Day 3 - "Where there's education, there's always Hope"

The Team split into groups, with some going off to Addis Development Vision, and Fiona Harper, Lauren Bartmanis and myself heading to Hope Enterprises. As we entered the city centre headquarters, we could hear the sound of children singing at the top of their voices, which immediately made the hairs on the back of the neck stand up.

These are kids from disadvantaged backgrounds, 700 of whom come in every morning for a breakfast of two bread rolls, a banana and a mug of warm milk. The purpose of the exercise is to encourage them to attend school and to this end the charity has a full-time social worker who visits their homes, meets with their parents, and helps resolve any problems. He has a caseload of over 1000 children all over Addis, and without the charity, these kids would undoubtedly go through life with no formal education and little future.

Hope is an immense organisation, with schools across the country and many other projects (see http://www.hopeenterprises.org for more information). One of these is a soup kitchen, which offers a basic meal to over 1000 homeless people a day. It was perhaps the only time in the entire trip that we saw the pragmatists who run these projects crack a little. The core principle of the Hope programmes is to build for the future, whereas the soup kitchen operates purely to offer basic sustenance to those who have been stripped of everything - hope, dignity, opportunity. We were fortunate to meet a Dutch businessman, who for the last 15 years had co-ordinated the contributions of over 200 businesses to support this enterprise, and we could only stand in awe and the level of commitment that he had shown in both time and money.

Our next stop was the Hope School in Addis. The school offers education from Kindergarten through grade 12, plus up to 3 years of specialized vocational education in areas such as Hospitality, Catering, and Electrical Engineering. This is where we are due to spend most of our week, teaching English and helping the teachers in any way we can.

Our final destination was that site of the Hope University which is currently under construction. This will be and extraordinary complex when it is completed in 2010, designed by a local architectural firm using traditional Ethiopian design forms, and will offer the opportunity for Higher Education to thousands of students who otherwise would not have been able to afford it.

Our guides for the day were Dr Minas and Dr Alemu. These are two hugely inspirational men. Most of the time in the developed world, we only hear about emergency aid requirements, feeding people in dire need but offering no long-term solutions. Hope is attempting to change this, and the future of an entire country through education. It is an immense undertaking, costing nearly £6m to fund a year, and not insubstantial portion of which comes from Ethiopiaid.