By Beth Ashley, Marin Independent Journal

Emebet Bellingham visited her native Ethiopia in 2003 and was stunned at the changes she saw after 17 years. The streets were crowded, the air polluted, and 4.6 million of Ethiopia’s children were orphans. “It just shocked me,” she says.

Euyeal Joseph Zeleke and Emebet Bellingham are
co-directors of The World Family, a San Anselmo-based
nonprofit that is building a community center in an
Ethiopian village and helping equip medical clinics
there. [Photo: Robert Tong]

She returned to her San Anselmo home determined to do something to help her people. Her mother, Yemegnushal Haile – “an amazing woman and a true humanitarian,” Bellingham says – served on the board of an organization helping children whose parents had died of malaria, AIDS, poor sanitation and inadequate care. She planned to start a nonprofit of her own that would be the American partner of the agency where her mom worked in Ethiopia.

Her intentions were derailed when she became pregnant with her second child. She continued to sponsor orphans in Ethiopia on an individual basis – “I have sponsored children since I was 19” – but her plans for a nonprofit were put on the shelf.

Then, last year, her mother died in an auto accident in Addis Ababa, and Bellingham, 39, resolved to pick up the work her mother had started.

She joined with another Ethiopian, Euyeal Joseph Zeleke of San Jose, to found a new nonprofit called The World Family – Ethiopian Orphans and Medical Care.

Zeleke was already working in Ethiopia, rounding up serviceable but outdated medical equipment in American hospitals and sending it to clinics in his native country. He has sent $5 million worth of equipment since 2005, some of it to a clinic that Bellingham’s mother helped build.

Bellingham and Zeleke met in her mother’s hospital room in Ethiopia and decided to team up.

“I am so grateful,” Zeleke says. “She’s a really good person, very dedicated.”

In March, Bellingham went back to Ethiopia, looking for a place on which to focus her efforts.

She fell in love with a rural village called Gara Dima, whose people lived in primitive huts, drinking impure water from a nearby river. “The people were so warm and welcoming,” she says. “This was an underserved community in clear need of help.”

She decided that Gara Dima and a second village nearby could best be served by construction of a community center that would serve everyone, including orphaned children, and would include a library, kitchen, clinic, a large meeting room, classrooms and a guest apartment for visiting experts.

Field Paoli, a design firm in San Francisco, drew plans for a center, to be constructed from bags filled with dirt enclosed in plaster. The firm didn’t charge for its work, and deliberately chose an affordable form of construction. “(Field Paoli) has been supportive in every aspect,” says Bellingham.

Projected cost for the center, which she hopes to start building in January: $95,000. “We expect to get additional donations to help furnish the clinic and library.”

She has already raised $88,000, much of it from a charitable event held at Fort Mason in San Francisco last month.

Meanwhile, the nongovernmental organization she and Zeleke co-direct continues to send medical equipment to Ethiopia, working with the Ministry of Health and the Clinton Foundation, which is building 100 new health centers every year.

The nonprofit sends two 40-foot containers a month to Ethiopia, enough to equip four centers.

Working with the Ministry of Education, World Family has also implemented the opening of two dental schools, the country’s first.

To meet Bellingham is to marvel that she has accomplished so much in a short space of time.

“I am a very driven person,” she says.

Dave McConnell, president of the Marin Environmental Forum, says he is “just amazed that a person (like Bellingham) is taking the bit in her teeth and running with it.” McConnell has consulted with her on environmental aspects of the proposed center.

A reed-slim woman with a fashion model face and a head of springy black curls, Bellingham came to the Bay Area from Ethiopia in 1984 when her father, then an executive with Ethiopian Airlines, decided to send his two daughters here to attend school. (A son was already here.) Bellingham finished high school in Richmond, then enrolled at the Fashion Institute of Design in San Francisco. She then attended the Academy of Art for a year and a half before going to work at Esprit, buying fabric and designing clothes.

Later she began her own highly successful business, designing high-end women’s clothing and selling it to boutiques.

“It just got too hectic,” she says. She had married Michael Bellingham, a painting and decorating contractor, in 1994, and “we decided not to expand my business, and to raise a family instead.”

She is the mother of a girl, 8, and a boy, 4.

The rest of her family is spread out: her sister lives in Hercules, her brother in Singapore, her father is still in Addis Ababa.

She continues to work in the fashion industry, doing freelance work as a designer and wardrobe consultant.But much of her energy goes to the World Family, and she expects that to continue.Many outsider organizations come to Africa, provide relief monies, and disappear, she says. “The villages have nothing lasting to show for the money that’s been spent.

“I hope to reverse that situation.”

HOW TO HELP

– Financial contributions to The World Family can be made online at www.theworldfamily.org or by mail. Checks should be made to The World Family Ethiopian Orphan and Medical Care and sent to either Medical Care Donations, 391 Jacklin Road, Milpitas 95035 or Orphan Care Donations, 310 Laurel Ave., San Anselmo 94960.

– The agency also needs donated warehouse space to store reclaimed medical equipment. Call E. Joseph Zeleke at 408-594-1360 or send e-mail to [email protected].

– Volunteers are also needed. Call Emebet Bellingham at 302-3037 or send e-mail to [email protected]

Contact Beth Ashley via e-mail at [email protected]

2007 Great Ethiopian Run, Addis Ababat

Thousands of Ethiopians took part in the 2007 Great Ethiopian Run in Addis Ababa today. As soon as the race started, it turned into a protest rally against the Woyanne regime.

The runners chanted slogans that are anti-Woyanne and that condemn the invasion of Somalia.

The runners also chanted:

“Kinijit Yegna!” (Kinijit is ours)
“Bertukan Yegna!” (Bertukan is ours).
“Gifa belew Eritrea Gifa belew! Betemingistun dem be dem adirgew!” (when they reached Arat Kilo)
“H.R. 2003 Endegfalen” (We support H.R. 2003)

By Peter Heinlein, VOA

The United States says it is more than doubling humanitarian aid to Ethiopia’s troubled Ogaden region. The announcement was made Saturday following talks beween top U.S. foreign aid officials and Ethiopia’s prime minister on the importance of stability in the Horn of Africa region. From Addis Ababa, VOA’s Peter Heinlein reports the meeting came days before a deadline in the simmering border dispute between Ethiopia and neighboring Eritrea.

U.S. Agency for International Development Administrator Henrietta Fore’s talks with Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi touched on tensions along the Ethiopia-Eritrea border and on efforts to rush emergency food aid to the insurgency-wracked Ogaden region.

Ethiopia is again allowing several humanitarian agencies into the Ogaden after expelling a number of groups last July, including the International Committee of the Red Cross. Fore said she told Mr. Meles of Washington’s concern that many people in the conflict zone do not have access to basic necessities.

“We spoke about our shared concern to be sure we are looking out for the food security of the people in Ogaden and the work of our many partners who are working in the Ogaden,” said Fore. “We have a good deal of assistance that is going into the Ogaden.”

Fore said the United States is more than doubling this year’s assistance program for Ogaden from $19 million to about $45 million. With the United Nations estimating nearly a million Ogadeni people in need of food, USAID mission director for Ethiopia Glenn Anders termed the assistance an emergency.

“Our office of food for peace has committed to $25 million more in predominantly food grains, but that includes oil and corn; soybean as well, and that’s already purchased and on its way,” said Anders.

USAID administrator Fore acknowledged that she had discussed with Ethiopia’s leader Washington’s concerns about the possibility of renewed outbreak of war along the disputed border with neighboring Eritrea. An estimated 70,000 people died when the Horn of Africa rivals fought in the late 90s, and tensions are again high as a border commission named to adjudicate the dispute prepares to close down late this month.

Fore says she mentioned to Prime Minister Meles that providing aid is easier when countries are stable and peaceful.

“It is always easier to help a country at peace. It is because you can move around the country. People have more hope and more chance of having a little business, going to school, building a clinic,” she added. “People always have more hope if there is stability and security in a country.”

Sitting alongside the USAID administrator, Washington’s ambassador to Ethiopia Donald Yamamoto played down the fact that an independent commission charged with the demarkation of the 1000-kilometer border between Ethiopia and Eritrea is to dissolve later this month. He says Washington believes the two countries must settle their differences themselves, as stated in the Algiers Accord that ended their last war.

“The only way resolution can be achieved is from the parties themselves addressing the issues directly with each other and implementing decisions on resolution of the border issues, and also their own differences,” said Yamamoto.

With border tensions high, a number of high-ranking officials will be visiting the Horn of Africa region in the next weeks to impress on officials the importance of preventing another outbreak of war.

U.N. Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs John Holmes is due in Addis Ababa Monday, and will visit the Ogaden region Tuesday. Several U.S. lawmakers and officials are said to be planning trips to Ethiopia soon, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Ethiopian Orthodox Church members battle for possession of Maxfield Avenue premises

BY BASIL WALTERS, Sunday Observer

The rift in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church widened on Friday after a group representing one fraction of the church went to its headquarters at 89 Maxfield Avenue in Kingston and, with the help of bailiffs, took control of the premises.

The group — which is loyal to [Aba Gebremedhin (formerly Aba Paulos)] in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia and which recently won a law suit to claim the Maxfield Avenue headquarters — turned up with new locks and keys to reclaim the premises, and was met with hostility by the other members currently occupying the premises.

An animated Kes Wolde Dawitt (right) who led
the operation to repossess the Maxfield Avenue
headquarters of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church,
caught vigorously objecting to the presence of
the Sunday Observer. Looking on are members
of his flock including its trustee and financial
secretary Sarapheal Hemmings, at left.
(Photo: Joseph Wellington)

Since 1992 there has been a split in the church when the mother church appointed a new patriarch and Archbishop Paulos [Aba Gebremedhin] to replace the incumbent Mekrios, who was ill. A section of the church, led by the late Abuna Yesehaq Mandefro who was in charge of the Western Hemisphere branches of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, contended that the decision by the mother church was a violation of its cannon, which stipulates that an incumbent Archbishop cannot be replaced once he is still alive.

That led to a schism in the first ancient African Christian Church, and separation of its members, with those following the late Abuna Yesehaq declaring their independence of the mother church.

Here in Jamaica, those members loyal to the mother church stopped from fellowship at the Maxfield Avenue headquarters. They began meeting instead at the St Mary Anglican Church on Molynes Road — still observing the ancient rituals of the Orthodox Church. But some of these members, sources say, were automatically excommunicated from the Abuna Yesehaq’s-influenced Maxfield Avenue congregation.

The Molynes Road fraction eventually filed a law suit to claim possession of the headquarters, and on June 15 the court ruled in their favour.

The administrators of the Maxfield Avenue headquarters have since appealed, and a hearing has been set for next Tuesday.

“I’m not really happy about what is happening,” resident priest at the Maxfield Avenue HQ, Kes Gabre Selessie (Fitzgerald), told the Sunday Observer.

“It is a matter that have to go back to the court. they came here while an appeal is pending for the 27th of this month. We will have to wait until the court resettle this matter,” Fitzgerald added.

But Sarapheal Hemmings, a trustee and financial secretary of the Molynes Road fraction told the Sunday Observer that “the rite of possession has been issued by the court for us to come and picket. for the past two weeks they have been issued, and it’s just today we decided to come and takeover. So, we come this morning with the bailiff to just take possession of the place; we’re not here to run the people or anything. We’ve locked up the place now and we’re going to try to arrange a meeting with the administrators to see how we still can workout this thing peacefully,” Hemmings said.

However, Theophilus Dawkins, a member of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church for over 30 years, accused the Molynes Road group of using “brute force.

“I am one of the foundation members here in Jamaica. Now, what they come and done this morning, is to try to dig off the locks and put on new locks, and try to force people to give up the keys for them to put on their locks. And we, the people, were telling them that we don’t want them.”.

“Dem come wid brute force, dem come wid di belly a di beast come tek ova di church,” he added.
The other members of the Maxfield Avenue fraction echoed similar sentiments.

One church sister also complained that a funeral service was about be prevented because the Molynes Road fraction had stated that they (from Maxfield Avenue) should no longer use that building.

“We have a funeral here for a member that passed off. She is supposed to be buried on the 25th; dem lick off the lock, put on dem lock and sey we can have no more service here. And she is a member here from she was young. Her name is Sistah Dotti and her baptism name is Amarian. She is from Trench Town,” the church sister said.

However, Fitzgerald told the Sunday Observer that the Molynes Road fraction had made a concession for the funeral to go ahead today, adding that this was the last service he would be allowed to conduct there.