Imagine Ethiopia 2011: You Can “Go” From Home

As one of the leaders of Imagine Ethiopia 2011 I wanted to share a progress update to inspire and potentially involve you in our next steps. Read on for more.

Earlier this year, Vancouver-based charitable organization, imagine1day, launched their second annual Imagine Ethiopia trip: a two-week adventure that takes participants on a daily exploration of the best that Ethiopia has to offer.

imagine1day is a growing global community of people making passionate contributions to ensure that all Ethiopians have access to quality education funded free of foreign aid by 2030. They ran their first trip to Ethiopia last year to great success.

This year’s trip is fast approaching. The Imagine Ethiopia team is set to arrive in Addis Ababa (Ethiopia’s capital) on October 23 and they are busy. Not busy packing bags – busy with Creatribution. In the lead up to the trip, this year’s participants have chosen to take on raising $100 000 (the funds required to finance a three-year, self-generating education project with imagine1day) before they depart. You can support them here and US donors can support them through GO Campaign, our stateside partner, here.

What is Creatribution? Rather than bore you with an explanation of the concept, here is a glimpse at some of Imagine Ethiopia 2011’s participants and what they are doing to ensure that $100K is in the suitcase bound for Addis this October:

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Three Ways to Do Something About Famine in Africa (From Forbes.com)

A guest blog by Majka Burhardt on Frederik Allen's Leadership blog on Forbes.com.

...There is enormous opportunity here to rewrite the long, sad story of famine and turn it into something much more promising and much more accurate for the Ethiopia of today as it becomes the Ethiopia of tomorrow—using Ethiopia’s own resources. Ethiopia is not Somalia, but all of the countries in the Horn of Africa are being lumped together in the current headlines in a devastating manner, in part by association and in part because the very real drought does cut across national lines. The Horn is a region of more or less than a million square miles with between 100 million and 200 million people, depending on how you define it. The region’s entire story is much more complex and ultimately hopeful than just the famine. Focusing on only the famine is like saying that all of Europe is financially and morally bankrupt just because of the recent doomsday chatter about Italy....

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The Biggest Job I've Ever Had

A boy in the Ethiopian Flag in Northern Ethiopia, Photo By Travis Horn Five years ago a taxi driver in Addis Ababa told me that the book I was about to write chronicling climbing in Ethiopia would save Ethiopia. I’d just explained to him what rock climbing was the minute before. Nevertheless he was convinced and I nodded and smiled as if I were as well.

When that taxi driver told me my book would save Ethiopia I took his statement at face value: write book =  save Ethiopia. Who knows what he really meant. I’ve never seen him since and don’t know his name. What I do know is that Vertical Ethiopia came out a year later and I spent that year and the two years following learning that I was indeed trying to save Ethiopia. But not just Ethiopia -- Ethiopia, myself, the United States, and the world....  

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Running With Haile, An Additive Adventure Entry

Haile Gebreselassie

In Conjunction With OutsideTV.com

This is how it happens. One person has the idea to run 13,286 kilometers—the distance from Vancouver B.C. to Mekelle, Ethiopia—to raise money to build a school in rural Ethiopia. It’s hard for one person to run that far himself or herself. So they ask for others to join them. One of the people who signs up is Haile Gebrselassie, the international running icon who’s broken 27 world records, and the current world marathon record holder. And just like that, I’m running with Haile.

Wake up early in Addis Ababa and go outside. Early, early. 5:00 am early, when mountain air swirls cool around your uncovered ankles and wrists and nose. 5:00 am early, when the only illumination in the darkness is the flash of white teeth and eyes of the hundreds of runners who got up even earlier. Join them. 

Running in Ethiopia is a way of life. Running in Ethiopia as a visitor, is a rite of passage. In Addis, Ethiopia’s capitol, runners swarm paved streets and dirt roads. If you sleep in until 7:00 you will miss them. You will not know the passion of the pounding of feet. You will not be swept up in your own desire to do the same—even if you only jog, even if you only walk, even if you only watch.

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Me, As a Dot. An Additive Adventure Entry*

Photo By Gabe RogelFrom OutsideTV.com.

I have no idea who the people are who will change my life in the next two years. I had no idea, two years ago, that a woman making a spontaneous stop in a Patagonia store in California would change mine now. Susanne Conrad caught a glimpse of a tall hardbound book called Vertical Ethiopia. I’d written it, but that didn’t matter to her, then. Ethiopia mattered.

A few months later, a random email appeared in my inbox. Sapna Dayal introduced herself and suggested that we might have much in common. She was the executive director of imagine1day, a non-profit dedicated to changing the world’s future via building schools in Ethiopia. We spent following winter months talking. I’d come home from ice climbing in New Hampshire and watch it get dark and cold in New England as Sapna would pause her afternoon in a rainy Vancouver for us to brainstorm about how to work together in the high desert in the Horn of Africa.

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