When Tom Hammond ’62 says that the rural villages of Ethiopia have been left behind for the past 500 years, he is not necessarily exaggerating. Situated on a plateau of fertile highlands surrounded by desert and lowland swamps, Ethiopia’s unique climate and proximity to the Red Sea has given rise to a rich history of development. Beginning in 100 CE, the Kingdom of Aksum – located in present-day Eritrea and northeast Ethiopia – was a bustling trade center for over 800 years.
The outlying areas, though, are spotted with small agrarian communities that today make up about 80% of the population. Even prior to the Marxist takeover of the late 1970s and widespread famine of the 1980s, these swaths of Ethiopia were home to subsistence farmers living in huts that lack running water. While the urban centers have boomed in recent years, and the capital – Addis Ababa – now has a population of 4.5 million and doesn’t look much different from Los Angeles, the remote villages have not been included in Ethiopia’s commerce and infrastructure development.
Driving just two hours south of Addis Ababa, though, brings you to Yetebon, an exception to this unwritten rule.
Tom Hammond first learned of Yetebon when – while traveling to Ethiopia for the adoption of his grandchild – he met Demeke Tekle-Wold, the founder of Project Mercy. Originally from Ethiopia, Demeke and his spouse Marta Gabre-Tsadick founded Project Mercy in Indiana in 1977.
Project Mercy initially provided refugee and famine aid in the form of food, clothing, medicine and the like. When the communist government ended in the early 1990s, Marta was able to return to her native country and saw that aid was not what was truly needed. Instead, she turned Project Mercy’s mission to development. The village elders of Yetebon reached an understanding with Project Mercy, and the organization began working there in 1993.
At the time, they did not have a master plan, but they did use a concerted, holistic approach to development. Rather than handling just one of the key pillars to alleviating poverty – education, health, nutrition, vocation for adults and infrastructure – they tackled all and integrated each into their projects.
Since meeting Tekle-Wold in 2011, Hammond has been to Yetebon twice to pitch in with the work that Project Mercy is doing there. On his most recent trip, Hammond was accompanied by his daughter, a physician who worked with the midwife program. With a largely Muslim population and a traditional lifestyle, Hammond says, families in Yetebon value having eight or nine children. Even though Yetebon now has a hospital, many women gave birth in their mud and wattle tukuls until just a few years ago. As a result, Project Mercy launched an education project to bring people into the hospital for childbirth and has now seen hundreds of new families leave happy and safe.
Using only U.S. donations, Project Mercy filled holes in government funding for education by building a K-12 school that now serves 1,600 children and the preschool for the village’s 200 little learners. Integrated into those schools are meal programs that provide students with nutrition, which is why Hammond’s grandchildren, ages 16, 15, 13 and nine, spent their mornings peeling 400 hard-boiled eggs for the preschoolers.
As they grow, the children of Yetebon use their education to enter the workforce in a way that had not been possible before. Many have gone on to college and returned to the village to work as teachers or nurses. And one is in the process of being certified as one of Ethiopia’s only neurosurgeons, a far cry from the future of goat herding that might have been his only option just decades ago.
When asked about how his grandchildren took to the foreign environment and their Ethiopian peers, Hammond noted that kids are funny. “If you throw a soccer ball on a field,” he said, “they all gather around.”
Hammond was particularly eager to work in Yetebon’s experimental garden, which he had first learned about on his last trip there five years ago. Because the villagers grow their own food, finding new crops with higher yields ensures that there is always enough to go around. When Hammond saw this, he reached out to a friend at Kansas State University with a background in agriculture and facilitated a program to identify crops that will thrive in the area. The garden now provides both nutrition and education for the village.
The Hammond family had an invaluable opportunity to be on the ground with Project Mercy, painting schoolhouses and washing the feet of children about to receive their first shoes. For those who want to be involved, Project Mercy gladly accepts donations and also sells beautiful crafts made by the people of Yetebon.
Perhaps the most bittersweet aspect of Project Mercy’s work is that Yetebon is just one of many poor, rural villages in Ethiopia. But, as Hammond reflects back on his time there, he says that — even if he cannot change the large, institutional causes of poverty — he knows that the work he is doing has a direct impact on these people and this community.
Learn more about Project Mercy at projectmercy.org.