronicles JDC’s non-sectarian work in the region. While closely tied to a Jewish agenda to bring the “lost tribe” of Beta Israel Jews to Israel in the last century, the organization has built a wide network and great influence in the northern Gondar region where these Jews once lived, also touching the lives of ordinary Ethiopians. The impact of the work is astounding and embodies the true spirit of tikkun olam, the Jewish obligation to repair the world.
I spent last week in Gondar (with very little electricity or running water) visiting JDC related projects. At the Teda Village Veterinary Clinic, I interviewed four farmers who brought their livestock for life-saving treatment which literally saved their only livelihood. One man walked more than three hours with his cow that developed a deadly bacterial infection from eating poisonous grass, common during this dry season.
In a village neighborhood in Gondar Town , I spoke to women at the community water tap. Lined up waiting to fill jugs with clean water for 10 cents (a deal compared to the 50 cents their neighbors with running water charge), they often came several times a day to bring drinking water for the table, personal hygiene and other domestic purposes. Before the tap, some women walked nearly five miles to the next closest spring or used polluted stream water, a source of serious and potentially fatal health hazards such as malaria and diarrhea.
Thirty minutes outside the main town, we drove to the end of a dirt road followed by another twenty bumpy minutes off-road and a fifteen minute walk to an isolated school in a remote village. The grades 1-2 students beamed with pride showing me their homework in their new mud school built just two months ago. With no elementary facilities nearby, most children might never have attended school, instead becoming the traditional goat herders at age four. More than a dozen children (not in school) walked me back to the car. Most had not seen a white person before; even more amazing, three had never seen a car! As we drove, children rushed from their homes waiving, shouting and running after us.
Those feelings of pure joy though can, in an instant, turn to sadness. Back in town, an overcrowded hospital has a makeshift emergency room in outdoor tents. Patients may wait up to a week to see a doctor, sleeping outside on the ground waiting for their turn. I spent Saturday morning with a 10-year old boy with leukemia in Addis at the Mother Teresa Clinic, another JDC partner. I held his hand while two other volunteers held his arms and legs as a rare (there is one doctor for every 35,000 people) pediatrician administered a spinal tap. We sat with him while he received chemotherapy treatment because his parents, poor peasants from the south, could not afford to be there. He has been living in the clinic for more than six months alone. He is luckier than others. At a public hospital, twenty-five pediatric cancer patients are cramped into three rooms with no drugs and tumors literally bursting from and deforming their small bodies. Wishing I hadn’t come, I wanted to leave but they were so excited to see a foreign visitor, waiving, smiling and eager to practice their English, so I stayed and wound up laughing with them instead of crying.
I am always either laughing or crying, often contrary to what I expect in the situation. It is exhausting and I wonder if there is a middle ground in this beautiful country of the lowest lows and the highest highs. The clinic’s namesake Mother Teresa once said, “Let nothing perturb you, nothing frighten you. All things pass. God does not change. Patience achieves everything.” It is a blessing to meet and work with some of the most caring, dedicated and patient people in the world. I don’t know how they do it.
