Learning To Share

Edmonton teacher Meheret Worku helps children in her native Ethiopia stay in school

- Tim Querengesser

! MELES WUDIMA* FLED from his village near Addis Ababa to the Ethiopian capital because he had nowhere else to go. He was five years old and both his parents were dead. He’d headed to his aunt’s, but she had seven children and couldn’t take him in permanently. Soon Wudima was participating in the street economy, along with roughly 10,000 other orphaned kids in Addis. To survive, he shined shoes, sold peanuts and begged.

Then, when he was about nine, Wudima met Meheret Worku.

A year earlier, in 1996, Worku had flown from Edmonton to her hometown of Addis to visit her mother for the first time in well over a decade. Accompanying Worku were her husband, Scott Smillie (a social worker), and their two children, Rebecca, three and a half, and Rachael, 18 months. The family had come with the intention of helping street-involved children, but without a set plan.