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Yeneneh Betru: Medicine for the Neediest

Around the time that Osama bin Laden was leaving his native Saudi Arabia for the path of jihad, a young man from Addis Ababa named Yeneneh Betru, who was born in Ethiopia in 1966, was on a path toward the fulfillment of a promise he made to his grandmother when he was a boy. He told her way back then that he would become a doctor so he could take care of her if she fell ill. It’s the sort of childhood vow that is ardently made at the time and then usually forgotten. But when, in 1981, the fifteen-year-old Yeneneh left Addis to attend high school at the Abbey School in Cañon City, Colorado, he already knew what his purpose was in life, and he never wavered from it.

The Holy Cross Abbey School in Cañon City—which is near Colorado Springs on the edge of the Rocky Mountains—is a Catholic school that recruited Yeneneh in Saudi Arabia, where the Betru family lived for several years. Yeneneh’s father, Betru Tensay, worked in the marketing department for several airlines and moved the whole family to Jeddah, the Saudi capital, in search of a better job. He and his wife, Sara Tesheberu, who belonged to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, had four children altogether, Yeneneh first, followed by two more sons, Sirak and Aron, and a daughter, Ruth. It was a close family, surrounded by uncles and aunts and cousins. The photo albums in the Betru household in California, where Yeneneh’s parents now live, are full of pictures of Yeneneh with the other children of the clan, and with his brothers and sister. One shows him and Sirak dressed in similar suits for a birthday. Yeneneh went to a private school in Ethiopia through the fifth grade, then he was in Saudi Arabia for four years, and then, as the oldest child, he was the first to go to high school in the United States, where his brothers and sister all followed.

“We all attended American schools because our parents wanted us to get the best education possible,” Sirak said, “and they knew that English was a very important language to know.”

Yeneneh was a good student and an athlete. He was also the star forward on the Abbey soccer team—one of the best players in the school’s history, said Sirak. He went horseback riding in the Colorado countryside and competed as a Vaqueros, a trick horseback rider. Years later, his family, living in a wood-paneled stucco home in Los Angeles, still had his trophies—for baseball tournaments in Saudi Arabia and for Vaqueros competitions in Colorado. “Even though he was a really good student, he wasn’t just a bookworm,” Aron said. But when he went on to Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, where he got a degree in biology, with honors, in 1988, and then to medical school at the University of Michigan, there wasn’t much time for extracurricular activities.

“He set a high mark for us,” Ruth said. “We owe our professional success to him. One time when I was an undergrad at UC Berkeley, I went out to Michigan to see him, to get away from studying.” Yeneneh was then in medical school. “And you know what he did? The minute I got there, he sent me to the library to study! I ended up sleeping on a couch, but he studied while I slept.”

Yeneneh, in other words, worked hard, doing what many immigrants and nonimmigrants have done since time began in American life, using the schools to get ahead. And he pursued his medical career with devotion. His mother recalled that even when he was taken to the hospital in Addis Ababa when he was three years old, he would say he wanted to be a doctor, maybe because he liked the medical attire, she thought. Or maybe it was because of his vow to his grandmother. It certainly wasn’t to get rich. When Aron once told Yeneneh that he also wanted to be a doctor because doctors made lots of money, he got a fraternal reprimand about the spiritual thinness of the pursuit of wealth.

“He said that was not a good reason,” Aron said. “He said you should always find a passion and enjoy what you do. For him it was definitely the passion of helping people.”

Yeneneh did his internship and residency in Los Angeles, and eventually joined a group called Consultants for Lung Diseases/Institute for Better Breathing in Burbank, California. He was a hospitalist, a physician who works only in a hospital, not in an office or private practice. “Betru was on the cutting edge of what a hospitalist should do,” said Earl Gomberg, executive director of the Consultants for Lung Diseases. “He went around the country training doctors on how they should deal with hospitalists. But Betru also loved patient interaction so he did rounds on the weekends. He didn’t want to lose patient contact.”

He never lost touch with his Ethiopian roots, whether that meant calling his mother and asking to come over for some of his favorite Ethiopian dishes, or giving medical advice to members of St. Mary’s Ethiopian Church, which his family attended. Once when Ruth had to do some community work as part of her graduate studies at UCLA, Yeneneh suggested that she organize an Ethiopian health fair. He and other volunteer doctors provided free medical care and advice to the three hundred or so low-income people who attended.

He lived in Burbank in a single-story, two-bedroom house with white stone walls and a manicured lawn. It was sparsely decorated with modern furniture and ethnic artifacts. There were three paintings of an Ethiopian boy playing musical instruments, two wooden statues of an Ethiopian warrior and his wife, and many Ethiopian crosses on display, along with American Indian pottery on the bookshelves on either side of the fireplace.

And in the garage of the Burbank house were four refurbished kidney dialysis machines along with a water filtration system, needles, gauze, and other supplies he was planning to ship to Ethiopia, and therein lies the key to understanding Yeneneh Betru’s passion for helping others. When he died, he was in the midst of a long, difficult effort to create the first kidney dialysis center in Ethiopia, a project that, for him, epitomized what he wanted his life to mean.

It was his beloved grandmother back home who prompted him to undertake this mission. In 1998, he got word that she had fallen desperately ill. Yeneneh called her doctors in Ethiopia to find out what he could about their diagnosis, which he realized was incorrect.

“The doctors over there thought it was some type of urinary tract infection or something,” Ruth remembers, “but after talking to my grandmother, he realized that she had had a stroke. He got all the medication that he could in the U.S. and he flew, with my mom, to Ethiopia. But by the time they got there, my grandmother had a blood clot and was suffering even more.”

Yeneneh, contrary to his boyhood pledge, was unable to help her, but he vowed to do something about the primitive state of medicine in Ethiopia. He spoke to doctors there, and they told him that what the country needed most urgently was dialysis machines, since kidney disease was an important cause of death in Ethiopia and yet there wasn’t a single dialysis center. Yeneneh began using his contacts with American kidney specialists to collect used dialysis machines, six of them altogether. At the same time he began negotiations with Ethiopia to set up a dialysis center at the Tikur Anbessa Hospital in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s largest hospital and the center of its most important medical faculty.

“He wanted to do something big for his home country before he got married,” said Jim Stramoski, a technician who rebuilds used dialysis machines for hospitals in California. Betru, helped by Stramoski, was able to put together his six machines for only about $15,000, an eighth of what the same machines would have cost new.1

“He didn’t want to help the rich,” the Addis Tribune, an Ethiopian newspaper, wrote, “but the poor, the ones who can’t help themselves.”

It wasn’t the first time that Yeneneh wanted to help the poor. When he was a resident at the University of Southern California Medical Center, he had some patients who were so poor they paid him with live chickens or ducks, which he brought home to the house he was sharing with Ruth in Los Angeles. “We built a small fence one year to house these chickens that Yeneneh would get,” Ruth said. “At one point, we were worried that our neighbors would call animal control or something to complain about all the livestock we had in our backyard.”

In the meantime, Yeneneh’s American career was advancing. In 1999, he became director of medical affairs for In-Patient Consultants, which recruits and trains hospitalists and advises hospitals on using their services. At the same time, for the three years after his grandmother’s death—until September 11, 2001—he traveled frequently to Ethiopia, consulting with local doctors and meeting with government officials in his effort to create his dialysis center at the Tikur Anbessa Hospital. It wasn’t easy. Ethiopia is a country of bureaucratic red tape, a country that didn’t have a single dialysis machine and yet imposed prohibitively high tariffs on refurbished machinery.

“He never showed any frustration with the roadblocks he faced in his dealings with the machines,” Gomberg said. “He just plodded along and kept trying to get the quest done.”

“He was such a good person and he was only thirty-five years old,” Yeneneh’s brother Aron said. “He was a visionary. He had a lot of ideas. He was at the point where he was going to break free and do so much more.”

In January 2001, Yeneneh and Sirak went to Ethiopia for vacation and in his last few days there he met a young women. He didn’t say much about her to his family, not wanting to make her too much of a subject before he knew what would happen between them. She agreed to go to the United States so the two of them could get to know each other better, and in the last weeks of his life, he went, accompanied by his mother, to Ethiopia to bring her back with him. He flew back from Ethiopia to Washington and deposited the young woman with a sister of hers who lived in Washington. Yeneneh was supposed to stay for a couple of days in Washington and fly back to work in California on September 12, but he was anxious to get home and back to work, and so he went to the airport to see if he could get on a flight standby. He did. The flight that had seats available was American Airlines flight 77, bound for Los Angeles.