By Donna Berber

John and Breck Spencer at an unprotected spring in the Simien Mountains in the Amhara region of northern Ethiopia.

Recently, 14-year-old Breck Spencer and his father John traveled to northern Ethiopia with A Glimmer of Hope to see the life of the rural poor. For Breck and John, the trip was transformational. I wanted to share with you an insightful letter John recently sent me about how the trip changed him from a skeptic to a man filled with optimism and hope for the future lives of the women and men in Ethiopia.

Dear Donna:

Having just returned from Ethiopia, I wanted to thank you and the rest of A Glimmer of Hope’s team. Foremost, I want to extend my heartfelt thanks to Eric, Tameru, Mary Clare, Daniel and Eric. Their incredible personal dedication to the Glimmer mission along with their attention to detail and concern about meeting our needs made the trip an overwhelming success. You have assembled a world-class team on the ground.

Also, I want to share with you how the trip changed my perception of Ethiopia. Before we went, I steeled myself for the shock of poverty and human misery that usually greets me when I travel throughout the Third World. Having worked and traveled extensively throughout Latin America and Southeast Asia, I had a pretty clear picture in my mind of what to expect – abject poverty breeding despair, dependence on western aid, and political corruption that blocked real reform. In short, I expected to see a place where noble people were robbed of any future by forces beyond their control and left hopeless. I plead guilty to succumbing to profound cynicism in regards to Ethiopia’s future - cynicism that this trip obliterated.

John & Breck on market day in the village of Robit, Ethiopia.

Our journey began in Dubai, where two days on the ground provided perspective and contrast for our trip on to Ethiopia. We saw what you would expect of a place shrouded in complete material excess – the luxury cars, the buildings, the restaurants and the lavish houses. What I didn’t expect, and what set the stage for my experience in Ethiopia, was the way Dubai is failing to invest in its future. While Dubai was at one point flush with cash, it remains a startlingly poorly educated population that imports close to everything it consumes. Their mass transit projects seem designed more to capture the imagination than actually move people and goods around the country. This lack of Dubai’s investment hit me hard.

With this in mind, we left Dubai on our way to the Ethiopian capital Addis a little depressed. Skipping over the small details, I was struck throughout my time in Ethiopia by its contrast to Dubai. Instead of comparing Ethiopia’s poverty to Dubai’s money, I became convinced of Ethiopia’s bright future because of the long-term investment of infrastructure being erected wherever we traveled. We saw the investment of bridges, roads, dams and electric transmission lines everywhere. A desperately poor country in sub-Saharan Africa was actually investing in itself! Wow!

But all of this macro-economic goodness is only as powerful as the investment in Ethiopia at the ground floor, and throughout my trip I witnessed Glimmer providing that ground floor foundation. At the village level, education, clean water and health care are the essential foundations for the future. Without these basic needs, further development like infrastructure, a modern banking system or economic development is futile. The eradication of preventable disease through access to clean drinking water and vaccines, coupled with a strong educational system and access to micro-loans, paves the road for the next generation.

Glimmer staff members Eric Schmidhauser (Austin, Texas) and Tameru Abasaba (Addis Ababa, Ethiopia), along with John and Breck Spencer and the micro-loan recipient standing in front of his farm.

The picture snapped into focus while visiting a micro-loan recipient who built a future for himself and his family by using a $700 loan to irrigate his farm. Now his yield is some 30% higher, and he can plant twice a year. The farmer will repay the loan in full from the proceeds from his first harvest and plans to lease the adjacent plot with the proceeds from his second harvest. The whole thing makes me smile still. It is easy for me to believe that the children in the villages benefiting from Glimmer projects will one day become engineers and doctors.

In my travels throughout Asia, I became convinced that much of its economic success is the product of a culture that demands focus and self-reliance. There is absolutely no margin for error when tiny farms – the size of a modest suburban American backyard - are the sole source of your survival. Literally, rice farming has bred discipline into the Asian culture, and sloppiness out of it. And as we passed the equally tiny farms in Ethiopia, I sensed that the same work ethic, focus and self-reliance are being homegrown in the lives of the Ethiopian men and women.

John giving a pregnant Ethiopian woman a gift so she can purchase a donkey to help her carry water on her 3-hour trek each day to the local well.

To illustrate the drastic self-reliance I saw in the typical Ethiopian, I want to tell you about a 22-year-old woman with a four-year-old child that we met at a well near the new school funded by the ATA (Austin Tennis Academy). The woman expressed she was so grateful for access to clean water that she did not mind the 3 hours a day she spent walking twice to the well. As I was mulling this over, Mary Clare pointed out that this woman was also pregnant with a second child. In response, we attempted to buy her a donkey to help her transport water. We pressed upon her the obvious risks to her unborn child of walking three hours a day, bent over, with this enormous weight on her back. Her response floored all of us. She simply said, “Thank you, but I am not a beggar.”

With one sentence, this 22-year-old woman taught me more about Ethiopian culture than the knowledge of 100 books. She only relented to our request when we told her this was not an act of charity, but rather that we hoped this would begin a cycle of kindness if she could in turn help someone else in need, and that person continued the cycle. Once she understood our purpose, she opened up and spoke of passing the donkey on when she no longer needed it. In response to this woman’s actions, I can only think of Mary Clare’s sage words that everywhere she went in Ethiopia, people said “Thank you,” when in reality she felt she should be thanking them.

I am truly thankful to the people of Ethiopia for what they have taught me. My experience completely disabused me of the notion that Ethiopia is yet another African country ripe with resources, but mired in a vicious poverty cycle because of corruption, repression and neglect that forces it to seek aid from the developed world. Instead, I saw only optimism. There is definitely hope in Ethiopia, and it is far more than just a glimmer.

John Spencer carries a student of the Ahzera School (back left of photo) in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, during the inauguration of the deep borehole water project at this school made possible by Dave and Isabel Welland.

Thank you for opening our minds and our eyes.

Sincerely,
John Spencer

To read more about what John’s son Breck is doing in response to his trip to Ethiopia with his father and Glimmer staff, check out Glimmer’s Donor Spotlight from August. Breck and the Austin Tennis Academy organized an event to share this experience with other students on Wednesday, September 1, 2010 from 5:00pm - 9:00pm:

Walk for Life
Austin Tennis Academy/ Spanish Oaks
6800 Spanish Oaks Club Blvd.
Austin, TX, 78738

(UPDATE: This event was a huge success! See the Tennis Academy on a Winning Streak article posted on philanthropy.com for more about this event.)

Donna Berber
Founder and Co-Chair