Bill Shore’s Letters

Letter For Africa

May 2000

Dear Friend,

Our Ethiopian Air flight departs this time tomorrow.

• We're as prepared as we'll ever be: Took the shots for yellow fever, meningitis, Hepatitis A, and tetanus/diphtheria (ouch!) as well as the pills for typhoid and malaria.
• Met with returned Peace Corps volunteers and congressional staffers.
• Spent countless hours with maps and phones to find the fastest and safest way to get from Addis Ababa to the feeding centers in the Ogaden desert through Dire Dawa, Jijiga, and Kebri Dehar.
• Best of all, Share Our Strength moved quickly last week to approve an initial grant of $21,000 to support the anti-famine efforts of our partner Oxfam, in Ethiopia.

The timing for the trip turns out to be more remarkable than we could have imagined when I first wrote to you. This is one of those rare periods when Africa dominates the news, from ABC's Nightline to a cover story in The Economist Magazine. Just three days ago Ethiopia held their national elections. Three days before that, Ethiopia's armed forces launched a major three-front assault on Eritrean forces at their disputed northern border. They explained it as an effort to end their two year long war so that Ethiopia can focus it's energies on preventing starvation in it's deserts. But neither side has covered itself in glory during fruitless negotiations to end the ferocious fighting that our UN Ambassador, Richard Holbrooke, has aptly called senseless.

Over the last few days, many of Share Our Strength's friends and supporters have asked why famine seems imminent again and whether persistent droughts make the situation in Ethiopia hopeless, or whether our efforts can eventually make a difference. In many ways they already have.

Karl Vick, a Washington Post reporter in the region suggests that the answer "lies in a complicated mix of weather cycles, inefficient farming practices, rapid population growth and a war that discourages international aid... Across the Horn, agricultural techniques remain medieval. With irrigation a rarity, more than 90 percent of farming in Ethiopia depends entirely on rainfall. Erosion is so bad that in an average year 2 billion tons of the nation's topsoil are blown away by wind, food scientists say."

Our pre-trip focus has been to get an understanding of Ethiopia's problems that goes deeper than the day's headlines. Indeed Ethiopia challenges almost all of one's expectations. At lunch last week, former Senator Harris Wofford, who now heads the Corporation on National Service but was once Peace Corps Director in Ethiopia surprised me by explaining how rich Ethiopia was in natural resources, particularly water! The country has 14 large rivers including the Blue Nile, the Gibe and the Tekeze. Many of them crisscross the Ethiopian highlands making this the most extensive contiguous area of fertile land in the eastern side of Africa. The untapped potential for irrigation projects is enormous.

Share Our Strength's philosophy that it takes more than food to fight hunger is nowhere more true than Ethiopia. Those who are hungry and dying this time are not the farmers or those in the cities. But rather the millions of pastoralists who rely on sheep, goats, cattle and camels for their food and livelihoods, and have lost them due to pastures that can't be grown or grazed without water. Today's relief effort consists not only of the distribution food and water, but also the repair of roads and ports, and technical assistance to local communities on livestock preservation methods like: rehabilitation of watering points for cattle, rehabilitation of grazing lands, provision of veterinary services and drugs and establishment of slaughter facilities.

For centuries many of Africa's societies have been geared toward survival in Africa's fickle climate, not to development. But that has begun to change. In the 1990's Ethiopia's government began to build strategic stockpiles of food for the first time and to take other measures that have enabled Ethiopia to survive three and one half years of drought. Non-governmental organizations have rehabilitated farmland, improved irrigation in drought prone areas, and distributed seeds and tools.

One of the reasons Ethiopia doesn't get all of the help it needs is that it is not easy to get help to it. Vast distances are made more so by lack of roads and broken trucks. Food and water are a five day journey from warehouse to feeding center, which would be like the Share Our Strength staff trying to get food and water from Washington, DC, all the way to California again and again and again.

By the time you read this I'll have landed in a country where my current age is the national average life expectancy. The dollars in my wallet total are more than twice the annual per capita income. The distance is too far and the challenge too great to guarantee complete success in return for your support, although most experts agree we have a better chance of averting a major famine than we've ever had before.

Perhaps this is the time to take heart in the words of Thomas Merton, the monk who advised a friend and activist: "Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on ... you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there too a great deal has to be gone through, as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down but gets much more real in the end; it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything."

I'll write soon from Gode or Yavella, and of course again once I get back. Until then please think of ways that you can help: through your family, office, or place of worship. The Share Our Strength Ethiopia Relief Fund will channel 100 percent of your donation to our partners who have literally put their own lives on hold to protect and preserve life half a world away. I'm eager to keep in touch. Thanks for your compassion, support, and most of all, your friendship.

« Previous letter | Main | Next letter »