0

Sapna in Ethiopia: I Stand in a Field of Onions

Day 1 in Tigray – what a day!  Depart Addis 6:30am on the ever reliable Ethiopian Airlines.  Arrive Mekele at 7:30am. By 8:30 our team is on the road.   First stop – the Abada Primary School, one of 30 schools that imagine1day is working with.   I first visited Abada one year ago and instantly fell in love with its beauty.  To reach it requires careful negotiation with the narrow rocky trail that takes approximately one hour to climb.  Over the course of the year we have been supporting Abada in improving the quality of education offered to its children.

We started by mobilizing and training a PTA and then followed by providing furniture, books, sports materials, science kits and various teacher training workshops.  Through our  interaction we came to understand the commitment that this community has to its children’s education and realised that in order for it to realise its education objectives, the school would need a sustainable source of income.  To achieve this Abada required a new source of water as the existing hand pump well barely serves the basic daily needs of its some 1,500 inhabitants.   Members of the community led us to what they thought might be a high potential spring.  Indeed it was!  In June we completed the development of the spring which now serves the community as a whole, the school children, and most importantly is being used to irrigate a plot of land that has been allocated to the school for agricultural and agro-forestry income generation activities.  Today I saw the results.  In just four months since receiving this new source of water, the Abada Primary School has a crop of wheat and onions which when harvested next month will generate approximatley $1,000, a huge addition to their existing budget of approximately $200 per year provided by the government.

They will plant three crops per year.  Words can’t describe my excitement!  From Abada we visited Aggo and Tsehafti, two more communities that we are working with and finally to Atsemba, a community that so many of our incredible donors have been contributing to over the past 10 months.  Happy to report that construction will begin in November and the request for bids was posted today.  Sun sets at 6pm.  Johannes, our incredible field driver gets us all home safely.  Until tomorrow.

Sapna