Feeling charitable

In August 2006 Ethiopia was hit with flash floods that destroyed several regions of the country.

One particular area, Dire Dawa, was declared a disaster zone with close to 500 people missing or dead and over 10,000 left homeless.

It was with this in mind that Youth Release was set up by former DCU student Niamh Power who went over to Dire Dawa last summer to work with the kids and to finalise plans for a youth centre in one of these flooded areas.

“I’d been teaching in Zambia during college and I thought there’s very little development going on in Ethiopia. There’s thousands of street kids and there’s not really enough schools for the kids who have to work and live on the street.

“Ethiopia gets a lot of fundamental aid in terms of food provisions and that but not enough money goes into the development, and education I think is the key. Even if they had a youth centre that they could drop into for an hour a day, five hours a week if they wanted to that would be a really good idea,” says Power.

The project was financed by a series of fundraising events including table quizzes, sponsored runs and some small donations. In total they raised about €40,000 before they went out.

Each day in the community the group of nine volunteers, including four DCU students split into two groups to work in two different areas. Some local schools opened up for the summer so they could come in and use its facilities. For three hours in the morning they would teach a group of about 50 kids basic English through music and songs. After lunch, an hour was spent with a group of orphanage kids that came from another school while from three o’clock onwards they would play sports such as football, basketball and volleyball with nearly 250 kids from all around the area.

“The kids over there are very responsive to anyone who wants to give them attention and anyone with a football is a big deal and it’s just someone stopping and giving them a bit of attention really,” says the Youth Release founder.

One of the volunteers was DCU’s former SU president Alan Flanagan who said it was an amazing experience that truly opened his eyes to the world.

“I know some people who wouldn’t want to go over because it can be upsetting. But the way I look at it is [that] it’s an education and I think you’ll have a very skewed idea of what the world is like if you haven’t seen what the world is actually like.”

Flanagan admits that one of his best and worst memories came when he was with some street children the night before he left. “They were showing us around the city and we’d seen a good bit of it before but this was a couple of hours of just solid walking. It was good to see from a research point of view but was really difficult to know as we were going home and these kids on the streets didn’t have a home to go to,” he says.

Unlike the common view of Africa as a place of rural wasteland, Dire Dawa is an actual city. With a population of almost 400,000 people it is the second largest city in Ethiopia behind the capital Addis Ababa and is blighted by severe problems of unemployment and homelessness. Conditions, of course, are often a lot worse in the countryside but Flanagan says that while that can sometimes be a self-sustaining life, in the city it’s easy to get lost in the crowd and end with nothing at all.

Over there the volunteers had to balance themselves between the day to day volunteering and then other work such as the youth centre that was more long term.
Here they worked alongside the De La Salle brothers and the Sisters of Charity of Ethiopia. After they put forward plans and proposals and met with local government, 5,000 square metres of land was eventually granted in a small region nearby.

Youth Release, one of this year’s RAG week charities, will head back again this summer to push ahead with the building work of the youth centre. At the moment

Flanagan says that they are just trying to sort the logistics of the entire thing but he is looking forward to going back.

For now though, Niamh Power is satisfied with the difference they made to the lives of the kids in their short time there last summer. “You’re not going to go over and change [the children’s] lives in six weeks but as a child you always remember your summers,” he says.

“I always remember my summers and if those kids got two months of just being off having a good time like a summer camp basically, that’s really good. Very basic, like ‘I remember that summer when those mad Irish people came over and we had the craic every day’.”

It seems the ‘craic’ they had last summer won’t be forgotten anytime soon by this group of volunteers or indeed the young kids of Dire Dawa.

For more information you can contact youthrelease@gmail.com