Bill Shore’s Letters
Heroes and Cheap Hotels
Originally published: May 2000
Dear Friend,
I returned from Ethiopia in time to take Zach to the Memorial Day opening of America's top box office hit: Mission Impossible. I don't think it will ruin the suspense to reveal that Tom Cruise prevails in the end. What makes him the movie's hero however is not just his mastery of high tech gadgetry, fighting ability, or getting the girl in time-honored Hollywood fashion. Actually Tom Cruise's character follows the classic trajectory of all mythic heroes from Homer's Oddysseus to Star Wars' Luke Skywalker. He journeys far from the comfort of home, sacrifices and suffers while being tested and tried, finally to return more capable of protecting his loved ones.
The map of Ethiopia doesn't lie, but it can deceive. It certainly can't convey the enormity of the Rift Valley, a vast landscape with no horizon, dotted with round thatched roof houses that are so small on the dry land they look like caramel candies that spilled in your yard.
On the map the road to Yabello is a thick, brightly bordered orange stripe that looks just like the Pennsylvania or New Jersey Turnpike. There is a route sign on the map, like our Interstate shields, that says Route 6, as if it were a real road. How would you know it is unpaved and jammed with sheep, goats, mules and chickens and that villagers by the hundreds stand chatting in the middle, not quite ignoring the rare landrover that roars by, just barely shifting their weight to avoid being hit, the vehicle with horn bleeting, coming within inches of them? Chuck turns from the seat in front and warns, "It's better not to look."
We spent more than 9 hours a day in that landrover, with no air conditioning and windows up to keep out the fine, choking dust. Our rest at journey's end came in a hotel with no name, a kind of stable with 8 small rooms, and a rooster for a wake-up call. The $1.10 a night seemed fair given that the generator provided electricity for only two hours a day, which was two hours more than bathrooms were available.
The payoff for this arduous trek was supposed to be the projects we'd see: the new diesel generator pumping water from river to village, the veterinarian post helping so many Ethiopians keep livestock alive, the experimental farming plots testing which crops grow best in the desert. But the real reward was not the projects at all, but rather the people, especially a select few we got to know whose skills and strengths will likely change what had been thought to be Ethiopia's harsh fate.
What's most exciting to report is not what Share Our Strength or other international agencies are doing, but what the Ethiopians are doing for themselves. I don't mean the government. I mean a generation of their best and brightest who have given more of themselves than anyone has a right to expect.
Abera Tola, our host for the week, is one of them. A soft-spoken 39 year-old who lives in a quiet neighborhood high on a hill overlooking Addis Ababa, Abera was proud to share Ethiopia's history and culture, and to introduce us to his family and neighbors. In between appointments one afternoon near the end of our visit, he explained "my story is kind of long and a little complicated." His father's land had been confiscated by the government, and in the 1980's Abera was imprisoned for ten years because of his political status. After his release he struggled to create a grassroots development organization to foster more economic opportunity for the poorest Ethiopians. Eventually he raised $57,000 to come to the U.S. for a graduate degree at Harvard's Kennedy School. He couldn't afford to bring his family and the youngest of his three children was born while he was in Cambridge.
Abera brought his learning back to Ethiopia. Today he leads the efforts of Share Our Strength partner, Oxfam, and coordinates strategy and resources for local development efforts. His colleague, Yoseph Negassa, received his education in Great Britain and returned to become executive director of Action for Development, a small organization bringing new practices like pond rehabilitation and crop production to the nomadic pastoralists vulnerable to drought. Chuck and I met a dozen others like Abera and Yoseph: livestock experts, agronomists, veterinarians, water engineers. More than humanitarians, they are patriots in the old-fashioned sense of the word. Like the heroes of history and literature, they journeyed far to prepare themselves, and returned to where the need is greatest.
Up early one morning with the rooster, in a remote village before dawn's first light, watching Abera walk with a water bucket to the latrine dug into the ground behind our $1.10 rooms, I think of the simple pleasures he must have enjoyed sitting at a Starbucks near Harvard Square, or the way his eyes come alive when talking about the rows of books he browsed in Cambridge's many bookstores. I wonder if he thinks of this, or longs for the comfortable life that was his, that could be his yet, but for the quiet, steady commitment to his homeland and the unfinished -- perhaps unfinishable -- business at hand.
The opportunity to help feed people is one of the great privileges afforded Share Our Strength. Today we are also being given that rare chance to walk among and stand behind heroes. Not the sexy, cinematic variety, but the age-old, timeless heroes, defined by classic journeys, both physical and spiritual, which ultimately bring them home. Is anyone more deserving of our support?
Seven days in Ethiopia is not long enough to develop an expertise, but it is enough to cement a commitment.
As taxing as our trip turned out to be, the real challenge is just beginning. It's not difficult to write a convincing letter when the dust of the desert still coats your throat, and the day has been spent futilely waving flies from an emaciated child. The hard part comes when you get back, after the hot bath, and the Memorial Day movie or barbecue, and your fifth-grader's spring concert, with ice cream cones on a summer evening and her questions about why you work and travel so much. The hard part is not succumbing to distractions, excuses, and rationalizations that "we did as much as we could."
We haven't yet done as much as we could. But the initial response has been gratifying, with individual contributions to Share Our Strength's Ethiopia Relief Fund ranging from $10 dollars to $10,000. Just yesterday, USA Today Weekend magazine agreed to run an appeal that will reach 57 million readers.
We saw in Ethiopia that even a few dollars can make an enormous, life-saving difference. 100 percent of the funds raised will directly support our partners doing the most effective work to prevent drought and famine. On behalf of both the hungry and the heroes, thanks for all of the hard work that enables Share Our Strength to be there when and where we're needed.
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