Aid Syndrome

2005-12-09T23:14:00.000-08:00

It was exactly a year after the horrible Ethiopian famine of 1985/86 that took the lives of nearly 1 million Ethiopians. One Sunday morning residents of a rural village in northern Ethiopia (one among the hardly hit by the famine) gathered under a tree shed to discuss and pray for the rains that once again didn’t show up. At that meeting every body was expressing concern over the outcomes if the rain is not coming. In the middle of the consultation one farmer rose and clapped his hands for attention to tell them the following: In those horrible days last year though we lost loved ones, it was the wheat from Canada that saved us and make us survive to this very day. So friends stop worrying and start praying for the rains to come in Canada.

NOTE: In those days most of the relief food that used to be distributed have a sign on their packs that reads Canadian government. And people thought that Canada is the sole relief provider to Ethiopia.

.Boge's story

2005-12-09T09:20:00.000-08:00

Ethiopia is believed to have close 90 percent rate of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM).The most common type of the practice is Clitoridectomy, which involves the cutting of the clitoral hood, with or with out the removal of part, or the entire clitoris.
This age-old horrible act, due mainly to the efforts of activists, is currently facing the defiance of some sections of the Ethiopian society. But no other area has registered tremendous success as the one in the Kembbatta area, southern part of Ethiopia. Kembbatta – home to about one million people- had almost 100 % prevalence of FGM. But with in the last seven years a growing number of parents have started saying no to circumcision of their daughters. In every place in Kembbatta young girls in thousands are standing up for their rights and beginning to say no to mutilation rituals. A couple of years ago, it was absolutely unthinkable for a girl in Kembbatta to be engaged with out undergoing circumcision first. Because doing so was believed among the community as “a cardinal sin” that may result in rejection or denial.

The figure behind such success is Bogalech Gebre. Born and bred in the same Kembbatta area in a rural village called Zato, where as many as 8 children are born to a single couple and where FGM is highly practiced. Bogalech remembers the day she was circumcised when she was only 14.As it is the fact with most parts of rural Ethiopia, she begun to serve her parents even she was physically fit – at the age of 6. She is from a community that looks women as an object of servitude. The traditional system doesn’t allow girls to be educated for they start to think about them selves. Fortunately Bogalech became the first girl in her village to be educated beyond 4th Grade (elementary level) in the 1950s. She joined Hebrew University, Israel and became a lecturer at the Science Faculty of the Addis Ababa University in the 1970s.

It was after serving for almost two decades as a lecturer in the University of California, USA that Bogalech was awakened from her physical and emotional numbness- what had been to her as a child.

In 1998 , Bogalech established the Kembbatta Women’s Self Help Center, locally known as Kembatti-Menti Gezzimma(KMG) in that area with a fund she raised by running marathons in California and financial assistance from donors. Her center is dedicated to empower Kembbatta women and support their right to be free of harmful customary practices and other forms of abuse of which eliminating circumcision its primary goal.

Her commitment and success have won both national and international recognitions.

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Aid Syndrome

.Boge's story