Ethiopia
Two or three days a week, 13-year-old Gebre-Selassie rises at 4.30am to help his mother gather water. It’s a two-hour walk away and he doesn’t get to eat anything before they leave. Five hours later, he stops only to collect his books and eat some flat injera bread before heading out the door to school.
Projects funded: 240
Gebre-Selassie attends the afternoon shift at Tsigereda Primary School in Northern Ethiopia. Classes start at noon so he has to cover the six miles distance quickly. Almost all the schools in rural Ethiopia split their days into two shifts. This gives twice as many children the opportunity to get an education while still allowing them to contribute towards their families’ workloads.
One of the top students in his class, Gebre-Selassie wants to be a doctor and studies subjects like math and science intently. By the time he gets home at night, his day has included more than eight hours of walking and five hours of schoolwork. He eats another small meal and goes to sleep in the room he shares with his mother, father and four younger siblings.
He understands that if he works hard at school, he might be lucky enough to avoid a life as a subsistence farmer and achieve his dream of becoming a doctor.
His nine-year-old sister Ameit attends a small two-room village school near their home because she doesn’t have time to walk to the big school with her brother. Her mother needs her to work around the house caring for younger siblings, cooking, cleaning and fetching. Ameit wants to be a teacher as “they seem to lead a better life than we do.”
In truth, almost every child in rural Ethiopia wants to be either a doctor or a teacher because they are the only professions, aside from subsistence farming, that they’ve ever been exposed to. Gebre-Selassie and Ameit are lucky to be getting a chance at a better life at all.
Historically, education has only been available in the cities and larger towns and there’s still a long way to go before that imbalance is redressed. Right now, only half of all adults are able to read and write. As it is, many of the schools that do exist are so ill-equipped that students only have a minimal chance of advancing to some form of higher education or professional training.
A Glimmer of Hope views education as a key factor in helping Ethiopia move from a developing nation to a developed one. Its projects include the building or restoration of schools and the purchase of essential school supplies and furnishings.
