Abebech Gobena

Abebech Gobena was born in 1935 in a village in Shoa province, north of Addis Ababa. Her father was killed fighting the Italian invasion while she was a baby. She was married off at about ten, to a man she had never met, and ran away to the capital, where she found work in a grain store and later married again and built a modest, settled life.

In 1980 she went on pilgrimage to Gishen Mariam, a church in Wollo, at the height of the famine there. On the road she found a woman dead of hunger with a baby still trying to feed at her breast, and a little way on a child whose father begged her to take her before she died too. She had no plan. She simply brought the two children home. On her next visit she came back with more, until there were twenty-one in her house.

Her husband's family objected to their home being turned into an orphanage and her marriage ended. She sold her jewellery and made and sold injera to feed the children, then began baking and trading to keep going. In 1986 she registered her organisation, later known as AGOHELMA, and over the following decades it raised some 1,500 orphans directly, put thousands more through its schools and clinics, and trained mothers in villages far from the city.

She was called the Mother Teresa of Africa, a comparison she did not seek. She died of Covid-19 in July 2021, aged eighty-five.