Ethiopian activist looks to Canada to help AIDS orphans

House of Children’s House of Hope facility needs donations to continue in Addis Ababa

Yewoinshet Marsesha was in Richmond on Thursday, to raise money for a Hope for Children facility, the House of Hope, in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa. Hope for Children works primarily to care for children whose parents have died of AIDS-related complications.

A few days before Yewoinshet Masresha left Ethiopia for a fundraising tour in Canada, an HIV-positive girl too weak to walk was brought to the House of Hope, her arms draped over the people supporting her.

Masresha thought she would die within a couple of days, but when she checked on the girl the next morning, she was shocked to see her up and making coffee. The House of Hope staff said she had got out of bed and come down to dinner the night before. When she asked the girl what had made her walk down to dinner after being too weak to support herself at lunch, she said that she was inspired by the happy people around her who had been healed and were now taking care of other children with the disease.

When Masresha, the founder and executive director of Hope for Children, established the House of Hope in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, it was as a hospice where people with HIV and AIDS could go to die in relative peace and comfort. But as anti-retroviral therapy became more widely available and subsidized by the Ethiopian government, it increasingly became a place of healing and hope. More and more patients are being nursed back to health and returning to their families.

But the House of Hope is in danger of disappearing, and Masresha is hoping to save it. Now on a fundraising tour of Western Canada, she spoke in Vancouver earlier this week.

The House of Hope’s landlord died earlier this year and his family wants to sell the property, so Masresha is trying to raise $60,000 to buy it from them. Her organization is funded by the Enderby, B.C.-based charity Partners in the Horn of Africa and other non-profits in the U.S. and Australia.

The House of Hope is needed, Masresha said, because HIV and AIDS patients are sometimes neglected by their families, who are uneducated and have misconceptions about how the disease is spread. Hope for Children workers try to combat this stigma by conducting home visits and talking directly with families, hosting coffee gatherings to discuss the issue and teaching teens about sexual health and HIV transmission.

This is no easy task in a country where sex and AIDS are both taboo subjects. Families used to send dogs to chase these workers when they tried to broach the topics, Masresha said.

But things have changed since she founded Hope for Children in 2000 to care for eight HIV-positive children. Her organization now reaches 13,000 kids in 50 villages through its programs and cares for 1,050 directly. It exists primarily to care for children whose parents have died of AIDS-related complications.

As the oldest of 13 children, Masresha has plenty of experience with caregiving. Her mother had a baby about once a year, and by age five, Masresha already had four younger siblings. Her parents did not want her to go to school, but relented after she cried for two days. She finished elementary school in four years and even went to high school at a time when sending girls to school at all was still seen as a costly novelty.

Then she went to jail. Masresha spent three years in solitary confinement, sleeping on a bug-infested mattress in a room too small to fully extend her legs in and only seeing the sun for five minutes a day. Her crime? Turning down a marriage proposal from an army officer. But she could talk to other prisoners through holes in the wall and they were able to teach each other things, so her mind stayed engaged and she never lost hope.

She became a social counsellor for a Catholic organization working with HIV and AIDS patients before anti-retroviral therapy became widely available.

“They were dying, and when they die, they hold my hand and say ‘Look, I am dying. Could you please take care of my children?’”

It was there that Masresha saw the need for an organization to care for those being left behind.

She now oversees a group home for 84 such children.

“Now the first two kids are going to university,” she said proudly. Three more, all girls, will follow in September.
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