Helping out Ethiopian mothers
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Helping out Ethiopian mothers
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Kay Dibben
September 14, 2008 12:00am
WHEN Leith and Rob Harding adopted two children from Ethiopia they vowed to take them back so they could maintain a link with their birth country.
The Hardings, from the inner west Brisbane locality of Rainworth, have adopted four of their seven children from overseas.
"We realised as we were raising the children how important it was for them to know about their birth culture and their birth family, as well as their Australian culture," Mrs Harding said.
But Ethiopian-born Zewditu, now 14, was adopted when she was five after both her birth parents had died, and there was no extended family.
Ben, now 20, went from an Ethiopian hospital into foster care, before being adopted by the Hardings when he was 22 months old.
"We felt the need to make a connection with the country," Mrs Harding said.
"It was important for them to have Ethiopian friends – in Ethiopia as well as here."
Over the years the Hardings, now in their early 50s, have made almost annual trips to the African country, with Leith also taking Queensland high school groups there to visit aid projects.
In a country ravaged by civil war, famine, drought and HIV, many families have lost their wage-earners.
Infant mortality is high, literacy levels are low and women do 80 per cent of the manual work.
The Hardings would see young mothers cutting rocks and carting cement – often with babies strapped to their backs.
Some young mothers, out of desperation, would reach the point where they had to leave their children in orphanages just so they could keep working to survive.
Mrs Harding wanted to do something to help these mothers, many of whom had been victims of rape or seduced by men who later abandoned them and their babies.
The Hardings had met Gold Coast Christian couple Deanne and Andrew Knife, who have been living in Ethiopia with their two young children for just over two years.
The Knifes, who were teaching and running a guesthouse in Addis Ababa, also felt there must be another purpose for them in Ethiopia.
Eighteen months ago the two Queensland couples and a young American woman, Marcie Erickson, came up with a "vision" to establish a centre to help young Ethiopian mothers and babies.
"Marcie was living and working in Bahir Dar, seeing mothers living on the streets and in bus shelters with their babies," Mrs Harding said.
Bahir Dar, a tourist area on Lake Tana in northwest Ethiopia with a population of about 100,000, also is a military post with many transient men.
Many young girls who end up pregnant are left on their own to cope after the men move on.
"Because of war and famine, women don't always have the traditional support of mothers and grandmothers who have died young," Mrs Harding said.
"My daughter Zewditu is older than some of the mothers we're seeing.
"I wanted to do something to help children stay with their mothers and empower the mothers.
"We wanted to provide optimum care for children – nappies, singlets, children bathed every day, fed every day, being held while they have a bottle.
"In institutions babies rarely get held while they have a bottle."
Just over 12 months ago the Hardings and Knifes set up the Grace Centre for Children and Families in Bahir Dar, with two local workers ready to look after four children.
They now have 40 Ethiopian staff caring for 70 children in a daycare centre and 22 abandoned or orphaned children in a transitional residential care centre.
"We set up a daycare centre so that the mothers could work during the day and pick their babies up and take them home at night," Mrs Harding said.
Local authorities have donated land so they can build a new Grace Centre one day.
About 300 families are being fed and supported at a cost of about $4000 a month.
The Knifes say many of the women they help would have faced giving up their children because they could not feed them, let alone clothe or shelter them.
"Currently we feed more than 50 people every day," Mrs Knife said.
"They are all destitute people, mostly single mums who are unable to work due to having small children. Our daycares are all full, so we offer them food."
When the centre advertised that it would train girls to care for children, and offer some of them work, more than 500 people queued up.
Mrs Harding, who spent about eight months in Bahir Dar with daughter Zewditu last year, tells of the transformation of young mothers once they realise they can get help with their babies.
"At first they are often very subdued, anxious and afraid," she said.
"They come with the desire to hand over their babies so they can survive. They're desperate."
Then they see the young women become more confident – even asking for help to go back to school.
"Ninety per cent of mothers choose to keep their children after they are counselled and helped back on their feet," Leith says.
The Queensland families have had their hearts touched by those they have helped, and so far only one child's life has been lost.
"Last September we were given a baby that weighed less at seven months than when she was born – only six pounds (2.7kg)," Mrs Harding said.
"We named her Hope because we thought the only way she would survive would be with hope. She lived with us for 10 days. She died in our arms."
They are now planning the Hope Memorial Clinic where they will look after the health of young children.
There are plenty of heartwarming success stories that give them real hope for the future of the children and mothers at the centre.
A little girl who was near death from a form of tuberculosis when she was brought to the centre is now a bright, intelligent 13-year-old who is about to head off to school.
One of the first children taken into care was a little boy, Beruk, who had been left by his mother, whose husband had left her and was finding it impossible to work and look after her child.
One day a woman, Eyerus, arrived at the centre, asking to volunteer. They later realised she was Beruk's mother.
"She worked around the centre, just watching her son," Mrs Harding said.
"We offered to reunite them and she has stayed with us ever since.
"She's our head nanny and she's now returning to school."
Deanne, 30, and Andrew Knife, 33, who live at the Grace Centre with their children Lydia, 11, and Josh, 8, are in the process of adopting Ethiopian twins.
The rewards for the work they do at the centre, they say, are "the smile on a woman's face when she gets that little sliver of hope that life is going to be OK; the delighted hugs and squeals of the daycare kids when they go in and they mob you".
All around them they still see so much poverty, with families living with next to nothing in mud huts.
Mrs Knife has witnessed scenes of desperation that have left her stunned.
One day as she drove to pick up some antibiotics she saw a vehicle had driven off, leaving a 15m trail of chickpeas along a dirt road.
"I watched about 20 people bent on their knees picking up these chickpeas out of the dirt, one by one," she said.
Zewditu Harding says Grace's Ethiopian staff have become like a second family to her.
The St Aidan's College Year 9 student, who still has memories of her childhood in Ethiopia, loves visiting her birth country and learning the language, and misses her friends when she is in Australia.
"It's pretty much like two different lifestyles," she explained.
At Grace Centre, Zewditu helps look after the babies.
"Sometimes I'm bottle-making at night time and sometimes I help with schooling the kids and playing around with the toddlers," she said.
Ipswich couple Emma and Murray Jensen, both 31, who have an Ethiopian-born daughter Abeba, 4, and biological daughter Matilda, 2, are spending five months at the Grace Centre.
"We're really enjoying giving Abeba the opportunity to experience her culture and her birth country," they said.
"We're relishing the opportunity to give back to a country that has given us so much – our beautiful daughter."
Stephanie Willmann, 18, who first visited Ethiopia as a 16-year-old student from Saint Stephen's College at Coomera on the Gold Coast, has spent most of the past two years there and helped start up the Grace Centre.
"I love working with the people, helping them solve their problems," the Beenleigh student said.
"On my last visit one of the best things was helping a little three-year-old boy with burns get an operation on his hands and a little girl with osteomyelitis get an operation."
Stephanie says Ethiopia is such a warm and inviting place that she sees herself having a future there.
"I feel more at home over there in Ethiopia than I do in Australia," she said. "I've never seen people as kind and with as much love for life as I have there."
Tax deductible donations to the Grace Centre can be made at www.gracecentres.org
Article from:
Font size: Decrease Increase
Email article: Email
Print article: Print
Submit comment: Submit comment
Kay Dibben
September 14, 2008 12:00am
WHEN Leith and Rob Harding adopted two children from Ethiopia they vowed to take them back so they could maintain a link with their birth country.
The Hardings, from the inner west Brisbane locality of Rainworth, have adopted four of their seven children from overseas.
"We realised as we were raising the children how important it was for them to know about their birth culture and their birth family, as well as their Australian culture," Mrs Harding said.
But Ethiopian-born Zewditu, now 14, was adopted when she was five after both her birth parents had died, and there was no extended family.
Ben, now 20, went from an Ethiopian hospital into foster care, before being adopted by the Hardings when he was 22 months old.
"We felt the need to make a connection with the country," Mrs Harding said.
"It was important for them to have Ethiopian friends – in Ethiopia as well as here."
Over the years the Hardings, now in their early 50s, have made almost annual trips to the African country, with Leith also taking Queensland high school groups there to visit aid projects.
In a country ravaged by civil war, famine, drought and HIV, many families have lost their wage-earners.
Infant mortality is high, literacy levels are low and women do 80 per cent of the manual work.
The Hardings would see young mothers cutting rocks and carting cement – often with babies strapped to their backs.
Some young mothers, out of desperation, would reach the point where they had to leave their children in orphanages just so they could keep working to survive.
Mrs Harding wanted to do something to help these mothers, many of whom had been victims of rape or seduced by men who later abandoned them and their babies.
The Hardings had met Gold Coast Christian couple Deanne and Andrew Knife, who have been living in Ethiopia with their two young children for just over two years.
The Knifes, who were teaching and running a guesthouse in Addis Ababa, also felt there must be another purpose for them in Ethiopia.
Eighteen months ago the two Queensland couples and a young American woman, Marcie Erickson, came up with a "vision" to establish a centre to help young Ethiopian mothers and babies.
"Marcie was living and working in Bahir Dar, seeing mothers living on the streets and in bus shelters with their babies," Mrs Harding said.
Bahir Dar, a tourist area on Lake Tana in northwest Ethiopia with a population of about 100,000, also is a military post with many transient men.
Many young girls who end up pregnant are left on their own to cope after the men move on.
"Because of war and famine, women don't always have the traditional support of mothers and grandmothers who have died young," Mrs Harding said.
"My daughter Zewditu is older than some of the mothers we're seeing.
"I wanted to do something to help children stay with their mothers and empower the mothers.
"We wanted to provide optimum care for children – nappies, singlets, children bathed every day, fed every day, being held while they have a bottle.
"In institutions babies rarely get held while they have a bottle."
Just over 12 months ago the Hardings and Knifes set up the Grace Centre for Children and Families in Bahir Dar, with two local workers ready to look after four children.
They now have 40 Ethiopian staff caring for 70 children in a daycare centre and 22 abandoned or orphaned children in a transitional residential care centre.
"We set up a daycare centre so that the mothers could work during the day and pick their babies up and take them home at night," Mrs Harding said.
Local authorities have donated land so they can build a new Grace Centre one day.
About 300 families are being fed and supported at a cost of about $4000 a month.
The Knifes say many of the women they help would have faced giving up their children because they could not feed them, let alone clothe or shelter them.
"Currently we feed more than 50 people every day," Mrs Knife said.
"They are all destitute people, mostly single mums who are unable to work due to having small children. Our daycares are all full, so we offer them food."
When the centre advertised that it would train girls to care for children, and offer some of them work, more than 500 people queued up.
Mrs Harding, who spent about eight months in Bahir Dar with daughter Zewditu last year, tells of the transformation of young mothers once they realise they can get help with their babies.
"At first they are often very subdued, anxious and afraid," she said.
"They come with the desire to hand over their babies so they can survive. They're desperate."
Then they see the young women become more confident – even asking for help to go back to school.
"Ninety per cent of mothers choose to keep their children after they are counselled and helped back on their feet," Leith says.
The Queensland families have had their hearts touched by those they have helped, and so far only one child's life has been lost.
"Last September we were given a baby that weighed less at seven months than when she was born – only six pounds (2.7kg)," Mrs Harding said.
"We named her Hope because we thought the only way she would survive would be with hope. She lived with us for 10 days. She died in our arms."
They are now planning the Hope Memorial Clinic where they will look after the health of young children.
There are plenty of heartwarming success stories that give them real hope for the future of the children and mothers at the centre.
A little girl who was near death from a form of tuberculosis when she was brought to the centre is now a bright, intelligent 13-year-old who is about to head off to school.
One of the first children taken into care was a little boy, Beruk, who had been left by his mother, whose husband had left her and was finding it impossible to work and look after her child.
One day a woman, Eyerus, arrived at the centre, asking to volunteer. They later realised she was Beruk's mother.
"She worked around the centre, just watching her son," Mrs Harding said.
"We offered to reunite them and she has stayed with us ever since.
"She's our head nanny and she's now returning to school."
Deanne, 30, and Andrew Knife, 33, who live at the Grace Centre with their children Lydia, 11, and Josh, 8, are in the process of adopting Ethiopian twins.
The rewards for the work they do at the centre, they say, are "the smile on a woman's face when she gets that little sliver of hope that life is going to be OK; the delighted hugs and squeals of the daycare kids when they go in and they mob you".
All around them they still see so much poverty, with families living with next to nothing in mud huts.
Mrs Knife has witnessed scenes of desperation that have left her stunned.
One day as she drove to pick up some antibiotics she saw a vehicle had driven off, leaving a 15m trail of chickpeas along a dirt road.
"I watched about 20 people bent on their knees picking up these chickpeas out of the dirt, one by one," she said.
Zewditu Harding says Grace's Ethiopian staff have become like a second family to her.
The St Aidan's College Year 9 student, who still has memories of her childhood in Ethiopia, loves visiting her birth country and learning the language, and misses her friends when she is in Australia.
"It's pretty much like two different lifestyles," she explained.
At Grace Centre, Zewditu helps look after the babies.
"Sometimes I'm bottle-making at night time and sometimes I help with schooling the kids and playing around with the toddlers," she said.
Ipswich couple Emma and Murray Jensen, both 31, who have an Ethiopian-born daughter Abeba, 4, and biological daughter Matilda, 2, are spending five months at the Grace Centre.
"We're really enjoying giving Abeba the opportunity to experience her culture and her birth country," they said.
"We're relishing the opportunity to give back to a country that has given us so much – our beautiful daughter."
Stephanie Willmann, 18, who first visited Ethiopia as a 16-year-old student from Saint Stephen's College at Coomera on the Gold Coast, has spent most of the past two years there and helped start up the Grace Centre.
"I love working with the people, helping them solve their problems," the Beenleigh student said.
"On my last visit one of the best things was helping a little three-year-old boy with burns get an operation on his hands and a little girl with osteomyelitis get an operation."
Stephanie says Ethiopia is such a warm and inviting place that she sees herself having a future there.
"I feel more at home over there in Ethiopia than I do in Australia," she said. "I've never seen people as kind and with as much love for life as I have there."
Tax deductible donations to the Grace Centre can be made at www.gracecentres.org
2008 Sep 14