After reporting around the world, journalist and S.D. native Chuck Raasch says he is still inspired by those who cared for others
My notebook is filled with firsts. On one trip into a new camp, the plane I was on that was carrying food and aid workers was the first plane many Ethiopians covering a vast mountainous steppe had ever seen. The morning of our arrival an impromptu runway a mile long had been stomped and packed in the soft dirt and sand by lines of hundreds of those refugees still capable of walking.
One pilot, a man named Larry Ayotte, from Round Rock, Texas, fought off tears when he recounted the first time deplaning and being surrounded by dozens of little children, five or six of them holding onto each hand at the same time.
“I saw a 7-year-old girl yesterday with arms this big around,” he told me, and my notebook says he made a circle the size of a quarter. I envision him to this day tearing up, searching over my shoulder to something larger than both of us, for the next words that could not come.
He had flown aid missions in Indonesia, and he had committed to staying a year in Ethiopia.
Larry was one of seven pilots flying in 11-hour shifts, virtually non-stop, for World Vision. They had two de Havilland DHC-6 planes, which they had nicknamed Romeo and Juliet. They could fly in up to 22 aid workers at a time or several tons of supplies.
Larry had a 2-year-old child in country with him. His wife also worked for World Vision relief camp kitchens. I did not get a chance to meet her.
Larry was 37, tall and balding, fond of wearing Western shirts and moccasins when flying. He was haunted every day seeing a 2-year-old half the size of his own child.
But even one success story was all the salve to the soul he needed to keep going, to look beyond the grain, medicine, or baby formula he was flying into mountainous camps of up to 9,300 foot in elevation.
“Too much of the time, all we see are things in boxes and we are working hard to just get them into the camps,” he told me. ”But then you go into the camps, and you see the kids that have graduated because of the food and medicine and people we fly in.”
And tears again welled in the eyes. And words again seemed inadequate.
A medical doctor from Lincoln, Neb., Dr. Frank Weirman, was one of two doctors among a medical staff of 30 at a camp near Lalibela, a center of pilgrimage for Ethiopian Christians. When Dr. Weirman arrived, 50 children a day were dying. By the time I got there, they had gotten it down to two.
He had a simple motto: “Live ‘til I die and never get the two confused.”
I asked him about all the obstacles he faced: the bureaucracy, the hostility toward western aid groups from Ethiopia’s Marxist-Leninist military government run by the murderous Mengistu Haile Mariam, the civil war that raged over the north of the country, the overwhelming sense that you are one person against never-ending need.
Dr. Weirman said it came down to human to human.
“I have to look at a person who needs food and give him food,” he told me. “When you see someone who is cold, you cover him up because that is an individualized command to me as a Christian. When you see a brother in need, you help him.”
I met Dawn Fitzgibbon, a nurse and medical technician from Vancouver, Wash., who helped run medical labs in some of the camps. No electricity. Primitive latrines. Tents when available, open-air sleeping when not.
But Dawn was accustomed to deprivation. She and her husband had served two years in Micronesia in the Peace Corps in the 1960s.
In Ethiopia, she had a Bible and a tape recorder for medical notes on a box nightstand. She had helped set up two field labs by the time I got there, and was trying to procure materials for two more.
“So we have to go find it,” she told me. “Hydrometers. Pinch clamps. Bottles, tubes, beakers, funnels, scalpels, urine tubes, slides, acetic acid.”
The list, like the need, seemed to go on and on.
She’d read an article in the local paper about the calamitous disaster. Real news, the kind that self-absorbed politicians might dismiss as fake if it was inconvenient to their narrative.
Dawn had joined a group of medical professionals called the Northwest Medical Team that attached itself to World Vision.
“I’m not probably different than a lot of Americans in that I see the awful things on TV and I change the channel,” she told me.
But something kept bringing her back to a place that looked to truly be God-forsaken. Figuratively, then, finally, physically it brought her to Ethiopia.
“And I can’t really tell you what it was,” Dawn told me. “A sense, maybe, of having something to offer. A lot of support in my family and my church and my friends. A sense that opportunities like this just don't occur by accident.”
Did things ever seem hopeless?
"I look at it more like I’m the first brick of a very big wall," she told me.
She had just written a letter — this was pre-internet, remember — to a specialist in parasites back home. She was encountering, in everyone from babies to grandfathers, parasites she called “outrageous.” Answers often took weeks.
We ended our conversation with her explaining how she and her husband had left their hearts in Micronesia, and that she was pretty sure she would do so again when she left Ethiopia.
Her service there, she said, “is not political. It’s personal. I feel like I can do a job here. I feel like my faith in God implores me to take a look at the world and see where I can do some good.”
This is the America I know. Over 45 years of reporting, in 49 states and four continents, I considered myself above all a friend of the American people.
Journalism is an honorable profession if approached with humility and an understanding that you are in a treacherous place when you attempt to tell anyone else’s story, especially stories this tragic, sad, and so, so unfair.
But stories like Dawn’s still inspire, especially the simplicity of seeing the world and finding your place to do good.
During my career, it was easy to be proud of American generosity. Food for Peace was not just a slogan. Despite the craven cruelty you see on social media, I still believe that a vast majority of us are kind and generous. Until now, our leaders have shared with us an American Dream that was open to anyone who wanted to join in that spirit.
Only recently has the concept of the American Dream become a nightmarish, selfish cudgel to be used by those who think they have “made it” to beat down those they ridicule as losers who never will.
I was never prouder of America than I was in moments in the worst of times, like those with the Dawn Fitzgibbons and Larry Ayottes and Frank Wiermans and all the better angels of our nature.
But I have never been more in awe of the human spirit than what I witnessed among those suffering the most back in 1985. The mothers and fathers of Ethiopia, starving themselves to feed their children. Down on their knees in thanks for the aid that possibly could save them. Effusively kind and gentle to one another. Hungry for human touch.
Human in ways I wish some of the blowhards cheering on the craven cruelty on social media could experience just once in their smugly comfortable lives.
I think back of a mother who had to be scolded to drink the milk provided her; she was giving most of it to her child to augment the child's diet. Or the woman who attempted to maintain her dignity even after a doctor touched her garments for an examination, and the cloth disintegrated and fell from her body, like brittle paper.
Or parents faced with a real-life Sophie’s choice of purposely starving one child to get them below 80 percent of expected body weight to expedite the entire family for entry into the camps, which were often surrounded by tens of thousands of refugees awaiting processing by overwhelmed aid workers.
In this country, we fight over the release of new cellphones or Black Friday sales. In Ethiopia, in the midst of a catastrophe of which I have never felt fully capable of describing, the people were patient and kind. And forever grateful for the aid coming from America, Canada, Europe and elsewhere.
They all had hopes and dreams, too.
My own dreams are still occasionally haunted by one story, that of a woman of about 30, told to me by a nurse. I never learned the woman's name, but her story was well known. She and her husband and five children started a journey to a refugee camp 60 kilometers from home.
Her husband was the first to die on the way, then one of the five children died later enroute. When they arrived, two of the four children were in really bad shape. The oldest daughter and the baby died. The mother had saved two of the five.
I also think of Fatuma, a woman who had lost two of her four children, but who had also survived with the remnants of her family. I later learned she had recovered and worked in the aid camp, and then received a house built by a local farmers' association. Donors gave her pots and pans and blankets.
A World Vision nurse who is only identified as Betty in my notes witnessed the day Fatuma was told she was going to get a house. Fatuma was overcome with thankfulness.
“This lady, you figure she lost everything in the world,” Betty told me, “and yet, she still smiled.”
I pray Fatuma, and her children, and their children, and all the children saved by our aid, found peace and happiness in their lives.
And I sometimes try to walk in Fatuma’s shoes.
Or that of the 30-year-old Honduran mother, and those of her children, whose life is one of violence and deprivation.
Or the 17-year-old Guatemalan boy whose life choices are gangs or a lifetime of abject poverty and threats.
They're in our midst, whether you choose to see them or not. Perhaps without papers, a condition that could and them in the concentration pens our leaders smilingly celebrate. People trying to build a life here doing the work that many Americans will not. Judge them at the peril of your own soul.
If you walked in their shoes, and you heard of opportunity — even at the very bottom of the economic ladder — for a better life for your kids in a land at the end of a long journey, would you take it? Even if that journey were longer than even 60 kilometers?
Would you do everything in your power to start that journey even when labeled a murderer and rapist? Even when so-called leaders of the far-off land stand, smiling like giddy teenagers, in front of cages being built for humans by feckless politicians whose only hunger is ambition?
I know the road to opportunity I’d travel, for my children. What road are we called to travel on the receiving end?
Chuck Raasch, a Castlewood native, is a reporter and author who covered major state, national and world stories for the Huron Daily Plainsman, the Sioux Falls Argus Leader, USA Today, as a Gannett News Service columnist and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Photo: USAID worker in Tigray, Ethiopia, public domain, wikimedia commons
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