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Prize-wrapping under guard!

Last week, the much awaited end-of-year prize giving has taken place at Mehoni schools, including our project school Lemlem Baro. Getting the prizes ready this time around was more challenging than usual, as Lesley reports from Mehoni.

‘Due to my early arrival in Mehoni, school exams were still in progress. There were government stewards monitoring the 8th grade government exams at all schools, and no one but the exam candidates and stewards was allowed to enter the school. For three half days and evenings I worked in a small extra room our hotel let me have for this purpose. We had wonderful prize material, some of it from GE Electric Volunteers’ group, some from EE board member Tatjana Meier and her colleagues from IBM, some from Swiss Re and even the Limmattal Bahn! I wrapped over 200 prizes for Lemlem, difficult in a small room and without help as the teachers were monitoring exams at other schools on the exact days we had set aside for this. We even had enough material to make 20 lovely prizes for the top ten 9th grade and 10th grade students from Mehoni High School where we are running our scholarship program. The school was delighted.

Thanks to a good supply of coloured pencils and colouring-in sheets, we were able to give two other primary schools from our sub-project school group a large box of the pencils and a healthy pile of the sheets, plus sharpeners. They were thrilled. And while I was packing, I got another thrill. On one of the packing days, the new Ethiopian Prime Minister visited Raya and of course Mehoni as its main town. He came to lunch in our hotel (CHF 25 per night which is a lot in Mehoni but our preferred, cheaper family hotel is being renovated). When I heard all the commotion, I slipped out of my room to photograph the courtyard where lunch was being set up. As the hotel is open plan, I was observed. The next time I came out of my room, I found an armed guard sitting on the balcony opposite my room!’

Many thanks to all those who donated this high quality and truly helpful material.

Help us to stop illegal migration !

Ethiopia Ala is one of the students we supported during the past school year. Sponsors receive two progress updates per year as well as a background story and photo when the student is selected.

 

The following story is not uncommon in the depressed region of Raya-Azebo in which our project schools are based. With too few places in high schools and preparatory schools (9th to 12th grades) and virtually no vocational training, the lure of illegal migration is huge. Lesley reports from Mehoni:

“The day after I arrived in Mehoni was a sad day indeed. While we were checking on the construction of a rain-water collection system at one of our sub-project schools, we saw groups of people being transported by bajaj ‘cars’ to funerals. There were seven funerals in two villages outside Mehoni that day, four of them for students who had finished their final high-school exams just a week earlier. They had fallen prey to illegal migration agents.

Using the prospects of finding well-paid work in Saudi Arabia as bait, these agents had collected a group of 15 students between the ages of 17 and 20 from villages around Mehoni. Of course, the students or their families have to pay for the agents’ ‘help’. Many fall into unpayable debt in the process.

The kids were driven overnight to a point at which they were supposed to continue on foot in the direction of the border of Djibouti. According to the scant information available, they were given maps for the journey, but had very little in the way of supplies. Remember, these are kids with scant knowledge of the world but desperate to find a way to make money, especially if they think they won’t get to the next level of schooling after their 10th grade exams.

During their journey through a desert area, two of them died of thirst and exhaustion. A third student died later when he drank contaminated water, likely when they passed through a settlement on the way. A fourth student was shot by border guards (we don’t know on which side of the border) when he apparently resisted arrest after being spotted. This student’s younger brother travelled with us part of the way back to Mehoni after the funeral and told us what he knew. There has been no further news of the fate of the remaining members of the young group.”

YOU CAN HELP US PUT A STOP TO ILLEGAL MIGRATION!

Last year, Ethiopian Enterprises began a pilot high school scholarship program to help young people build a future in Raya and resist the bait offered by migration agents. For just CHF 300 a year, you can support a student for schooling or training, and help him/her to create a future and contribute to the Raya area. Our first year of this program in 2017-18 was a great success, and the program will be expanded in the new school year starting in September. Some of our students have done exceptionally well and can look into the future with renewed hope. So please contact us if you would be willing to help a student/s in this program for the coming school year.

2017 Annual Report now available

Thomas Baumann has recently completed the Annual Report on Ethiopian Enterprises’ activities in 2017. The richly illustrated report provides a detailed overview of all that EE achieved during the last year in Mehoni. Click HERE for pdf-file (only available in German)

New Mehoni Brochure now available

Our new Mehoni brochure is hot off the press. It’s illustrated with updated project pictures and information. Click HERE to view. Please help us to spread the word about our work in Mehoni by ordering copies for your friends and colleagues from info@ethiopianenterprises.org ! We will be happy to send you the brochures by post.

News from Hagereselam and Mehoni

Our long-year watershed rehabilitation project in the farming community of Hagereselam notched up its 8th and final year in 2017. Financed by Ethiopian Enterprises and executed by the team of Helvetas-Swiss InterCooperation in Ethiopia, the project in Hagereselam was slowly ‘phased-out’ throughout the past year in mutual agreement with the relevant stakeholders.

Highlights of the phase-out year included a perma-garden workshop run by international expert Peter Jensen which was financed by Ethiopian Enterprises. A group of Hagereselam’s ‘entrepreneur’ farmers attended the training and were able to implement Permagarden digging and planting techniques in their own garden plots.

During the project’s final weeks, a comprehensive survey was carried out by a company hired by Helvetas Ethiopia in order to see just what had been achieved over the duration of the project. The survey reflects both the successes and shortcomings of the project and is a very helpful document. Should further collaboration between the farmers of Hagereselam and Ethiopian Enterprises prove appropriate in the future, the survey document will provide a basis for monitoring the community’s progress between the end of 2017 and any future starting point.

After a challenging 2017 in Mehoni, the good news is that the year ended on a positive note. After nearly a full year without a school principle due to a desperate shortage of school staff in rural districts, our project school Lemlem Baro Elementary School acquired a new and experienced headmaster at the start of the new school year in September. At the same time, the challenging and disruptive building work required to stabilize the school compound and protect the school buildings against flooding and erosion drew to a close. The compound landscaping work was completed in December, and the Swiss flag now flies proudly on its flagpole in the compound along with the flags of Ethiopia and of Tigray.

Ethiopia will celebrate its Christmas on the weekend of January 6th and 7th, which in the Ethiopian calendar is the end of December. School starts up again later in January and we are looking forward to a new semester of progress at the school in which the focus will be on maintenance of the school’s new buildings and the improvement of academic standards.

 

2016 yearly report now available…

Thomas Baumann has recently completed the yearly report on Ethiopian Enterprises’ activities in 2016. The richly illustrated report provides a detailed overview of all that EE achieved in its seventh year in Hagereselam and Mehoni. Click HERE for pdf-file (only available in German)

‘Best Training Ever’

Lesley Stephenson and Thomas Baumann made it back to Switzerland just before the Easter Bunny  after organizing and participating in two special training workshops in our project sites in Hagereselam and Mehoni.

The workshops introduced participant groups to the ‘Permagarden’ concept designed by US Global Nutrition Garden Training Specialist Peter Jensen who has worked throughout Africa for the past 20+ years in agricultural projects addressing the challenges of climate change. Peter Jensen developed the PermaGarden method over ten years ago, and has since trained hundreds of groups throughout Ethiopia and other African countries in this effective method. By applying special garden-protection techniques to deal with the management of excess water in the wet season, as well as unique digging techniques and soil enrichment procedures, Peter helps his participants ensure that the quality of their gardens and the food they grow is far beyond that which can be expected from most ‘normal’ gardens.

In Mehoni, the training was attended by teachers and parents from 6 different schools, and these participants now have the mandate to create a Permagarden in each of their own schools. As at Lemlem Baro, the produce from the gardens will be used exclusively to raise resources to cover school maintenance costs. Teachers are also expected to use their school gardens as teaching models for their wider school communities. The teachers and parents were thrilled with the training, which they described as ‘our best training ever’.

Raya-Azebo School Initiative

EE president Thomas Baumann and Mehoni School Project leader Lesley Stephenson have arrived safely back in Zurich this week. As so often in the past, they appear to have taken rain with them to Mehoni and Hagereselam – at least that’s what the local people are starting to believe! The day after they arrived, the small rainy season (which hadn’t eventuated for the past 2 years) started almost a month earlier than usual. Mehoni had full rain showers for several days which served to refill the school rainwater collection tanks substantially, and greatly please the local farmers.

A lot of activities took place during this visit, including the orientation meetings for the Triple S (Self-Supporting Schools) Rainwater-Collection Project. This project has been initiated by Lesley and is strongly supported by the local government and the other schools involved in the pilot project. We will be explaining this sub-project in full at our information apéro on May 18th (open to the general public), but basically it will allow us to share the vital committee and rainwater/garden components of the Lemlem Baro School Project with 5 other schools in the Raya region. This will add considerably to the sustainability of the entire program, as additional focus and pressure on these schools will be applied to ensure that creating school resources for maintenance purposes becomes a top priority.

In addition, meetings at government level took place, and Lemlem Baro had it’s semester prize-giving last Saturday, always a very large event at the school. And there was an exciting presentation. The Raya-Azebo Bureau of Education (BofE) with whom we have excellent relations received a long hoped-for gift. Due to scant resources, BofE members have had to rely on public transport to make their school visits to over 170 schools in the region! Even when there is a local bus, they are dropped somewhere on the main road and have to walk literally for hours on the dirt roads to reach some of the schools. But not any more. An EE donor has covered the costs of a sturdy motor bike which can carry two Bureau members to the schools outside Mehoni in a fraction of the time, saving wear and tear and allowing for better school supervision. Bureau members are thrilled and have formally agreed to use the bike only for BofE business.

We will shortly begin our compound consolidation project at Lemlem Baro School, a next and crucial step designed to protect our new school buildings from the effects of heavy rain and flash flooding during wet seasons. A new girls’ toilet block is also foreseen in this next construction phase.

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