Today’s Good People, Good Works will be presented in Amharic and English, with subtitles in Amharic, Arabic, Aulacese (Vietnamese), Chinese, English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Mongolian, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Thai.

HOST (IN AMHARIC): Enlightened viewers, welcome to another edition of Good People, Good Works on Supreme Master Television. Our program today is the first in a two-part series that features the noble Dr. Anteneh Roba, physician, humanitarian and co-founder of the International Fund for Africa (IFA), a US-based non-profit organization dedicated to bettering the lives of those in need in Africa, regardless of species.

Dr. Roba (m): The mission of International Fund for Africa is as best as we can to prevent, alleviate and abolish all suffering of both humans and non-humans. We started the organization towards the end of 2006. The reason IFA equally promotes the interests of both humans and animals stems from the founders’ deep, abiding belief in the interconnectedness of life.

The group operates on the principle of “ahimsa” or nonviolence and respect for all beings. The IFA has many projects encouraging constructive relations among humans and between humans and our animal co-inhabitants.

Dr. Roba (m): The main areas we work in are human health, animal welfare/rights and promoting veganism in Africa.

HOST: Dr. Roba is firmly committed to spreading the good news regarding the health benefits of the plant-based diet and its relation to kindness to animals.

Dr. Roba (m): In 1999 my cousin, who is now the vice president of the International Fund for Africa, asked me to keep her dog for her, because she had gotten this little dog and was keeping him in her apartment and the apartment building would not let her keep him. And she said, “Can you keep him until I move to another apartment so that I can keep him with me?” And I said, “Sure.”

Dr. Roba (m): I started falling in love with him. And I learned something about animals that I never knew before: that they’re wonderful beings, they are sentient beings and they give so much love. And so he started me on the road towards reconsidering my lifestyle, and especially my being a meat eater. And so I slowly started changing my diet.

Dr. Roba (m): I stopped eating meat, eventually eggs, dairy products, and finally fish. And about eight years ago I became vegan.

HOST: Dr. Roba, who was born in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, travelled widely with his parents in Africa, Europe and the US as a boy, since his father was a career diplomat. He finished high school in his hometown, did undergraduate work in North Carolina, USA, and then went on to study medicine. He is currently an emergency-room physician in Houston, Texas, USA. During a visit to Ethiopia in 2003, Dr. Roba saw that the health needs of the disadvantaged were not being met, particularly in the area of hospital services for newly born babies.

Dr. Roba (m): So far in the human arena we’ve worked very diligently to bring equipment to hospitals in the capital city of Ethiopia. Most hospitals in Ethiopia do not have neonatal units; “neonate” meaning the first 30 days of life, the babies when they’re born if they’re sick, they’re supposed to go to a unit or a ward or facility where they can be taken care of. Until four years ago there was only one in the capital city that was basically functioning.

Dr. Roba (m): We hooked up with a very good doctor in Ethiopia who is a neonatologist. She specializes in taking care of babies in the first 30-days of life and we supported her. She had started a small unit in one of the hospitals and we started supporting her, bringing in equipment so that babies do not die of you know simple things like hypothermia, loss of temperature, and malnutrition and things like that. The first one we started was in a hospital called Yekatit 12, which is in the capital city of Addis Ababa.

HOST: IFA has helped to upgrade Yekatit 12 in numerous ways such as providing vital equipment for neonatal care like incubators, phototherapy devices, glucometers, and beds. For the neonatal staff at the hospital, which consists of 12 nurses and one doctor, the Fund has gifted pediatric stethoscopes, scrubs, jackets, protective eyewear, shoes, watches, and caps.

Dr. Roba (m): The facility had only one room, two beds and after three years working with the hospital and this doctor, we transformed that place from a one room, two bed facility, to a seven room, 30 bed facility and we even opened the first intensive neonatal unit in that hospital.

In fact, right now because of all the progress that we saw in starting this, the hospital itself was motivated and the government, the Ministry of Health is also helping to build one whole floor dedicated to the neonatal unit, and we have promised to help them provide equipment for which we’re trying to get funds.

Dr. Roba (m): Now we’ve also got involved with another hospital, called the Gandhi Memorial Hospital after the great Mahatma Gandhi. It’s a maternity hospital that never had a neonatology unit. Imagine a baby is born to a mother and if the baby is sick they have to literally pick up the baby and take the baby by foot or by taxi to the only other hospital that has a neonatology unit and a lot of the babies would die on their way.

In October of 2009 I went there and they had opened two rooms with basically a couple of beds and nothing else. And they asked, “Dr. Roba, please can you and your organization help us because a lot of organizations have come to Ethiopia and told us they’re going to help us but nobody has showed up.” And I said, “We’ll do the best we can, You know, funding is an issue.” But I said, “We’ll try.”

Dr. Roba (m): So I came back to the United States and we scrounged around to get funding and eventually, some of the doctors that I work with in the hospital helped me out and I put some money of my own and we bought the equipment and sent it back to Ethiopia. And the facility now has a full-blown unit and all the babies that are born do not have to go to another facility anymore.

Dr. Roba (m): Mortality has gone down from 30% to less than 5%, just from this action. The other hospital, when we first started, mortality was 17.5% or 17.8% down to 4% in three years after we got involved. So the…you know, the results have been phenomenal.

HOST: In a short time, Dr. Roba and the IFA have managed to bring about fantastic changes in neonatal care in Ethiopia’s capital, but their compassionate deeds don’t stop there. Their love extends to all of God’s great creations as they also work to bring comfort to the country’s vulnerable animal co-inhabitants.

Dr. Roba (m): We’ve been going to Ethiopia for many years and every time we see a lot of homeless dogs who are suffering, miserable, they get hit by cars, they are dragging their feet. You see them dying, some of them have babies that are drowning when the weather is bad and there’s rain. They can’t even pick their heads up and they drown on on the streets. So we approached the government and said, you know, “We can help you. Can we work together?” And they said, “We would love to get some help.”

So we came back to the United States, and we hooked up with the Best Friends Animal Society in Utah, and the Humane Society International, which is part of HSUS (Humane Society of the United States), and we told them, “Look, we need help, can you work with us? We don’t have money, but we are working with the government, and they are willing to work with us. Can we do something?” And they said, “Yes, we can help you.”

So we set up a one-year project, clears throat a pilot project to take a certain part of the city and… do vaccination, and spay and neuter. We plan to do about 1,200 dogs to show the government how it works. And we brought in vets and dogcatchers from India to train the Ethiopian vets. We trained them for about a month.

After that the project was continued for about a year, and we were able to show the government that this could happen. We just went back a couple of weeks ago, actually Gregory Castle from Best Friends Animal Society, who is the CEO and I went to Ethiopia. We sat down with the city officials, and even went up to the president of the country to see how we can actually expand this program.

And the government was very receptive, and Best Friends and HSUS is also going to help us to cover the whole city of Addis Ababa. There are four veterinary facilities. We are working on a proposal to provide not only equipment, but technical support and training to cover the whole city, which will be starting sometime in the future.

HOST: The International Fund for Africa is also looking out for the welfare of donkeys and horses in Ethiopia as many lead tremendously harsh lives, with constant heavy, laborious work being the norm for them. A common practice is to abandon the animals when they become old and not able to work at the same level as before.

Dr. Roba (m): We’re also working on opening a donkey-and-horse sanctuary in Southern Ethiopia. Ethiopia, by the way, has the second largest number of donkeys in the world, after China. China is number one at a 11 million and Ethiopia has five million. And imagine the difference between China and Ethiopia, as far as numbers.

But the donkeys in Ethiopia are suffering a lot, and the horses are also. We’re working with a veterinary school of medicine in Southern Ethiopia to start a very small horse-and-donkey sanctuary, so that we can take the horses and donkeys that are left to die and give them some support until the end of their life.

HOST: Please join us again next Sunday on Good People, Good Works, when we will continue our interview with Dr. Anteneh Roba and learn more about the International Fund for Africa’s praiseworthy programs.

For more details on the International Fund For Africa, please visit www.IFundAfrica.org or connect with the IFA on www.Facebook.com

OUTRO (IN AMHARIC): Amiable viewers, we appreciated your company on this week’s edition of Good People, Good Works. Coming up next is The World Around Us after Noteworthy News. May we endeavor to always clean and beautify our planet.