Ethiopia-Red Cross story.
Ethiopia: Pastoralist stories - Elfe Wayu, schoolgirl
Source: International Federation of Red Cross And Red Crescent Societies (IFRC)
Date: 06 Mar 2009
Goro Dola, Oromiya region, Ethiopia
Through the flies that feast on the secretions from her eyes, through the malnutrition that’s left her looking not much more than half her age, and through what seems to be the human form of foot and mouth disease, caught from the village cattle, Elfe Wayu’s smile displays the indomitable spirit of the child.
The villagers of Dhuko, one of the Ethiopian Red Cross Society’s three critically drought-affected "peasant associations" hereabouts (the name is a Marxist legacy, meaning just settled communities), repeatedly swear Elfe is 13. She looks about eight.
A bothersome sore covers the right side of her mouth.
Yet sitting in the cool of her classroom, with her headmaster and some almost inevitably male playmates, her only complaint is about the lack of food.
"Sometimes I get so exhausted I can hardly concentrate on the lessons," she says.
The total roll for the school in Dhuko, a remote pastoralist settlement in southern Oromiya region, is 165. But only 34 are girls.
"Do you enjoy school?"
"Of course," says Elfe, startled by the daft question.
In Ethiopia there is no exception to the extraordinary tenacity with which rural Africans pursue their children’s education. The people of Dhuko – who even in normal dry seasons have very little to spare, and now after two years of unbroken drought are fighting for survival – still manage to club together to pay their school’s teachers 300 birr a month (about US$ 25) in salary.
"Our school has no water supply and no food to give children," says the 21-year-old headmaster Tesfaye Butiti, who says 55 pupils have dropped out since the drought began two years ago.
"Food is the first priority," he adds. "But next on my list would come furniture. You can’t really teach properly unless children can sit comfortably and write."
"They just can’t do it on empty stomachs"
But the school has not closed and will not. A sign in Amharic by the main gate says: What did you learn today? Another, in English: Did you do your homework?
If there were some way rural Ethiopians could "study" their way out of the drought disaster they face, it would long have been solved.
Not only do they show little sign of giving up but Butiti speaks of expansion. "The next school is 60 kilometres away," he says. "We desperately need another at Halu, 45 kilometres from here.
"But there too we’d need food and equipment."
To western parents – concerned about the negative influences their children face like drugs, alcohol, alienation and promiscuity – nothing is more humbling about Africa than its children’s unshakeable dedication to their lessons.
Those same parents would also appreciate how difficult – and vitally important – it is to get busy schoolchildren to eat properly, even with a first-world supermarket on the doorstep.
There is little for Dhuko’s children to eat except nearly raw aid-grain, softened by boiling or frying. Almost all the cattle have been taken away by the menfolk, who have temporarily migrated to Borena zone for the dry season, where pasture may be better.
"Many children walk a long way to get here," says Butiti. "But the drop-out rate is increasing because of the drought.
"They just can’t do it on empty stomachs."
