Yohannis needs a car to build a school

Let's make his dreams come true - we've worked 12 years for this day

This is where Yohannis was raised.

M name is Linda Wolf, I'm a photographer and author. A great blessing of my life has been to know Yohannis Mezgebu Meshesha and help him move out of excruciating lifelong poverty to becoming a graduate of the University of Gondar, Ethiopia with a master's Degree in Engineering and a pretty good command of English and French languages. This is a deserving young man, who can now become a master of his destiny but even more importantly, have the means to follow his dream to build a little school in the Garbage Area of Gondar, where he grew up, and continue to help the children living there to dream of having an education as he has had.

This was when Yohannis got his Master's Degree:

All funds will go into my bank account and will be sent to Yohannis through Western Union. He has a bank account in his name with $5,000 in it from my mother's will.

Here is the gofundme link: https://gofund.me/8a2b39d6

I met Yohannis when he was 18 and a few years ago through the financial support of my family and a group of friends, he completed his schooling and had to immediately go into hiding. The government was after him for having participated in student protests while in school. If you know this story you already know what a miracle it is that he is still alive. Many farmers and students, some of them his friends, were slaughtered by government forces. He had his leg broken and was finally captured put in jail, tortured, and released. He's dealt with illnesses due to poverty in his childhood and he deals with ongoing debilitating discrimination against his ethnic group, The Amhara and so many other crises we don't have the room to go into. Yet he has persevered. And now he has a chance to become independent. Also, if you have a car in Ethiopia you have protection; the police still hunt for those student leaders, like Yohannis who rebelled openly. But most importantly, Yohannis will be able to make a living as an Uber Driver, fix his car issues with his engineering background, and be a tour guide. If you already understand and are on board to donate, please just do it. But Make sure you check the GOFUNDME % Slider on the donation page and slide the slider to 0 to make sure all of your donations will go to Yohannis, otherwise, GFM will take 15% automatically. If you want to read more of the story of how this relationship came to be between me and Yohannis, please keep reading.

Gondar Ethiopia 2012

I met Yohannis when I was on assignment in Gondar, one of the Northern towns on the main tourist route. I was shooting photos in the marketplace when he and a friend of his approached me offering to carry my camera equipment while I shot. After a short while observing me taking photos, Yohannis asked if I wanted to go around to the back of the market and see where the orphans lived. It was and still is called, The Garbage Area.

“This is where I grew up,” Yohannis said, “I am an orphan.”

“Where you grew up,” I said in astonishment..”

“Yes,” Yohannis said, as we rounded a corner and came upon an encampment of such poverty I was shocked. I thought I was looking at photos from Life Magazine from the 1980s famine in Ethiopia. Children playing ball in the dirt wearing rags, young toothless women in dirty dresses hanging off their bodies, nursing babies, skinny dogs whose croaking barks bespoke of animal hunger, workers atop mounds of garlic separating them for a market vendor –nothing but dirty makeshift tents that looked like they’d been repaired dozens of times over with whatever cloth and cardboard people could find. It was overwhelming, I could not even take pictures. Instead, my guide, Yeshi, asked me to purchase a batch of 200 Injera, the fermented flatbread that is a staple in Ethiopia, to give out to each member of the camp. Then, I started filming. The videos below are clips showing the Garbage Area tents, handing out Injera

Yeshi filming me with Yohannis in a yellow shirt handing out Injera

Afterward, the two boys, Yohannis and his friend, accompanied us to meet our van driver. We were going to plan our trip the next day to Bar Hadar. When our van driver met the boys, he asked if they would accompany him to Bar Hadar as he didn’t want to drive back on roads known to be treacherous alone at night coming back. They agreed.

In the morning, we gathered at our hotel and took off. Yohannis sat next to me. We were already becoming friends. I liked him. He was kind. He had a beautiful face and was enthusiastic about everything we talked about.

This is Yohannis the day I met him.

The day was beautiful, sunny, and bright and we were all in high spirits. He told me his life story and I shared my earbuds with him and turned him onto the music I loved. I was impressed by his gentleness, his grace, and kindness, and his deep desire to go to college. He said the government paid for orphans’ education only up to the end of high school. He had been a straight-A student but had no money to go to college. To be a “good man” he would need $150 a month for his education and he asked me if I could give that to him.

“No, I said, I don’t have that kind of money. I’m sorry. I have my daughters to get through school and I’m a single mother, an artist, working here on money given to me by a patron.” He didn’t ask again. We were passing Chat Fields, basically in nowhere land, not another car on the 2 lane road. “I don’t want to end up chewing Chat,” Yohannis said, “People do that so they don’t feel hungry.”

During the ride to Bar Hadar, I asked the driver several times to stop for me to photograph people walking on the side of the road. One old woman with a pile of sticks on her back was very kind to allow me to photograph her. There was nothing that would have indicated we were about to experience a horror ahead.

But suddenly, as we were driving through a narrow pass -- on one side was a rock wall of a mountain and on the other a ravine, I noticed our driver tensing up and slowing down. I looked ahead through the windshield and saw a bus careening towards us in our lane. “Oh my God,” I said, as we all watched it swerve away from hitting us and head up a low rise, the only choice the bus driver could have made as he realized he'd lost his brakes. We saw the bus become airborne then turn forward and hit the ground nose first, bounce down on its tires, and roll over on its side with an explosion of dust and dirt flying into the air and the sound of glass breaking. We pulled over and ran out. There must have been 90 young soldiers busting out the back window, climbing out and shooting their rifles in the air, screaming and shooting. They believed the bus driver had been trying to kill them. They were going to kill him. Yeshi yelled to calm them down. They were bloody and in shock. They needn’t have worried about the bus driver; he had been crushed dead upon impact as Yohannis would point out after going around the front of the bus and dragging me with him to look. It was a terrible sight. After the soldiers calmed down, people on this deserted road started emerging from the ravine in every direction.

We spent the next hour flagging any vehicles that came along to get them to take the wounded to the hospital. And then, we got on our way to Bar Hadar, still hours away. It was during this ride I thought to myself in the dead silence of the car as we reckoned with the fact that the dead bus driver had saved our lives and the lives of all those boys that I vowed to myself to go home and fundraise so that Yohannis could go to school. One dead, one living was my mantra. And that's what I did. Family, friends, my patrons, and many people have contributed to Yohannis, this one single human being, to help him achieve his lifelong dream - to build a little school in the Garbage Area for the children.

For years, instead of using it for himself, Yohannis took some of the money we sent him and bought school supplies for all the kids in the Garbage Area; pencils, notebooks, crayons, and such. He would pass them out each year when school started.

In October last year, my mother died. In her will she left Yohannis $5,000, hoping he could use it to purchase a car and save enough money to make his dream come true. But, it turns out $5,000 is just not enough to buy a good enough car. Uber drivers have to meet a certain standard. He needs twice that much to purchase a good car, insurance, and the repair tools that he will use to fix it.

I know what it is like to have my life and my dreams supported. I’ve been supported for 40 years by patrons who believe in me and the art I do, so I know what it has meant to Yohannis — HOPE – hope to get out of poverty and to live his purpose.

Donating to a single human being is one of the most rewarding things we have been able to do as a family. I hope you will join us in this next step in Yohannis’s life. To make a living, independently.

Here is Yohannis from a photo he sent a couple of days ago as he test-drove the vehicles he was looking at. FYI, we need to collect this money within the next two weeks due to Ethiopia printing new money then and everything will be much more expensive. Thank you, in advance from all of us and Yohannis. Love Linda

Here is the gofundme link: https://gofund.me/8a2b39d6