Yup. I’m heading to Ethiopia.

What does Ethiopia need with an Ad Guy? Good question.

So some years back a friend of mine named Philip Berber and his wife Donna started a foundation called A Glimmer of Hope. He’d hit it pretty well in the tech boom and decided to do something good with his windfall.

They picked Ethiopia and started building schools, clinics, wells etc. They funded it all themselves and built a really solid infrastructure to get things done. They’d go into a village and ask the locals what they really need. If they had to send the kids miles to fetch dirty water, they’d dig wells right there in the village. That allowed the kids to go to school, so they built schools. If there wasnt a health post, they’d build one. Pretty soon these villages started doing much better. The success stories kept adding up.

Then fund raising organizations saw what a great process they had, so they started giving them money.

There is a lot more to it than that and you should go to their Web site to get the whole story. Donna and Philip are two of my favorite people on this planet and everyone at Glimmer is amazing. I’m really proud and humbled to be able to go on this trip.

Basically, we land in Addas Abbada Monday, Sept 28th. Not sure what the whole schedule is going to be, but we’re going to be traveling to remote villages by Land Rover for almost ten days. We’ll be up in the Simian Mountains at one point. Beyond that, I’m not sure.

Our goal is to meet the people in the villages they’ve helped and talk to the people in new villages to see what it is that they really need. We’ll be getting a lot of footage and taking a lot of photos and asking a lot of questions.

Everyone I’ve talked to that has been says it’s a life changing experience.

I expect it will be.

More from the road

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