Doctor Mehret

President Obama recently held a town hall meeting for young African leaders at the White House. I had the chance to meet one of the young Ethiopian leaders, Salsawit Tsega Ketema, that attended the town hall and spoke with her at length about women and entrepreneurship.

Salsawit is impressive. At 30 she is an entrepreneur, designer and businesswoman who started the Sel Art Gallery, a handicrafts business which employs 35 women in the making of home accessories. She also manages TAF plc, an import/export business with over 100 employees. Ms. Salsawit is a member of the Core Team of the Women Entrepreneurs Group (WEG) in Ethiopia and also happens to be the mother of a five-month-old baby boy. We talked about many things but what impressed me most was her keen insight and sharp grasp of what women need to succeed as entrepreneurs in Ethiopia.

In case you missed the town hall, I have posted it below:

I have been working on a new film project for the past month and a half that has me very excited. I literally feel like the film found me.  I was minding my own business at a Health and Human Rights conference in Los Angeles when it happened.

Truth be told, the story actually start in Washington, D.C.  I was attending my cousin’s film premiere Guzo when the cinematographer on the film, Zeresenay Mehari, started to tell me about his own project Oblivion.  The film is about the story of a legal precedent setting case against the abudction of girls into marriage in Ethiopia. My ears immediately perked up because I recognized it was a story of women’s rights and justice.

Fast forward, a few weeks later, I am in L.A. for a conference and I connect with Zeresenay, who happens to live out there.  He gives me a copy of the screenplay and I am literally blown away by the story. I had to be a part of it. More importantly I had to help! TruthAIDS is currently designing the outreach plan for the film and helping out in any way possible to get the project done.

The production of this film will mean big things for women’s rights in Ethiopia. So thankful that it found me!

The Ethiopian Review recently posted a great article on an Ethiopian surgeon performing surgeries in remote medical care settings in rural Africa. His work is an inspiration and an example for the obligation that comes with training. (To check out the full article please click here)

Human capacity in the form of doctors and other service providers are invaluable resources in sub-Saharan Africa. I am aware of this and plan on staying in multiple places with my for this very reason. Human rights, and more specifically, social and economic rights know no geographical boundaries. My work is about teaching about the connection between health and human rights. This work takes me across many geographical boundaries, one of which is Ethiopia. I am due back this December to continue this work.

There are many Ethiopian ahead of me that are blazing a trail, some are physicians like Dr. Mengiste, some are public health practitioners like Sister Zebider, and other are good samaritans like Abebech Gobena. I hope to support all these Ethiopians in their endeavors as well as create a community in the Diaspora that can begin to get organized around the issues of social development.

My most recent involvement to this end has been serving as a technical advisor to the Ethiopian Forum for Peace, Democracy and Development (EFPDD). (Visit the Facebook page by clicking here). It is a non-political group devoted to helping Ethiopia meet her Millenium Development Goals. This groups is desperately in need of young members and I encouraged all interested to join.

The work with the EFPDD presents an important opportunity for intergenerational dialogue. The founding member’s are my father’s peer group and the Chairman, Ambassador Imru Zelleke, is one of the most active 85 year-olds I have ever met. The degree to which he is engaged in civic life, public affairs, and world matters sets a high bar for advocacy. The youth would benefit from exposure to such vitality.

I am in the process of digitizing some of the lectures the Forum has hosted on Ethiopia as part of a public video series. I hope this series will help spark dialogue and foster participation among the younger members of the Diaspora. I think it’s time young and old finally find ways of productively building bridges together and I am excited to help in this endeavor.

As far as public service is concerned, young and old need each other to prevent making the mistakes of the past and learning how to map a new future.

For those who do not know the sweet sounds of Gigi… enjoy!

“I never put a price on a child”
- Abebech Gobena

Abebech Gobena’s life is a testament to the fact that a woman’s truth cannot be bought or sold. Indeed, if she holds her ground, the world can change.

Abebech Gobena is the founder of Ethiopia’s oldest orphanage. Her accomplishments stem from an act of faith. She was on a pilgrimage to Gishen Mariam in the Wollo region of Ethiopia, an important site in the Ethiopian orthodox faith. The area was famine stricken and on her way back home she found a baby laying next to her dead mother, at a feeding center. She picked up the baby and brought her home. She subsequently brought a second baby home, who was lying next to his dead father. In one year’s time, she brought home 21 children. This simple act of love grew.

She increasingly brought home more children and raised them using her own resources. Her husband soon divorced her and her husband’s family disowned her. As you listen to her tell the story, she describes the reasoning behind the divorce as her “unusual actions.” In retrospect, it’s hard to call bringing a baby home, who would have died, unusual. Would it not be more unusual to not bring the baby home? Once you let love inform your actions, the difficult part becomes stopping it. Where do you draw the line between one too many and not enough?

Abebech’s life instructs what happens when you do not stop the love. The kids soon became 200 and in 1988 she received a permit to raise the children as orphans. Her unusual actions have grown into 6 different branches of the Abebech Gobena Children’s Care and Development organization with over 12,000 children under her care.

Love is revolutionary. We often constrain it to very narrow dimensions and separate it from our work. However, when individuals integrate it in all they do, the world changes. This takes commitment. When asked about commitment, Abebech replied:

“Commitment is everything to me. The first thing I did to start with was to commit myself fully. My vision would have gone nowhere without commitment. I had no idea as to how to proceed but I was sure that the only way forward was to work hard with my children in order to be self-supportive. During those six years, I sold all my gold ornaments. I tore all my dresses and re-sew them up into the size of the children. I didn’t have any sewing machine in those days. I stayed 24 hours a day and seven days a week with them.” (Making a Difference for Population and Development: Leaders in Action, Vol.2)

Abebech also teaches us what happens when your commitment, as defined by faith, is uncompromising. In modern times, many commit to money and personal success. However, commitment to a greater good outside of yourself is what the world needs right now. The natural disasters and wars serve as a reminder that greed is killing us. It’s women like Abebech Gobena who will save us.

(As written in, Ethiopian Review )