Welcome, Kevin Ferguson! Kevin is the newest member of the Mudula Water team. Here is his first blog post.
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Poets and presidents in swaddling clothes are buried unceremoniously in Silte’s ruddy soil. Physicians without a day of school step past them to haul filthy water and firewood. Civil engineers trudge single-file along pre-dawn roads on their way to work the brick kilns.
I am left breathless at the unrealized human potential in Ethiopia. The loss, when measured on a national scale is dramatic. The loss, immeasurable on an individual basis, is tragic.
I think of my 5-year-old son, Semeredin, who can beat me fair and square in chess, who is reading his first books, and whose remarkable empathy surpasses that of most adults. Four years ago, he lay alone, abandoned in Silte’s endless scrub brush. A farmer out searching for her untethered dray horse stumbled upon him. “I heard a baby crying,” she said. “I’m glad I found him before the hyenas did.” She named him Semeredin, or Found for Life. Because of her generosity—she had six other mouths to feed—and her horse’s serendipitous wanderlust, the world is a better place.
There are millions of Semeredins in Ethiopia and tens of millions across Africa. How do we help these poets, presidents, physicians, and engineers reach their potential?
The answer is complex. It’s more complex than my ability to explain why adoption—an international, transracial one at that—was the best course of action for Semeredin. Likewise, it’s more complex than most international aid agencies are willing or able to address.
The answer for a region filled with Semeredins is a holistic approach that fixes many broken parts. It fixes the water, the sanitation, the food, the schools, and the hospitals. It fixes the roads, the factories, and the farms. It fixes a nation of people so that they can do the fixing themselves. And it fixes them at the same time.
That’s a tall order. Yet, fixing these things one at a time doesn’t work. Building a new school doesn’t help if half the students (girls) spend their days fetching firewood and water. Building a health clinic that has no supplies, no medicine, and no trained health workers does no good.
Fixing all these moving parts on a national scale is particularly difficult. Aid agencies and ministries of health across Africa—for all the good they have done and the lives they have saved—have wasted billions of dollars trying to fix a broken system one piece at a time. To their credit, these agencies and ministries in the past year have begun taking a holistic approach, and they’ve begun doing so at the local level.
That’s what I find impressive about Mudula Water. It understands how the parts fit together. It understands that water, education, financial opportunity, and gender equity must be addressed together. It’s why Mudula Water will succeed in helping its own Semeredins reach their potential.
Kevin Ferguson, a former blogger for the New York Times, is a senior writer for Management Sciences for Health, an international non-profit based in Cambridge, MA.
