I attended the handing-over ceremony in Dessie, Ethiopia, and returned on February 28. This is the third time to deliver wheelchairs to Ethiopia.
Cheshire Foundation, the local partner in Ethiopia, wants us to keep sending wheelchairs. I told them it would be possible through mutual efforts for the costs.
I visited several children’s houses to see how they used their ‘first’ wheelchairs. Dessie is in the mountain area and most of the houses were in the mountainside. Some children were sitting in the dark room of a shabby house, and a mother answered to our questionnaire with tears, facing the fact that there is no special school nor social support for these children. I felt really sorry for her because I could do nothing to solve such problems.
Even so, the children looked happy, being able to sit on their own wheelchairs and go out of their houses instead of just lying inside.
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Dessie is a conical town, surrounded by high mountains. It’s perhaps about 2,500 meters above sea level. It becomes cold in the morning and evening. There were frequent power failures and I could not charge my cellphone. I couldn’t tell the time, either. I was afraid that I would oversleep, but Koran at five thirty in the morning woke me up, fortunately.
I didn’t see any Japanese during our stay in Ethiopia and was sometimes mistaken for a Chinese. There was no traffic light while traveling to and from Dessie, but I saw lots of animals; donkeys, cows, horses, sheep, goat, and even camels!
I dropped in at a barber’s. (I like barbers.) The barber looked a bit tense to see a Japanese (maybe for the first time?) and I also gave up giving him a sensitive order, but it was all right after all. It cost me only 90 yen, with no shampoo.
March 5, 2016 Hirokazu Morita
Dessie, Ethiopia
The child and her mother with a new wheelchair