A Purposeful Life

By Agitu Wodajo

A Purposeful Life outlines Agitu Wodajo's life's journey growing up in the 60s in Ethiopia; her experience studying and working in both Ethiopia and the United States; traveling the world; the adversities she faced in her life's journey, and how they shaped her life to empower others to bring change to the quality of their family lives and their communities.

Agitu was born and raised in Nedjo, a small rural town in western Ethiopia. During her early life, girls' education was not common in Ethiopia, and the estimated illiteracy rate in the nation was ninety-five percent. But soon after she was born, her father accepted the Protestant Christian faith and purchased a property adjacent to a Swedish Mission School. As a result, she was able to start school at age six. However, despite that promising start, her father abandoned their family leaving her defenseless against a chain of problems: a horrific attack by a school director at the age of ten; she had traveled eighty-five kilometers by mule-back and on foot to attend high school, where she continued to face adversities.

Even after she left school, tribulations followed, and she endured a very abusive marriage while fighting sexual harassment and persecution in her career. But the strong Christian foundation that has shaped her life since childhood, and the unyielding faith and optimism that she sustained through it all led her through the depths of adversity to heed the call to make a positive difference in the lives of others. Her story provides a bridge between the developing and developed worlds toward addressing our shared responsibility in making the world a better place. The NGOs she founded in both Ethiopia and the United States helped underprivileged women through services that build self-sufficiency, and policy-change advocacy that lift barriers.

Agitu Wodajo has more than thirty years of extensive experience in the areas of women empowerment, healthcare, community/economic development, and social policy. She obtained diplomas in community nursing and as a pediatric nurse practitioner before she moved to the United States where she earned a bachelor of arts in human services from Metropolitan State University, an executive master of public affairs from the Humphrey School of Public Affairs/University of Minnesota as a Bush leadership fellow, and a PhD in Christian leadership from Christian Leadership University.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Feb 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9798886166705

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A Purposeful Life

Agitu Wodajo

ISBN 979-8-88616-669-9 (paperback)

ISBN 979-8-88616-670-5 (digital)

Copyright © 2022 by Agitu Wodajo

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing

832 Park Avenue

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

Acknowledgments

My Humble Beginning

The rough path to a better future

A miraculous door to a better future

Life changes for the better

My career life begins

Sweet and Sour

A Refining Journey

Endurance Rewards

Heeding the Call while Going Through Fire

Thorns inside and outside

The Long-Awaited Answer Was on Its Way

My Second Humble Beginning

Making a Difference in America Is Different

The Second Refining Journey

Raising Successful Children as a Single Mom

It Was All Purpose Driven

About the Author

List of Illustrations

A Rural Ethiopian Girl Carrying Firewood the Way I Did (Picture taken last year)

Eighth Grade Completion Certificate

With Neighborhood Children

Receiving my Diploma from Emperor Haile Selassie I

Ramshackle Shelters

WSRA's Leather Workshop

Pattern Drafting and Sewing Workshop

Milling and Food Processing Workshop

Leather Workshop Product Sample

UNFPA Country Representative, Dr. Nafis Sadik, Dr. Getachew, Minister of Health, Agitu

The Shroud of Turin

Gethsemane

At the Manger

At the Sea of Galilee

At Capernaum

With Rural Women in Guatemala

At Goree Institute, with My Instructors

House of Slave (From a postcard I purchased on site)

My Children and I When We Left Ethiopia

WSRA Women at our Family Event

Bethel and Menase at the Wedding

At the Great Wall of China

At Tiananmen Square/Beijing

The Marble Boat

At Baoshan Iron & Steel Corporation in Shanghai

Stone Forest in Yunnan, Kumming

Terracotta Warriors (from postcard)

Replica of Terracotta Warriors

In Cairo

ISAW's Computer Training

ISAW's Resource Bank

At UN Headquarters/New York

Meeting Ethiopia's Late President Girma Woldegiorgis in His Office

With My Children

Debut Book Inauguration

H.E. Prince Ras Mengesha Siyum Speaking

Preface

Since my childhood, spirituality has always shaped my life. The love and fear of God was instilled in me as a child, along with a desire to do the most good for the most people. I didn't need to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up because it was already within me. Others didn't need to ask me because they could already see me exercising my gift. God designed me with a purpose, and He provided the means for me to nurture and take it to a greater level.

I was born and raised in a small rural town in Western Ethiopia, dominated by backward cultural norms that gave girls and women subordinate status in society. In the 1960s, girls' education was not favored, and the estimated illiteracy in the nation was 95 percent. But soon after I was born, my father accepted the Protestant Christian faith and purchased a property adjacent to the Swedish Mission School, a Christian school that provided its students with spiritual, educational, emotional, social, and physical development. I was admitted to that school a month before I turned six. President Theodore Roosevelt remarked, To educate a man in mind but not in morals is to educate a menace to society. So everything in me has been modeled on moral values.

I started applying my gift in action at home. While I was still a child and despite my own young age, I took joy in serving my parents and siblings. Every morning, before I left for school, I cleaned the house and brewed coffee. After school, I assisted my mother and grandmother with domestic duties, as well as fetching water and collecting firewood. My gift to serve others didn't remain indoors. I provided thirsty passersby with water to drink. Rural farmers who walked long distances to bring their produce to the market were always grateful for this. I extended my service to strangers who spent the night at our home where I washed their feet and prepared their beds. I always did this with a cheerful heart because doing as much good as I can for others is my gift from my Creator.

Before I noticed it, I started laying the foundation for taking my service to the next level after my father abandoned our family and ceased providing for us financially. As the oldest child in the family, I took keen responsibility to support our family. My sister, Tsehai Wodajo, and I used to walk three miles to downtown Nedjo to buy groceries, which we resold at a profit. Because of the commendation I received from my Swedish teacher, I was the best student in handicrafts when I was twelve years old. This skill enabled me to generate income I could put toward my modest tuition at the Swedish Mission School and support our family. I made embroidered handkerchiefs and pillowcases, which I sold to my teachers. While attending high school, I made embroidered items during my lunch break, sold them to students, and bought my siblings' clothes and shoes using the money I made. My entrepreneurship was going to be put to use in serving others at home and abroad twenty years later.

After obtaining an associate degree in community nursing from a public health college in Northern Ethiopia at the age of nineteen, I joined Western missionaries and served as a nurse, got married, and started the second chapter of my journey—a journey that took me to the refinement I needed to define my goals and achieve them. In order to achieve my goal in addressing the needs of others, I needed to experience it all in my childhood, marriage, and career: my father abandoning our family due to misfortune when I was four years old, the horrific assault I faced from my school's director when I was ten years old, and the eighty-five kilometers I had to travel by muleback and on foot to attend high school where I continued to face hardships. Even after I left school, tribulations followed me. I escaped two attempts of kidnapping, and I suffered a very abusive marriage while fighting sexual harassment and persecution in my career.

I am certain that it was my unyielding faith, optimism, and compassion that led me through the depths of adversity, inspiring me to rise above my circumstances and empower others. But the spirituality that shaped my life involved struggle between my soul, my psychic nature outside God, which includes the mind and the intellect, and my spirit, my pneuma, my pure consciousness that relates to God. I experienced divine intervention and miracles and always won when I allowed my soul and spirit to work in my life in harmony. In Matthew 10:16, Jesus said, Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves. Therefore be wise as serpents and harmless as doves. My services did indeed take me among the wolves, but my dove personality dominated in my life, exposing me to many harms. The good thing is, God used it to strengthen me to fulfill the mission He gave me. My self-confidence and faith grew so strong that I was filled with boldness to take risks in the steps I took toward achieving my goals.

My story provides a bridge between the developing and developed worlds toward addressing our shared responsibility in making the world a better place. In Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, I founded a first-of-its-kind women's NGO, the Women's Self-Reliance Association (WSRA), to empower poor, displaced women to become self-sufficient and improve the quality of their family lives. These women had been displaced during the great famine of 1973 and had no livelihood. WSRA provided the women with training in marketable skills, including leatherwork/crafts, sewing and food processing, as well as management and marketing. That way, the women discovered that handout creates dependency while handiness builds independence and worked with greater motivation. Finally, the association helped the women with equipment and start-up money, organizing them in a cooperative to start their own small business. Economic independence equals empowerment. If women aren't self-reliant; they can never be independent.

WSRA soon became a best-practice model and opened the doors for me for international involvements. I was sponsored by UNFPA and UNDP for study tour, training, international conferences, and workshops, allowing me the opportunity to travel to many countries, including Europe, West Africa, and Central America. These extensive experiences exposed me to social, political, and economic life in many diverse societies on an international level. My study tour in Niamey, Niger, was instrumental toward the establishment of the first-of-its-kind Ministry of Women's Affairs in Ethiopia.

I moved to Minnesota in August 1994, along with my five children. With an aim to take my services to others to a greater level, I enrolled at Metropolitan State University to pursue studies in human services immediately after I resettled in South Minneapolis. As part of my internship, I founded another nonprofit organization, International Self-reliance Agency for Women Inc. (ISAW) that helped immigrant women from different countries to make a positive difference, like the NGO I started in Ethiopia. ISAW provided diverse immigrant women with culturally appropriate services that build self-reliance and policy change advocacy that lifts barriers to self-sufficiency. Even though obstacles to self-reliance for Ethiopian women may be different from barriers facing women who live in the United States, the outcome is the same. If women aren't self-reliant, they are subject to whatever power structure is in control. If immigrant women pursue their dream in the United States, they still encounter barriers to independence. Most daunting is a lack of support services, such as childcare, isolation, and licensing policies. I am overjoyed to see the advocacy role I played toward these two policies work out: (1) the bill that was enacted in August 2004, exempting foreign-qualified nurses in Minnesota from the CGFNS certification process and allowing them to take their NCLEX-RN exam after fulfilling Minnesota's requirement and practice nursing, (2) the new rule that was officially adopted by the Minnesota Board of Barber and Cosmetologist Examiners on May 15, 2006, exempting hair braiders from state cosmetology licensing requirements. ISAW obtained special consultative status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations in 2003 based on my experience with WSRA in Addis Ababa.

I was stretched so thin between school, work, and raising five children as a single mom. In addition, my humble beginning, moving from a wealthy neighborhood in Addis Ababa to an unfavorable neighborhood in south Minneapolis, had been hard but not hard enough to stop me. Working with these women was like increasing the size of my family and seeing them bring a positive change for themselves, and their families gave me the most satisfaction and joy. I didn't count the hours I worked or the problems I had. I counted character. I counted whether I had built it in others and built it to please God.

I found the United States different in many ways. Chapters in my memoir include stories showing what makes America different. Unlike my native country, America provided me with approval and encouragement for my commitment to serving others while I was still on a nonimmigrant student visa. An anonymous donor covered my tour of China and Hong Kong through a course of study titled Case Studies in International Business/Asia 1. In addition to raising five very accomplished children as a single mom and a homeowner, I was empowered through awards, recognitions, and a generous Bush Leadership Fellowship grant toward my master's degree, as well as a tuition scholarship from Christian Leadership University toward my PhD.

The success that my children and I have achieved in America proves that anybody can achieve whatever he or she desires in this land of opportunity. When I say, This land of opportunity, I want to make clear that the opportunity is not a handout that teaches dependency. Rather, it is a use it or lose it hands-up venture that is made possible because successful Americans are willing to teach and encourage others who are where they started and help them achieve what they have achieved or go even farther. They do so by helping others activate and develop whatever they bring to the table and thus facilitate their success. This is what makes America different. This is why it is a country of innovation.

My oldest child was seventeen years old, while the youngest was seven when we came to America. Today they serve their adoptive country, taking turns to give back to their community as middle-class Americans. And here I am in Atlanta, Georgia, embarking on the last phase of my life's journey with renewed energy. God, who used seniors like Moses and Joshua, gave me a new assignment in my retirement age—serving Him through a new nonprofit that He had me start and writing books. And I am still as strong as when I started this journey, like Joshua said, As yet I am as strong this day as on the day that Moses sent me; just as my strength was then, so now is my strength for war, both for going out and for coming in. I don't even have much gray hair for my age.

Acknowledgments

I am extremely grateful to God for His countless blessings and the opportunity to serve Him. I thank Him for entrusting me with tribulations in which He showed me His glory and used it to train me and shape my life for His purpose. This book is the result of all these, and I hope that it will be of benefit to my readers in their lives' journey.

I thank God for the wonderful children He blessed me with. Their achievements and the Christian character they maintain make me boast in the Lord from whom all good things come. Above all, watching them raise their children with Christian principles fills me with joy and hope that God's purpose and blessings will continue from generation to generation.

I thank evangelist Mulu Ilala for being the first to reach me in times of my greatest difficulties and confusion. Her prayers and encouragement led me in the right direction. I am very grateful to Pastor Fetlework Teferra for her wise counsel and prayers that sustained me and meant a lot toward my spiritual growth.

I thank Kathleen Moore, Cheryl Bates, and Michael Moore for making our resettlement in Minnesota possible, as I explained in my pages. I am grateful to my friend in need, Ertra Namara, for being there for me when I was in such need. I am thankful to my sisters, Tsehai, Rahel, and Destaye, and my brother-in-law, Yoseph Petros, for their support and encouragement. Tsehai's encouragement was a great help toward making that big decision to come to the United States along with my five children, which was outside my plan at that time.

I owe much gratitude to those donors in Addis Ababa and Minnesota who made my call to make a positive difference a reality, including and not limited to the following:

In Addis Ababa: The Swedish Development Authority (SIDA), the Netherlands Embassy, the Canadian Development Authority (CIDA), UNICEF, and the US Embassy for their funding toward the Women's Self-Reliance Association (WSRA), as well as UNDP and UNFPA who covered all my tour and training expenses in different countries. I thank Christian Relief and Development Association (CRDA) for their invaluable in-kind support to WSRA's women without which they would have been able to participate in WSRA's income-generating training. I am grateful to Rädda Barnen (Swedish Save the Children) who provided a funding toward the construction of integrated women empowerment and MCH clinic but were stopped by Kebele 20 administration. I also want to thank Plan International who availed a generous grant to build homes for the families who resided in ramshackle shelters, as well as develop Kebele 20 but were directed to a zone preferred by the TPLF-dominated government administration.

In Minnesota: The Minneapolis Foundation, Christian Sharing Fund/Catholic Charities, the McKnight Foundation, the Patrick and Aimee Butler Family Foundation for their multiple-year funding toward the International Self-Reliance Agency for Women Inc. I am extremely grateful to the Minnesota Department of Justice Crime Victim Services for their continuous funding and technical support for over a decade that made a remarkable difference in the lives of our domestic abuse victims and survivors. I want to thank Ms. Cindy Cook who opened the door for us for these grants, as well as Ms. Aida Tosca for her invaluable support that equipped me with incredible fiscal management, and evaluation skills.

Finally, I want to thank those nonprofit organizations, to name a few, The Advocates for Human Rights, Legal Aid Society of Minnesota, who partnered with ISAW in providing legal assistance, housing, training, and technical support That way, they enabled us to maximize our services with minimum resources. I hope those whom I didn't mention will forgive me.

Chapter 1

My Humble Beginning

The story of my early life probably has more in common with that of a girl from the fourth century than that of someone coming of age in the 1960s in the US. Instead of watching Saturday morning cartoons while eating bowls of sugary breakfast cereal and having fun after school, I fetched water from the stream closest to my parents' home in Nedjo, Ethiopia, and collected firewood for cooking because we had no electricity. Not only that, our country roads were inaccessible to automobiles during the rainy season.

Today, I write this from the comfort of my desk in Atlanta, Georgia, my laptop fan quietly whirring on my desk. In the distance, an impatient motorist honks her horn. So how did I get from there to here? To answer that question, we have to go back to my childhood and look at the strong Christian foundation that has shaped my life.

Soon after I was born, my father accepted the Protestant Christian faith and purchased a property adjacent to the Swedish Mission School and church in Nedjo, a small town in Western Ethiopia. He moved to the new location with his family: my mother; paternal grandmother; and me, their only child at the time. And God used my father to make the impossible possible, I was able to start school at the age of six. When he purchased the house, it had one spacious bedroom and one living room.

When I was a child, my grandma, mom, siblings, and I used to have a good time together, sitting by the fire every evening, telling stories, and playing riddles. I don't remember how old I was when my grandmother told us the story of how my father accepted the Protestant faith; but one evening, in front of the fire, Grandma shared the tale. We lived in a remote rural area where there were few homes far apart from one another, said my grandma. We used firewood for cooking, fetched water from the closest river or stream, and had mules and donkeys as our only means of transportation. But this was not much different from the way I lived. I fetched water and collected firewood. Grandma went on to state, My son lost his dad at the age of eight. At thirteen, he developed an ulcer in his right leg, which ultimately left him crippled. There was no health-care service in our area, so I took him to what they called holy water—the only treatment we knew of—but it didn't work."

Grandma leaned closer to the fire and continued. "The infection got worse, and I had to take him to the qaallu. This was a person who was believed to be the wise one or the possessor of the ancestral spirit. People used to go to the qaallu to inquire about the causes of illnesses and ask for healing. So I took him to the qaallu who ordered me to sacrifice a lamb under the neighborhood's offering tree in order for my son to be healed. The next day, my son cut that oak tree at its root, which took him the whole day, without telling me. He would have been killed if someone had seen him doing that because the offering tree was sacred to them. Luckily, no one found out. When he finally came home after having disappeared early in the morning, he said to me, ‘Mom! Come and see your god.' He recovered in a very short time without any treatment. Three years later, he heard about salvation in Jesus Christ. Out of his desperation to find the true God, my son learned the Amharic alphabet with some help from a friend. Amharic was the official Ethiopian language. Our family spoke Afaan Oromo. Grandma continued, Then he went to school, which he quit after just a year. He stayed just long enough to make sure he could read the Bible, which had been his ultimate goal. Then he bought a Bible and started reading it from page one until he got to Exodus 20:3–5: ‘You shall have no other gods before Me. You shall not make a carved image for yourself.' After reading this verse, he went to the Swedish Mission Church [presently Ethiopian Evangelical Church Mekane Yesus], converted to Protestant Christianity, and purchased a property adjacent to the church and school.

I can imagine my father was happy to settle his family just a mile away from the Swedish mission clinic. Unfortunately, having the clinic turned out to be worse than having no clinic at all. It was run by Lydia Larson, a Swedish missionary who had been assigned to the Synod's clinics as a registered nurse. I discovered her incompetence when I took a job at the Synod clinic (approximately thirty miles away from Nedjo), one year after I graduated from the Public Health College in Gondar, Northern Ethiopia. I was twenty years old when I took that job. And nineteen years later, when I visited the folk high school she attended, I learned that she hadn't even completed high school before she took that role as a registered nurse. I will tell that story in the pages to follow.

When my father relocated in the 1950s and began his life as a businessman, life was good. We were well fed, our meals comprising mainly of meat, chicken, and eggs. I was very attached to my father because he spent much time with me and took good care of me. My father was a short guy (5'6"), with superior physical strength. His muscles looked like a round baseball and were as hard as stone. I remember him folding his right arm, holding his fist tight, and asking strong men to straighten it, but none managed to do so. No man I knew of dared to mess with my dad. He laughed before he got wild when men provoked him into anger, and those men who knew what the laughter meant stayed away. My father had an oval face, and his hearty smile warmed me when I looked at him. He was quick and decisive in his movements, and his hands were always busy.

A few years later, my father established a business partnership with a creditor. This partner was the only creditor in the neighborhood, and he used to lend money at a monthly interest rate of 50 percent. He got away with it because there was no financing system in place in Nedjo at that time. Based on this partnership, my father purchased mules from Nekemte, located three hundred kilometers away, with the intention of making a substantial profit by selling them in his hometown. In anticipation of large profits from his business, my father added an extension to our home before traveling to Nekemte. This new extension had a living/dining room, a spacious bedroom, a storage space on the upper level, and a walkout basement for the mules, which was accessed through a door that faced the backyard. I never saw this type of design anywhere else in the country and only again when I came to the United States in 1994.

Unfortunately, all the mules died on their way to Nedjo, and another loss followed shortly thereafter. My father was away on a business trip when his friend came to our house after dark and deceived my mother, telling her he had to hide my father's brand-new industrial sewing machine at his house to ensure the creditor wouldn't confiscate it. That night, my mother had a carpenter break the heavy-duty lock on the cupboard in which the industrial sewing machine was stored so my father's so-called friend could take it. Later, however, he brazenly denied taking it. This incident greatly damaged my parents' relationship.

When I was four years old, soon after he built the new extension I mentioned above, my father abandoned our family and moved to a rural village seventy-two kilometers away because he couldn't humble himself to deal with the misfortune we were experiencing. Although I now understood he still needed money to provide for his family, I wished he had used the skills he had as an alternative source of income and stayed with his family. For example, I remember the dome-shaped wood carving he had used for producing hats for market. We named it fabrica, meaning factory in Afaan Oromo. I also remember the beautiful round dining table, called gabatee in Afaan Oromo, that he made. We sat at the gabatee and ate our dinner together every evening.

A few months after he abandoned us, my father had my mother and sister join him, leaving me behind with my grandmother. It was devastating for me to be without my parents and my only sister, Tsehai Wodajo, who was three-and-a-half years younger than me. When I asked my grandma why I was left behind, she told me it was because she loved me so much that she couldn't be without me. My father was her only son, and I was her first grandchild whom she loved dearly.

A month before I turned six, my grandmother took me to the Swedish Mission School to get me admitted to the first grade. While waiting to see the school's director, we met an elderly woman and her grandson, named Kifle Umata, who was the same age as I was. The Swedish school director let us in immediately after her arrival, and she began to