The winners of Sunday’s Buffalo Marathon were a long way from home.
The men’s and women’s champion were from Ethiopia in the annual race held throughout the city. Habtamu Bekele won the men’s division in 2 hours, 26 minutes and 5 seconds. Meserte Kotu took the women’s title in a course-record time of 2:43:08; the old mark was 2:44:57 set by Beth Anne DeCiantis in 1991.
Kotu was far too good for the field, taking the victory by more than 10 minutes over defending champion Jessica Allen. Kotu has a personal best of 2:30:02, so she figured to be a top contender Sunday.
Kotu had the most profitable day of any of the participants, earning $2,000 for the victory and $1,000 for the course record for a total of $3,000.
Bekele, who runs out of Marietta, Georgia, won by a a relatively comfortable 16 seconds. Jason Lokwatom, a Kenyan running out of Troy, Ohio, was second at 2:26:21.
Bekele has raced throughout the world. He ran the 26-mile, 385-yard distance in an impressive 2:10:43 during the 2003 Rome marathon.
For more details on the race, see Monday’s editions of The Buffalo News.
InDevelop Uppsala Ab is a Swedish consultancy company specialising in health and social sector reform and private sector development worldwide. On behalf of the Nordic Embassies in Ethiopia and Mozambique respectively, InDevelop operates two medical clinics; one in Addis Ababa and one in Maputo.
The clinics provide outpatient health care services to expatriate personnel, and InDevelop is now looking to recruit a medical doctor on a two year basis to the clinic in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia. The recruitment is under the condition that the contract with the Embassy of Sweden will be prolonged for another two year term.
Besides medical responsibility, the doctor will also be in charge of the clinic including administrative, financial and managerial responsibilities.
The qualifications required are, in short:
– Experience as a general practitioner, with an extensive medical background.
– Experience in tropical medicine.
– Managerial experience.
– Languages: English and either Swedish, Danish or Norwegian.
For further information, please contact:
Anders Wikman, InDevelop Ab, Biblioteksgatan 24, SE- 114 35 Stockholm, Sweden. E-mail: [email protected]
GENEVA — A former Ethiopian political prisoner, who made a new life for himself in Ottawa after arriving as a refugee in 1992, is the new head of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.
Bekele Geleta’s new position as secretary-general of the world’s largest humanitarian organization was announced late Wednesday.
The organization co-ordinates the relief efforts of more than 186 member Red Cross and Red Crescent societies.
Geleta, 64, is currently the general manager of international operations for the Canadian Red Cross. He spent five years in prison in Ethiopia.
After coming to Canada as a refugee, he started to build a career in humanitarian work.
MIDLAND, IRELAND — Supporting business development in Ethiopia will be the subject of a breakfast meeting hosted by Connect Ethiopia, to take place in Mullingar in June.
Businesses from across the Midlands who are interested in learning how they can offer direct training or mentoring to their Ethiopian counterparts are invited to attend the breakfast meeting, which will take place on Tuesday June 10 in the Mullingar Park Hotel.
Connect Ethiopia is a business initiative established in 2005 to develop trade and business partnerships between Ireland and Ethiopia. The initiative also encourages trade and investment in Ethiopia by Irish investors.
The objective of the forthcoming breakfast meeting is to engage with businesses interested in travelling to Ethiopia to share their skills, business knowledge, and possibly set up a partnership in business initiatives with similar companies. Connect Ethiopia plans to bring a delegation of business people to Ethiopia in November.
According to Brody Sweeney, one of the founders of Connect Ethiopia, “most businesses are interested in corporate social responsibility, but want to know that in engaging in such activities, they can achieve rewarding and tangible results, including new business opportunities. This is at the heart of what Connect Ethiopia is trying to achieve.
“Our focus on Ethiopia comes at a time when the Government there has prioritised efforts to grow the economy and provide a more conducive environment for business growth and development. This represents our third year of bringing missions to Ethiopia. Previous missions included delegates from the banking, insurance, textile retail, and coffee retail sectors. As a result, ongoing business support and mentoring has continued and trade has now opened up in a number of areas.”
The Connect Ethiopia breakfast meeting takes place on Tuesday June 10 at 8am in the Mullingar Park Hotel.
Those wishing to attend should contact Sandra O’Sullivan, Connect Ethiopia at (087) 4171809 or email [email protected]
While many of their peers are wiling away their hours playing video games and chatting on MySpace, Eli Ezra and his band are holed up in a recording studio in Kiryat Nordo in Netanya, Israel. There, amid the sound-mixing boards and microphones, they sing about racism, poverty and violence, for what they hope will become their first album.
Ezra, 18, is the lead singer of Café Shachor Hazak, a teenage hip-hop band that has been turning heads in Israel. Since forming in 2006, the group has toured around the country and appeared on “A Star Is Born,” Israel’s version of “American Idol.”
The band is currently touring the United States, and had a stopover for performances in the Bay Area in early May.
All members of Café Shachor Hazak (Strong Black Coffee in English) are Ethiopian Jews either born in Israel or brought there during one of the three airlifts Israel made between 1984 and 1991. Ezra, who was 2 years old when he immigrated with his family, grew up in Netanya and turned to music at an early age.
Spending time at a local community center, Ezra and his friends Moshe, Elak, Uri and Aviram, who today make up the band, started taking classes in music.
There, they learned how not only to write songs, but also to record them on professional studio equipment, much of it donated by Israeli cell phone company Cellcom.
That led to gigs around the country and collaborations with Israeli musicians such as Hadag Nahash and Eli Luzon.
“I hope that our music will be spread all over,” Ezra said in a recent telephone interview.
“We want to pass our message to people who can listen to us and make changes in themselves and the world.”
The promoters hope that Café Shachor Hazak’s Bay Area visit inspires and educates local teens about Israel and breaks down stereotypes about the country’s music and people.
“We want to talk about Israel not as a myth, but as a place that is real and struggling with important issues,” said Ilan Vitemberg, director of the Israel Education Initiative, which helped to sponsor the band’s Bay Area visit.
“We’re facing an uphill battle as Israel runs the risk of becoming less and less relevant to young Jews in the U.S.”
Because members of Café Shachor Hazak are all 17 and 18 years old, they are the perfect cultural ambassadors to carry this message to American youth. Clad in baggy jeans and baseball caps turned backward, they sing about going to school, the mall, fitting in — issues other teens can relate to.
Singing in Hebrew, English and Amharic, an Ethiopian language, the group also tackles adult themes, such as in “A Moment of Quiet,” a song about suicide bombers, poverty and unemployment.
Another is a version of famous Israeli singer Ofra Haza’s “Hand in Hand” that expresses hope for peace and coexistence between Jews and Palestinians.
“They write about issues that are an integral part of their life,” said Yarden Schneider, co-founder of Taste of Israel, another organization behind the band’s Bay Area visit. “They sing about difficulties, but each of their songs encourages hope, love and understanding. Their appeal is that they can see beyond the conflict and stick to their dreams.”
Another topic the group sings about is growing up straddling two cultures. There are more than 90,000 Ethiopian Jews in Israel, a community that, as a whole, has had a difficult time assimilating into Israeli society. Most adults lacked an education — many were illiterate upon arriving in Israel — and have struggled with learning Hebrew, according to the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics. They also have lower incomes than most other immigrants and are more likely to live in impoverished communities where they are segregated from other Israelis.
Despite the problems, the young generation — a whopping 40 percent of Ethiopians in Israel are under 15 years old — is imbued by a sense of hope. Many, like Ezra, have opted to do Nahal, a yearlong community service project, instead of going to the army, and are more prepared for jobs in a modern economy than their parents.
Their Bay Area hosts hope that American audiences will be inspired by the group’s optimism and energy and make more of an effort to connect to their Israeli counterparts.
Says Schneider: “They love their home, and are true leaders in the sense that they have the courage and talent to address difficult issues in order to better their environment in service of their community … And that is a great force.”
Ethiopia’s famed Axum obelisk is to be reinstalled at its original site next month, 70 years after the 1,700-year-old treasure was removed by Italian troops, UNESCO said on Thursday.
The UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) has overseen a multi-million-dollar operation to restore the obelisk to Axum in northern Ethiopia, where it once stood alongside around 100 other stelae.
Work will finally begin on June 4 to resurrect the 150-tonne stela — returned to Ethiopia in three pieces in 2005 — at Axum, a listed World Heritage Site, with an inauguration planned for September 10.
“This is an operation carried out under the sign of peace,” the head of UNESCO’s world heritage centre Francesco Bandarin told a news conference, insisting on the event’s “major importance for Ethiopia and for Italy.”
Italian soldiers carted away the 24-meter (78-foot), third-century AD granite funeral stela on the orders of then-dictator Benito Mussolini in 1937 during his attempt to colonise Ethiopia.
Despite a 1947 agreement to return the obelisk, it remained in Italy until 2005, standing outside the Rome headquarters of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation.
“It is a symbol of Ethiopian identity. We say, ‘hawult’, which means this is an eternal monument,” Ethiopia’s ambassador to France Tadelech Haile Michael told reporters.
“Our relations with the Italian government are good, but this operation has allowed us to fill the void that existed between the two countries.”
Axum was the capital of the Axumite kingdom that flourished as a major trading center from the fifth century BC to the 10th century AD.
At its height, the kingdom extended across areas in what are today Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, Somalia, and Yemen.
