Making Miracles Happen in Ethiopia

Reported By: Bill Liss

Web Editor: Michael King

Last Modified: 2/11/2007 7:14:08 PM

Courage, determination and dedication. Those words describe Ethiopian native and Atlanta resident Sebri Omar.

Omar made a life-changing commitment, and together with 11Alive’s Bill Liss, they Made Things Happen to save countless lives in Omar’s native Ethiopian city.

For Harar, Ethiopia, a city of a half-million people, the first ambulance ever, came from Atlanta. It was inspired by Atlanta resident Sebri Oman, who was forced to flee his native Ethiopia at the age of 17 to escape a military coup and possible death.

Omar walked across the desert -- alone -- for seven weeks.

“My parents didn’t want me to get killed,” said Omar. “Once you start walking, there is no stop.”

After three years in a refugee camp, Omar made his way to Atlanta.

Then, after 22 years, he returned to visit his native city of Harar. He saw deplorable conditions in a local hospital and made a life-changing decision: to build a new hospital for his Ethiopian city.

Omar did just that. He sold a gas station he owned and took a loan from an Ethiopian bank. His 45 bed medical clinic, named Yamaage for hope, is now open and fully operational.

But for Omar, the journey was not over.

“One of the things we desperately need is an ambulance, because there is absolutely no ambulance in the city of Harar,” Omar said.

Make Things Happen worked four months to find one -- and succeeded.

It came from Metro Ambulance Service of Atlanta.

Then came an equally big challenge: getting the ambulance from Atlanta to Harar. Domestic air carrier AirTran Airways funded initial preparations. Make Things Happen then turned to Peachtree City-based World Airways. Without hesitation, World Airways said yes.

“This is a great story for us because we are part of Atlanta,” said World Airways’ Steve Forsyth.

For Sebri Omar, and a half-million people in Harar, their first ambulance was then flown from Atlanta to Brussels on World Airways, then on Ethiopian Airlines from there to Addis Ababa.

Under huge floodlights, at Hartsfield-Jackson, the ambulance was carefully loaded onto a World Airways giant cargo jet for its free one-way trip to Africa.

“Trust me, I’ll make sure it gets there without a scratch,” said Deanthony Jackson of World Airways.

The ambulance triumphantly arrived in Harar and was paraded from street to street.

On arrival at the medical center, there was a historic celebration. And without delay, the ambulance was pressed into service.

For Sebri Omar, and for the half-million people of Harar, Ethiopia, a new era in medical care is now underway.

Omar said the hospital and the ambulance are just the beginning. He said he now plans to raise money and build Ethiopia’s first Hospice -- also in Harar.

A walled city

Traveling onward to eastern Ethiopia, the country's past and present became even clearer for me in the thousand-year-old walled city of Harar, a place rich in Islamic culture.

Travel writer Paul Theroux, in his book "Dark Star Safari: Overland From Cairo to Cape Town," described Harar as "one of the great destinations in Africa, for its exoticism, its special kind of fanaticism and its remoteness ... unique in its languages and customs."

Exotic? Certainly. Fanatic people? Some. Remote? Absolutely. Worth the hassle? Definitely.

It's easy to believe local claims that Harar is the fourth holiest Muslim city after Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem. It has the most mosques per square mile of any city in the world — 99 within the 1-½ square miles of the walled town — and eight more in the sprawling community outside the wall.

My guide, Endale, led me through narrow alleys to a Koranic school. Children, seated three or four to a desk, were exuberantly singing songs. Their instructor, a bearded man in his 60s, used a wooden tablet, probably like that of his predecessors during the last 1,000 years.

At Ras Tafari House, I saw the home of the former Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, who ruled until 1974. It's now occupied by a holy man who doubles as a healer, sleeping by day and, according to a hand-scrawled sign out front, curing by night anything from cancer to hemorrhoids to mental illness.

As I left Harar, I wondered how an estimated 130,000 Muslims and Christians in this city have peacefully lived side-by-side for generations.

Back home, I'm still grappling with that question and many others about Ethiopia. Does the Ark of the Covenant still exist? If so, was I only mere yards from it? And why does that man risk his life every night to feed wild hyenas?

The answers to those and many other questions, as Tafesse, the former national tourism minister, says, lie somewhere in Ethiopia's "checkered, illustrious and tumultuous history."

Dean R. Owen is a freelance writer and works for Federal Way-based World Vision.