Desperate Refugees In Ethiopia—

A Crisis Half A World Away Becomes A Rallying Point For Area Groups

By Kaaren Valenta

Responding to the horrific sight of starving, diseased adults and children in the Denan refugee camp, filmmaker Dick Young has enlisted the help of friends and organizations in Newtown, Woodbury, and surrounding communities to help support a new clinic in the remote eastern Ethiopian town.

Mr Young returned from his second trip to Denan on May 1 with a renewed determination to provide help to the 14,000 displaced persons in the camp in the Ogaden region of eastern Ethiopia, not far from the border of Somalia and nearly 50 miles from Gode, the nearest town with electricity —sometimes.

“I make sponsored films and videos,” he explained in an interview on May 17. “One of my clients is Heifer International and I was doing a film for them all over the world four years ago. I had to be in West Africa, I knew about the situation in Ethiopia, so I asked permission to go there at my own expense because I knew the media here was not covering it.”

At that time, Mr Young found 7,000 living without food and clean water in the Denan camp.

“The Ogaden region is populated mostly by ethic Somalis and has been devastated by drought, famine, and an armed separatist movement,” he said. “Temperatures daily soar well above 110 degrees, making the conditions there almost unbearable.”

It took more than two years to make a video from film he had shot during his visit there. But once he showed the video to friends at a fundraising dinner, they decided to form a committee to help. They raised more than $50,000.

“They asked what can we do, in a war zone with no roads, to feed 7,000 people? So we came up with the idea of getting a doctor to go there for one year,” he said.

The group also agreed to provide some medicine for the clinic and to build a reservoir to provide water to the clinic. Linda and Dr Morton Silberstein of The Homesteads at Newtown paid for the purchase of a solar-powered/battery backup water purification system for the clinic and a small refrigeration unit was donated by the Water of Life Corporation of Newtown whose chief executive officer, Harvey Sellner, founded the World Help Foundation, also based in Newtown to bring potable water to those in need around the world.

“Through the efforts of the Ethiopian ambassador to the United Nations and the Ethiopian minister of mines, we were able to arrange a partnership with the Ogaden Welfare and Development Association, a local nongovernmental organization,” Mr Young said. “That group helped get the Ethiopian government to agree to supply the clinic with some medicines, furnish two health assistants, and to construct a new clinic building.”

Dick Young returned to Denan this year for the April 26 opening of the clinic. He found the camp had grown to 14,000 people.

“The camp had no clean water for three weeks as the truck hired to bring potable water to the camp was broken,” he said. “There also had been no food shipment in over one month. You can imagine how desperate the situation was and is.”

As he approached the clinic there were more than 300 people surrounding the building and more were arriving.

The four big medical issues in the Denan area are malnutrition, respiratory diseases, gastrointestinal diseases, and malaria, he said. On the first day of the clinic operation, the patients who came had polio, bullet wounds, cleft palate, all types of skin diseases, burns, snake bite, infected wounds, blindness, deformed limbs, depression, and other conditions.

“In spite of our best efforts, the clinic couldn’t treat 10 to 20 percent of the people because there were no scalpels, sutures, or instruments and no way to sterilize anything,” Mr Young said. “If you live there and break and ankle, you are crippled for life.”

Five days after the clinic opened, the doctor left.

“The clinic had run out of medicine,” Mr Young explained. “Then a 12-year-old goat herder stepped on a landmine and was brought severely injured to the clinic. The doctor commandeered a pickup truck to take the boy to Gode where there was a hospital — if you can call it that — with a cement floor. It was closed and the doctor wasn’t there, so our doctor was up until 4 am operating on the boy.”

Dick Young and his photographer Jarret Schecter, who is also his biggest donor, left to buy medicine, packed it up, and sent it to the clinic. The doctor returned but the challenge now is keeping the clinic operating.

“One of the problems in working in the developing world is that unfortunately many times the money never gets to the people or causes for which it is intended. We have taken every reasonable precaution to see that this does not happen in Denan,– Mr Young said.

“We have supplied the funds for the construction of the clinic reservoir and witnessed the start of construction while we were there. We also have paid two months’ salary for the doctor in advance. He is being paid $1,100 a month. We also are paying the Ogaden Welfare and Development Association $250 per month to manage the project and furnish bimonthly reports,” he said.

“We need to raise money for medicines and the clinic also needs a vehicle, a Toyota diesel stick-shift with four-wheel drive — because there are only repair facilities for Toyota [in eastern Ethiopia] — to transport critically ill patients to the nearest hospital 80 kilometers away. And we would like to get a laptop computer for the doctor to keep track of patient treatment and to provide us with accurate, detailed reports.”

The clinic needs all types of medical supplies and medications, even outdated ones that still might be usable. Cash donations also are needed. Checks should be made out to Global Action with the word “Denan” in the memo line so that donors can get a tax deduction. Checks and medicines should be sent to Dick Young, 63 Judson Avenue, Woodbury, CT 06798.

“Every penny that is raised is going directly to the project,” Mr Young promised. “It is a joyous, moving experience to see what we have worked for coming to fruition and the impact it is having on the people of Denan.”