Irish nurse returns to Ethiopa with GOAL

In an indication of Ireland’s unswerving support for the work of GOAL—and the unchanging nature of poverty and famine—GOAL West leader, Maura Lennon, returned to Ethiopia last week, 27 years after first travelling to the region with the charity.

As a 21-year-old newly qualified nurse, Maura encountered a landscape ravaged by death and hardship. Last week, while heartened at positive changes, she observed also that “some things seem destined never to change”.

At the Dolo Ado refugee camps, home to 150,000 mostly Somali victims of the present day famine, Maura was transported back to 1985.

“The smell of human misery hit me straight away… You can never forget that terrible stench. It stays with you forever,” Maura said.

She recalled being in situations in 1985 where she “had to play God”, due to limited food for the queues of starving families at the feeding centres.

“You had to turn people away, knowing that most of the rejected people wouldn’t be back, because soon they wouldn’t be alive. That’s a terrible responsibility, but we couldn’t avoid it,” she said.

In the pre-IT era, Maura and other GOALies were cut off from the outside world, with the postal system taking six weeks to deliver letters from home.

Maura was helicoptered into villages to do vaccinations, and airlifted out weeks later, surviving often on only canned cheese and biscuits and living in mud huts.

One particularly harrowing incident occurred when she was unable to save the lives of a young mother and her newborn twins in one village. “Some of the villagers were angry with me. They had invested so much faith in me being able to work a miracle and felt I had let them down, though I don’t think I was ever in any real danger,” she recalled.

But there were positive aspects to her first visit as well, such as one grateful mother who presented Maura with a rang that she used as her wedding band when she got married.

“She was so grateful that we could feed her children and save their lives, she gave me this ring. I’ve always treasured it,” she said.

And while she has yet to meet any of them, many grateful Ethiopian parents named their children Maura in the ultimate tribute to the Irish nurse. “The main thing, whether I manage to meet one of them or not, is that they survived,” she said.