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As I write these words, I’m sitting in the heart of Ethiopia, surrounded by nine-thousand-foot mountains at the western edge of the Rift Valley - a dream come true. Several months ago I got a call from my son, Randall, asking me if I would be interested in joining him and a student team from Taylor University going to Ethiopia in January 2009. They were going to a place called Project Mercy in southwest Ethiopia for a faith-based student teaching experience there during their J-Term. Was I interested? I was thrilled!
My family and I had lived in Ethiopia from 1967 to 1969 when I taught at the Public Health College in Gondar. It had been the experience of a lifetime. Now, Randall, Dean of Students at Taylor University’s Fort Wayne campus, and Dr. Pam Medows, Professor of Education at Taylor University, were leading a team of sixteen Taylor students to teach school children at Project Mercy.
I met the entire team just before our long flight to Ethiopia. We landed in Addis Ababa, the capital, late the next night. It was midnight by the time we cleared customs and reached our hotel. The next morning a van and a truck from Project Mercy took us and our baggage on the two-hour drive to our destination.
Project Mercy is an amazing place, but it is much more than that. It began as a vision in the minds and hearts of a remarkable Ethiopian refugee couple in the USA over thirty years ago. They had made a heart-stopping escape from the communist regime that overthrew Emperor Haile Selassie’s government in 1973. Eventually settling in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Marta and Demeke began Project Mercy as a relief effort to help other Ethiopian refugees in various African countries.
When the Ethiopian communist government was struck down, Marta and Demeke returned to Ethiopia with a vision of making a difference in one of the poorest regions of one of the poorest countries of the world. They established Project Mercy in the Yetebon area of the Rift Valley, at the foot of the Gurage Mountains. Their goal was to bring education, health, and many life-enhancing skills to the people of that area, in an effort to help lift them out of the grinding poverty in which they were mired.
Sixteen years later, that impossible dream is being fulfilled. More than 1600 students from the surrounding area attend Medhani-Alem, the Project Mercy School. Students from kindergarten through grade twelve are given nutritious breakfasts and lunches every school day, in addition to the intellectual nourishment they receive from a staff of dedicated teachers. Graduates from the school are now going to various colleges and universities in Ethiopia and the United States.
Skills ranging from basket-weaving to animal husbandry to cement-block construction are also taught at Project Mercy. A large demonstration garden provides most of the food at Project Mercy, while also modeling improved ways of growing nutritious food. Today, many such foods are grown by villagers, with surplus food being sold in the marketplace as a means of supplemental income.
The fifty-bed hospital at Project Mercy treats patients from the surrounding area, but also teaches them better ways of caring for themselves. All of Project Mercy’s various programs demonstrate God’s love in the practical ways that Marta and Demeke envisioned. Refusing to take personal credit, they simply see themselves as instruments of God. However one views it, their efforts are bearing fruit. Project Mercy is a remarkable blessing, not only in Ethiopia, but around the world!
www.projectmercy.org
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