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Waging Peace
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Brendan Callahan '10 in Ethiopia
Brendan Callahan '10
Brendan Callahan '10 ~ Ethiopia

Take one Peace Corps volunteer and one bike. Add a few dozen Ethiopian school children and—voila! You've got a recipe for instant happiness. Brendan Callahan '10 laughs as he recalls how the kids at the Sebeta School for the Blind came running the day he showed up with a bike. One by one, with help from teachers and staff, they took turns climbing onto the seat. Slowly, they'd begin to pedal, eyes open wide but unseeing, cloudy with cataracts. Partially sighted friends ran ahead, hands clapping to help guide riders along a safe path. For every child it was the same: first a smile, then shrieks of delight—the sound of pure joy.

When Callahan signed on in 2010 as a Peace Corps volunteer, his plan was to put his new degree in environmental and resource economics to work helping with conservation and ecotourism at the Menagesha-Suba Forest, the oldest park in Africa. Instead, he wound up in a small town about 30 kilometers west of Addis Ababa, playing soccer, flying kites, and helping kids who live in the dark pedal a bike and feel the rush of wind on their cheeks. "I couldn't be happier with how things have turned out," says Callahan, who also has become something of an expert at mixing cement. "I can't even count how many bags I've been through," he says, describing the ramps and walkways he's built to help make the school safer for the 300 kids who live there.

Brendan Callahan '10 in Ethiopia

Despite all the challenges they face, these students are the lucky ones. Blindness, caused primarily by malnutrition and infectious disease, is endemic in Ethiopia. More than 1.2 million people are completely blind; another 3 million have low vision. Considered an embarrassment and a burden to their families, most blind children wind up begging on the streets. Some, though, are discovered by aid workers and enrolled in one of the country's two schools for the blind. When Callahan knocked on the door of the school in Sebeta and offered to volunteer, it was obvious, he says, that the place was in desperate need of help.

The school's only playground was filled mostly with rusted chunks of metal and broken swings. Many of the school's pathways were rough going for anyone with a disability. Callahan, along with the school's British Voluntary Service Organization volunteers and a crew of local metal workers, created a colorful new playground. He also transformed a plot of weeds into a garden with benches and gravel pathways, filled with the scent of rosemary and other aromatic herbs and flowers. He even installed a simple fountain that provides the soothing sound of flowing water—and a place to cool off under the hot African sun.

Brendan Callahan '10 in Ethiopia

Callahan walks to the school from his mud-walled two-room house, where he has one light bulb and no running water. He cooks on a propane stove and hasn't driven a car or been to a grocery store in two years. But while conditions are primitive by Western standards, the experience, he says, has been rich. "Most people think of Ethiopia only as a poor country struggling with drought and famine," says Callahan. "But Ethiopia is also filled with beautiful traditions and beautiful people." A fan of the country's ubiquitous injera, a sourdough-type bread made from teff flour that is eaten at every meal, Callahan has also become an enthusiastic coffee drinker and has been the honored guest at many coffee ceremonies in the homes of his new Ethiopian friends.

The school children know Callahan has to leave when his Peace Corps assignment comes to an end, but they constantly beg him to stay. He promises them he'll keep in touch no matter where his next adventure takes him. Meanwhile, evidence of the impact he made in Sebeta will remain—a garden sanctuary and a colorful playground, along with lots of happy memories of bike-riding children, faces to the wind. ~

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