GUEST SPEAKER … From left: Rotarian Jim Wyse, who arranged the program; Zerihun Kassa, national director of the Global Hope Network in Ethiopia; and Rosemary Fisher, an Archbold resident who served on a medical mission team to Ethiopia several years ago that partnered with Global Hope. (PHOTO PROVIDED)
Zerihun Kassa traveled 7,500 miles to tell Archbold Rotarians about the work of the Global Hope Network International in Ethiopia recently. Kassa is the national director of the organization in Ethiopia.
He explained that Global Hope Network, much like Rotary, identifies villages in underdeveloped regions with significant poverty whose residents lack formal education and have health-related problems.
Global Hope then spends three to five years working with the residents to introduce sustainable solutions to those issues that will result in transformational changes that will improve the residents’ quality of life.
He explained that the organization focuses on five areas: water, wellness, education, income generation and agriculture.
Project workers with the organization partner with others, such as the medial outreach team that Archbold resident Rosemary Fisher was part of as well as government, to address those issues.
Water projects, depending on the village, could involve the use of sand bio-filters, wells or simply teaching villagers to boil water before drinking it to provide clean, safe water.
Wellness focuses on teaching villagers how to prevent illness and disease, especially relating to sanitation. Education involves building schools to educate children as well as providing relevant education for adults.
Kassa noted that income generation focuses on the women by providing them with the skills to grow crops that can thrive in their environment not only to provide food for their family, but to provide food and products that they can sell to others to make money for the family.
He explained that women are given three goats to raise for three years to provide milk for their families. After that period, the goats are given to other families.
And, the villagers are shown how to provide drip irrigation for their crops to get them through the dry season. Project managers also suggest the types of fruit trees and crops that will grow best where the villagers live.
As work with the villagers begins to produce results, the organization also attempts to introduce Christianity to the community.
However, Kassa explained that in Ethiopia some parts of the country are Muslim and it isn’t safe to actively convert persons from one religion to another.
In Ethiopia, the organization has a national office of three persons with nine project managers and 25 missionaries.
Some of their work, such as the construction of schools, is funded by the government, but they also rely on donations to Global Hope International to sustain much of their work.