Engineering student Selam Gano returns to her father’s home country of Ethiopia with the hopes of providing clean water to the village where he grew up.

Selam Gano is an MIT undergraduate studying Mechanical Engineering with Robotics. She also blogs professionally for MIT Admissions and around the internet. When not in class, she is an undergraduate researcher at the MIT Media Lab and the principal researcher for the Muti Water Project. Born in the United States to an immigrant family, she has her heritage in China and Ethiopia and speaks four languages. She has a passion for robots, international projects, and writing.

This story originally aired on Jan. 20, 2017.

Story Transcript

My father is from Ethiopia; it’s a country in East Africa. The first time I went there, I was seven, and I think I was really too young to notice the differences between American society and a rural, agricultural Ethiopian society, because my father is from a very small region in the south called Kaffa that has its own language and culture. I don’t really remember all of those differences. All that I really remember was having a lot of fun. I rode horses because there were no roads for cars. I herded cattle and milked cattle and ran barefoot with my cousins down into the forest and into the closest river to fetch water, because there was no running water in Kaffa. So we would fetch it from the river and bring it back to the house, and in fact there is no running water in Kaffa.

The first time I went, I was so young and just took everything for granted that I really connected with my family there, with the village that my father is from and with our region Kaffa. So when I was a sophomore at MIT -- last year, in fact -- I decided to embark on a water project to see what could be done about some of these differences that I started to notice, and particularly that of water. I embarked on a project in a specific village in Kaffa called Muti and it’s actually the village where my father went to middle school when he was growing up.

Though I say village, Muti actually has a population of fifteen thousand people spread over a large area; again, very agricultural and rural. If these people aren’t getting their water from a spring or a river, they’re getting it from the structure called a spring protection, which is a type of structure that you build where you cover surface water such as a river or literally like a mountain spring, and if you do it in a way such that no organic material or contaminants get inside, then the soil and the sediment of the earth is actually a very good filter, and you can get very clean, drinkable water from that, even by the standards of Americans and of the United States.

The problem with this was that, previously, there were seven spring protections built in Muti. Now only one of them still works. They lasted anywhere between three years to three months, so they weren’t very sustainable, or at least not as sustainable as it could be. And so my goal was really to find a solution that would last longer and be more worth the investment and the effort and hopefully expand that to the rest of the region in Kaffa.

So I applied to a lot of grants at MIT and spoke to a lot of people and actually got connected with a professor in civil engineering who advises me on this project. In January 2016, I went to Ethiopia to see if it was even feasible, scope out the area. Again, it’s so rural and isn’t connected to very many resources, let alone MIT. I went there to make those connections and do some research.

What I really remember from that trip was not all the research or the technical decisions we made, and we made a lot of them. We decided in fact, actually, to build a hand-dug well, which is a structure that we hoped would be more robust and would last longer than the spring protections, without requiring too many more resources or much higher cost. But what I really took from that trip was the people that I met. They were so unlike other people I’d met. I went to Ethiopia by myself and met all these young, urban professionals in the capital city, Addis Ababa.

One of them is actually this guy named Leul. He worked with an NGO in Ethiopia called Drop of Water that I was really excited about because Drop of Water was started by Ethiopian students at Mekelle University. It was also largely funded from within the nation and they served a lot of regions in the north and were building wells and were doing water projects there. And so it was very much for Ethiopians and by Ethiopians. Leul also had a start-up in Addis Ababa, which is something that just would have been a non-sequitur like seven years ago.

So it was really invigorating to speak with him and hear what it was like to work with an NGO in modern Ethiopia and also be starting a start-up really on the crest of all the economic development that had happened. He had a lot to say about what was better now and what was more capable now than ever had been before or even some things that maybe were better in the past. Perhaps most importantly, what it meant to be Ethiopian in this modern age, when everything was changing so quickly and, perhaps most particularly, how to maintain that Ethiopian culture in the face of westernization or modernization, or were those two really just the same thing?

I’d left that trip really invigorated by Leul and others I’d met who had all this energy and all this purpose and were doing all these things in Ethiopia, which was really different from the Ethiopian Americans I grew up around, because they were older and understandably more conservative or pessimistic about economic or political changes in the nation, I think for very good reasons. But that enthusiasm and that optimism really carried me forward through finishing my sophomore year at MIT when I came back and applying for more grants and really nailing down this plan for this well and raising enough to go back to Ethiopia actually and really this time go there to plan the details of the well and get it built in the fall.

I landed in the capital city, Addis Ababa, for my second trip about three months ago, in August. I got off the airplane and I was in the taxi back to my aunt’s house with my cousin Gideon, who came to pick me up. He turns to me and he says, “The internet has been down for the last two days and we don’t know when it’s going to go back up.” He had meant that the internet had been shut down in the entire nation. In the entire nation of Ethiopia, you could not use email or social media or internet calling services. I could not communicate with anyone back in the United States, which of course had huge implications for our project, because there were people we needed to be communicating with, but also just for safety. How would we communicate with people back there? International calling was expensive and sometimes difficult, and it was also a symptom that something had seriously gone wrong or been happening that I hadn’t heard about until I landed there. That was three months ago.

Ethiopia is currently under a state of emergency. It’s a long and complicated situation, but the short version is basically that the government is led by mostly Tigray people, which is a cultural group in Ethiopia, and there’s two other large cultural groups, Amhara and Oromo, backed by several other Ethiopians, whether as just as individuals or other groups, who believe that the government is really marginalizing and oppressing people with some of the infrastructure they’ve built in more rural regions, and so they started protesting, which turned into larger conflicts and which led to violence and many deaths.

In fact, I also lead the Ethiopian-Eritrean Students Association at MIT and there was an exec board meeting we had just to plan an event like we often do, for people around MIT. We weren’t really even talking about this subject, but many of them are international students who only came to the United States to go to college. The end of that meeting really just devolved into people worrying about their families, their parents, arguing [about] whether other people getting involved, the diaspora Ethiopians, were doing the right thing. After this kind of back and forth, just silence.

With our project, we were actually able to do most of the things that we needed to do. I talked to a contractor while I was in Ethiopia. Fortunately, Kaffa is not too politically important or anything. We acquired the materials that we needed, chose the type of pump for the well, set up everything, but there’s still things that needed to happen after I came back to MIT. Contracts that needed to be sent and final agreements that became so much harder because of these communication issues, many of which actually haven’t happened yet. There’s the strange feeling of accomplishing something but not really doing that final step.

It just made everything so uncertain. In fact, the only thing that I’m really certain of at this point is that you have to keep going. I will keep going with this project and all those Ethiopian MIT students will keep going, as will all those young professionals in Addis Ababa. We are all people who look forward to giving back to our communities in ways such as these: starting projects or completing projects, starting businesses and start-ups and non-profits and really showing the world that Ethiopia and many other African countries are capable of so much more than others might think. In these discouraging situations, sometimes that’s all there is, just supporting each other in this unglamorous, constant, relentless push forward. Thank you.