In Ethiopia, hindsight and education
September 1st, 2010 by Coco McCabe Posted in Education, Ethiopia | 1 Comment »“An uneducated person means a blind person,” says Hussein Kedir who, with his wife, is working hard to make sure their children have a chance to go to school. Coco McCabe reports from central Ethiopia:
Demitu Gurmessa and her husband, Hussein Kedir, are sitting on a long wooden bench in the dirt yard outside their home in Jello Dida—a community in the Shashamene District of Ethiopia. Nestled with them are some of their nine children.
Demitu holds out her hand to me so I can feel her palm—rough with the countless chores required to keep her family fed, housed, and clothed. Hussein holds out his, too. It feels just like his wife’s, a hand toughened by work in the fields. For poor people in Ethiopia, that’s what life is; they are bound to hard physical labor—to plowing and planting patches of earth, to fetching water and firewood, to herding goats, sheep, and cattle. But the couple’s hands are tough for another reason:





