A spotlight shines on Ethiopia's poor

September 30, 2007:Candle-bearing Ethiopians massed in the main square of the capital celebrating a holy day Thursday for the "founding of the true Christian cross," which coincided with the observance of the Third Millennium.Just as this ancient country marches to a different calendar and bakes its special bread, Ethiopia uniquely links its Festival of Meskel to claims that a fourth century Greek queen divined the exact spot where the cross of Christ was buried.Presiding atop a grandstand overlooking a million celebrants, Patriarch Abune Paulos, of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, hosted a pride of frocked and crowned religious eminences from six nations - along with the bare-headed Rev. Calvin O. Butts, leading a 165-member pilgrimage from his Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem.National pride pumped by the holiday spirit overshadowed, at least for a day, the pressing problems Rev. Butts had brought his church pilgrimage to Ethiopia to observe and to help alleviate.Earlier, in the United Nations' sleek office building here in Addis Ababa, government ministers faced off with African-American specialists who politely peeled back scabs from sores of one of the world's poorest nations.Dr. Bert Petersen, a cancer surgeon and Abyssinian member, came with medical expertise and an analytical scalpel familiar with the tissue of bureaucracy. Upon entering practice at a city hospital, Dr. Petersen rejected the policy of seeing paying patients on one day and uninsured patients on a separate day. "I told the administrator," he said, "that I'm going to say nothing to a nonpaying patient that I wouldn't say to a paying patient." The scheduling of office hours, he said, was accordingly reformed.Similar battles earned Dr. Petersen the reputation as a committed champion of the underprivileged and impoverished. Health-care parity, Dr. Petersen admits, may prove daunting indeed in 80 percent agrarian Ethiopia, where, according to government figures, $21 is spent annually per person on health care, according to the World Health Organization.The "harsh reality," he said, is that Ethiopia has one of the highest infant mortality rates, with about 90 percent of mothers receiving no prenatal and little postnatal care. An Australian-run model hospital here treats a fraction of women suffering from obstetric fistula, a debilitating rupturing of the womb, a condition eradicated a century ago in the United States. On the bright side, the death rate has been reduced to 77 mothers per 1,000. But it remains about 40 times greater than the rate in the United States.With an HIV prevalence of 2.1 percent in the country, the minister of health reports that infectious diseases are the dominant threat, with malaria as the No. 1 killer. Another physician in the delegation, Dr. Myra White, said Ethiopia should attack the scourge of infectious diseases, most of which have been eradicated in the West, at their very root. "The country has to develop infrastructure, improve sanitation and build effective systems for getting rid of waste. Once this is done - and it won't be easy - the infectious disease problems will start resolving themselves."Dr. Petersen cited as a major challenge the drain of doctors from Ethiopia, where they average salaries of $300 a month, to other countries such as South Africa. Programs must be devised, he said, to retain skilled professionals. In addition to health care, the Abyssinian specialists took a preliminary look at establishing what Rev. Butts said would be ongoing relationships with officials in education and economic development.Asked at a closing press conference about the country's human rights abuses, Rev. Butts said, "I've not come here on a political mission to criticize the government." Still, he fired off a letter to the U.S. Congress asking it to hold off on a bill that would curtail assistance to Ethiopia because of concerns about human rights violations. Noting that the government had released "political prisoners," Butts said that, based on our visit here, it was a bad time for the United States "to hold back resources [from Ethiopia] ... when you consider the poverty."(Les Payne on Newday.Com)