By Lornet Turnbull
Special to The Medium
Ezra Teshome still recalls his first encounter with a polio victim.
A Rotarian, he was attending the Rotary Club’s 1997 peace conference in his home country of Ethiopia, learning firsthand about the alarming number of children there and around the world crippled by a disease many people had long consigned to history.
He had been on a field trip to remote villages to help orally administer a polio vaccine to children and wasn’t quite prepared when a mother he’d approached pulled back a blanket to reveal her daughter’s lifeless, withered legs.
“That touched me,” the Leschi resident said.
Two drops of the vaccine, administered to a child multiple times up to age five, can often be the difference between a normal life and lifetime paralysis, according to the World Health Organization.
“I made a commitment then that I’d come back every year until the disease was eradicated,” said Teshome.
At the time the Rotary Club was a decade into a global initiative to wipe out this scourge that was preying on 1,000 children a day in 127 countries.
And over the course of 20 years, Teshome never wavered from his commitment – sometimes traveling to Ethiopia several times a year; sometimes with groups of Rotarians from the U.S. and Canada and sometimes alone.
Now, the end is within reach, thanks to a global public-private initiative that expanded on the Rotary’s original eradication effort and that includes organizations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Health Organization and the steadfast dedication of Rotarians like Teshome.
His trip to Ethiopia this October will be his last to administer the oral vaccine, which is being replaced across the globe with an injectable form.
He’ll go back to a country that hasn’t seen a new case of polio in three years, the length of time it takes to be declared polio free. In fact, the disease has been eradicated from all but two countries — Afghanistan and Pakistan — with only 12 reported cases this year.
“We can’t wave the white flag and say it’s over,” Teshome. “We need to remain vigilant. Polio is only a plane ride away.”
Making a life in Seattle
Teshome was among a small wave of African students who arrived in the Seattle area for college in the 1970s. He always hoped to eventually go back home.
When he graduated in 1976 with a pre-law degree from Seattle University, his plan was to return to work for a year in Ethiopia, come back to obtain a law degree stateside and eventually go back to work for the United Nations or the Foreign Service.
But in 1974, a communist coup led to the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie, and the resulting turmoil and unrest made a return ill-advised.
“As I stayed longer, the situation at home got worse,” he said. “They were jailing a lot of young, educated people and some started to disappear.”
So he decided to settle in Seattle and took a job as an insurance claims adjuster with State Farm.
When his brother died accidentally in 1982, he returned home for the first time since he’d left and was shocked by what he found.
People were starving.
Homelessness reigned.
A rugged, landlocked nation in the horn of Africa, Ethiopia is the continent’s oldest independent country, its second most populous and a place of great ancient culture.
“My father, who had a dairy farm, and others who relied so much on farming had lost everything,” Teshome said. “My family told me: ‘there’s no reason to come back here.”
Making a difference
Back in Seattle, Teshome, who is married with grown children, opened an insurance agency on Capitol Hill. And as his business flourished, he looked for ways to give back.
In 1985, he joined the University District Rotary Club, volunteering to help prepare supplies for food banks and provide scholarships to needy students. He became the club’s president 10 years later.
And in 1997, when the Rotary chose Addis Ababa for its peace conference, Teshome made plans to attend.
He said he had no personal experience with polio; no one in his family had been afflicted by the disease. But it felt natural for him to do his part to rid the globe of it – starting in the country where he grew up.
“When you are crippled in Africa or in any Third World country, your only way of life is to beg for money on the streets,” he said. “Nobody should be forced to do that.”
His work on polio exposed other problems, too.
Many of the children he was treating and their mothers were homeless. And when the president of the Rotary raised the question, “what good is it if we are giving these kids medicine, and not putting a roof over their heads” Teshome decided to take up that challenge, too.
He raised funds, matched by the Rotary, to build 107 homes – each about 300 square feet – in a place residents later named Rotary Village. And once the families were sheltered, Teshome helped raise another $25,000 to provide micro-loans so they could start small businesses.
“Every year I go back, I go visit [Rotary Village], and I’m amazed by the progress that’s been made,” he said.
“They used the money to buy sewing machines so they could make and sell clothing,” continued Teshome. “They’re doing vegetable sales, small groceries stores in front of their homes.”
He also helped raise money for a new school and transported eight containers of wheelchairs for those paralyzed by polio.
Many of the Rotarians who accompanied Teshome on his annual trips were exposed to the intense and diverse needs of the country and many were moved to help, creating water sanitation projects, providing school supplies and other projects.
Teshome has been recognized for his work, including the World Affairs Council’s World Citizen Award in 2010.
And while he will no longer be administering the oral vaccines, he said he will continue to return to Ethiopia from time to time to work on other efforts.
“It’s an ongoing fight,” he said.
Lornet Turnbull is a Seattle-based freelance writer.
