by Elizabeth López-Rigaudeau, AWC Zürich
Dear Lisa & Jean-Paul,
Hello. How are you? I hope everything is OK by your side…We are safe from the pandemic at first and now because of the war I hope everything will be restored so we can go back to school. I want to appreciate and I am great full for the never ending support you are providing…May God bless you and keep you safe…They kill children, they people hungry, they rape women’s.
Yours, Elsa
This letter was received on April 20, 2021. Elsa is 15 years old and one of five students whom my husband and I have sponsored since 2012 at the Nicolas School in the Tigray region of Ethiopia. As sponsors, we receive two letters a year from our children, but this one caused us much grief and anxiety. It touched us the way a newspaper article or a TV anchorperson cannot: It felt personal.
The situation in Tigray
Ethiopia has been in the news lately, not only because of COVID-19, but because of the latest civil war, which broke out in November 2020 and has wrought devastation on the Tigray people. Mass killings, rapes and destruction of property have been widely reported, and the unrest threatens to cause mass starvation in the short run if left unchecked. In a New York Times opinion piece, “The Anguish of the World’s Doctor,” author Nicholas Kristof described the situation starkly:
Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the World Health Organization, has largely kept his pain secret, maintaining a stoic public front. But when I probed, he wept.
Dr. Tedros is from Tigray, a part of Ethiopia that since November has endured crimes against humanity by Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has properly described atrocities in western Tigray as ethnic cleansing, but the world has largely been indifferent. Tigrayan children are starving to death, men have been clubbed to death, and women and girls have been subjected to mass rape. Ethiopian opposition parties claim that more than 50,000 people have been killed — that is not verifiable, and the toll is unknown — and the scale of torture, starvation, murder and destruction in the past few months may have been the worst in the world.
“Hunger is weaponized, rape is weaponized, there is indiscriminate killing,” Dr. Tedros said. “The whole region is hungry.”
The situation on the ground: A case in point – The Nicolas Robinson School
The Nicolas school was built and is run by the Rainbows4children Foundation (R4C is Swiss and UK-registered), and educates 1400 students (ages 4–18) whose parents are severely disabled veterans of recent wars and as such belong to the poorest families. Our school is considered one of the best schools in Ethiopia on the basis of our students’ academic achievements and the quality of the education they receive. We are especially proud of the three young women who have been admitted to US colleges with full scholarships. We make yearly trips to the school to volunteer, and my husband is a trustee of the Foundation.
Due to the current situation, the R4C community living abroad went months without hearing anything from our sponsored children, their families or the staff at the Nicolas School. We were also worried about the security of the school grounds and buildings, since most local schools have been either ransacked or turned into refugee camps. Luckily, our school was spared, since the headmaster arranged for 24-hour surveillance of the grounds. However, we have lost the income (20% of our budget) that the school received for 300 children sponsored by a local company that has been looted and ruined.
The well-being of our students worries our local staff. We have been able to pay our staff salaries throughout the crisis, and we have supplied them and the families of our students with supplementary food. This food program has probably reached about 10,000 people. The financial gap is one of our current existential challenges: the deeper wounds will be psychological and emotional, as evidenced in Elsa’s letter.
In 2016, the Rainbows4children Foundation received a FAWCO Foundation Development Grant that was used towards the construction of a shower facility on the school grounds. Specifically, the funds covered the cost of the sanitary ware for the showers and the installation of a water cleaning system and pump by an adjacent well. The showers have improved the overall health of our high school students, increased their participation in sports, and encouraged more consistent school attendance. The effect on our female students has been particularly positive: PE grades showed a marked improvement for many. Additionally, the entire school community has benefited from the showers and the availability of clean water thanks to our solar panels that provide energy for the water pump. For months there was no electricity and while it has been restored, it is unreliable. Thus, unlike our school, most places do not have water. The older students are encouraged to play sports at school, which helps their mental health; the showers provide a big incentive, and many carry refilled water bottles back home with them.
Understandably, COVID-19 has deflected the world’s attention from very dangerous hot spots, of which Ethiopia is one of many. In the absence of a mega-event on the order of Live Aid, those of us who engage with charitable causes can rely on organizations such as FAWCO and the Rainbows4children Foundation to provide us with a meaningful and effective way to become involved. To get personal.
For further reading on the current situation in Ethiopia:
“The Anguish of the World’s Doctor” by Nicholas Kristof, New York Times, April 24, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/24/opinion/sunday/tedros-ethiopia-tigray.html?referringSource=articleShare
Talking Africa Podcast – an interview with Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, by Patrick Smith, April 9, 2021
https://www.theafricareport.com/77725/famine-in-tigray-i-have-never-documented-anything-as-relentless-systematic-as-what-were-seeing/amp/?__twitter_impression=true&fbclid=IwAR2RA9grsHhUdfFoN-CxVi-2k6yKB1RfpsWd8te0_FTnGHWYiqeumureOyw
“Ethiopia’s Perilous Propaganda War” by Nic Cheeseman and Yohannes Woldemariam, Foreign Affairs, April 8, 2021
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/africa/2021-04-08/ethiopias-perilous-propaganda-war
“Tigray crisis: Why there are fears of civil war in Ethiopia” By Desta Gebremedhin, BBC Tigrinya, Nov. 13, 2020 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-54826875
CNN report by Nima Elbagir, May 12, 2021 https://edition.cnn.com/2021/05/12/africa/tigray-axum-aid-blockade-cmd-intl/index.html
My blog: https://rainbowsinethiopia.wordpress.com
For more information on the Rainbows4children Fundation: https://www.rainbows4children.org/
photos by Elizabeth López-Rigaudeau