Her name, I learned, was Letikiros Hailu, and the story was true. She really had hanged herself from a tree after spilling water. A REST staffer had tracked down the details and discovered that Letikiros came from an isolated village called Meda, located on the northern border of Tigray and Amhara.
Over the last year and a half, I’d shared Letikiros’s story at speaking events, but I knew nothing more than what the hotel owner had shared with me. I pictured her as an elderly woman, near the end of her life, who one day decided, I just can’t do it anymore. People reacted to her story in a visceral way. But sometimes, when you say the same things on a stage over and over again, they start to play like sound bites, and you begin to wonder if what you’re saying is actually true.
Lately, I felt like I didn’t have the right to talk about Letikiros anymore—not until I went to her village, walked in her footsteps, and saw the tree where they found her body. I needed to experience what her life was like firsthand. So, on a Saturday morning in November 2013, I emailed REST and asked for help coordinating a trip to Meda.
Meda was so off the beaten path that there was actually no way to reach it by car. My contact at REST suggested I postpone the trip until a road was built, but who knew when that would be?
“Even if you are committed to walk the long distance,” someone from REST had written back, “we are not sure how long it takes—days or hours.”
Okay, so it will be a real journey, I thought. I’ll bring a tent. Food and water. A compass. Whatever it takes.
“Capturing this story is very important to me,” I began my reply. “The hardship is not an issue at all.”
I was passionately making my case over email when Vik walked out of the bathroom with something in her hand. “This thing is broken,” she said, showing me a pregnancy test wand. It was small and pink, with a digital readout window that read, “Pregnant.”
“I’m not pregnant,” she said. “Maybe it’s expired?”
We’d stopped using birth control a couple of months earlier, without much fanfare or a master plan. Vik was thirty. I was thirty-eight. It seemed like a good time.
“Or…maybe you’re pregnant,” I said.
“No way. I don’t believe it,” she said. “Could you take one, please, so I can make sure these things aren’t broken?”
“Um. Sure, honey.”
I went to the bathroom and got a tester from our hulking stash in the cupboard. Earlier that month, I’d realized we had about $500 in tax-free FSA money that we’d lose at the end of the year, so I went on a drugstore shopping spree and bought a ton of pregnancy tests, condoms, and a blood pressure cuff. We had so many pregnancy tests, we were running out of places to store them.
My results, not surprisingly, were “Not Pregnant.” I showed the wand to Vik.
“No way,” she said. “Take another one!”
We both took another test—I was humoring her at this point—but the results came back the same for both of us.
“Vik, I think we’re having a baby!”
“I guess so,” she said, stunned. “I just…I thought it would take longer.”
Neither of us had prepared mentally for this news. I started immediately buying parenting books. Vik searched the internet to learn everything new moms were and weren’t supposed to do. The latter list was longer. She was grumpy about not being able to drink wine with dinner, and about having to cut back on the three cups of coffee she usually had with breakfast. At first, I didn’t really get how hard it was for her, this sudden change in her lifestyle. Or how, when you’re tired all the time, and cravings become insatiable, it can feel like your body is betraying you. I just thought she was being whiny and self-absorbed. We were headed for a blowup.
In January, we went to Hawaii for a vacation and rented a small house with some friends. When we’d planned the trip back in November, Vik had been so excited about the prospect of eating good sushi, soaking in a hot tub, and maybe getting a massage. But now she’d been told that you can’t do those things when you’re expecting (mistakenly on the massage part, at least). So, the whole trip, she drowned her sorrows in pint after pint of Häagen-Dazs.
“Honey, we’re out of coffee ice cream,” she’d say. “Will you please get me more?”
“Okay,” I’d say, biting my lip and dutifully heading to the market. But one day, I Googled “sugar” and “pregnancy” and totally freaked out. I couldn’t take it anymore.
“You have to stop this! You are giving our child diabetes!” I shouted, complaining for the next ten minutes about how cavalier she was being with my baby’s health. That was it for Vik. She put down the empty ice cream carton and snapped.
“You cannot take this last thing away from me,” she said in an almost sinister whisper. “I expect you to be supportive. I can raise this baby on my own if I have to!”
It was one of our worst fights ever. We laugh about it now—the time Vik almost left me for Häagen-Dazs; or, actually, the time Scott forgot he was supposed to be a supportive husband to a newly pregnant wife. But I learned my lesson, and Vik cut back on the sugar. We were about to become a family. Every decision we made, individually and as a couple, affected that sacred bond—including my decision to chase Letikiros’s story.
Soon after we had made peace about the ice cream, we had a big talk about the upcoming trip.
“Babe, I need to go to her village,” I said. “I need to figure out what happened in Meda, why she killed herself.”
“What does REST say?”
“They’re not thrilled for me to go. They think it’s too far—like I won’t be up for the journey. I think they have safety concerns, too.”
“Do you?”
“Not really, but I haven’t been on a trip like this for a long time. I really need it.”
She was quiet for a while. Vik knew from her own experiences in the field how important it was for us to be connected with the work. Still, this hadn’t come at the best time, with her pregnancy.
“If you really don’t want me to go, then I’ll wait,” I said.
“No. I’m just jealous,” she said. “I miss Ethiopia. You have to do it.”
We’d been walking for hours in hundred-degree heat when our donkey wobbled a bit on his thin legs. He took a few more steps, breathed heavily, and then collapsed on the ground, taking all my gear down with him.
The poor animal was alive but exhausted. My guide gave him a long drink of bottled water in a bowl, and we decided maybe we all needed a short rest. I sat under the shade of a large rock formation, sore and covered in dust. Looking around, there was no sign of civilization on the horizon: no roads, no huts, no animals, no people, no wells. I wondered, Are we ever going to get there? Are we lost? Is there even a there there?
Earlier that day, at 5 a.m., I’d met up with Gebremariam, a water technician from REST, in the Ethiopian city of Hawzen.
“Scott, nice to meet you,” he said. “Are you ready for the long journey to Meda?”
Gebremariam would be my translator, guide, and company for the entire trip. Teklewoini Assefa, REST’s executive director, sent a car and driver to take us about four hours southwest from Hawzen to the Tekezé Dam. Fears of a terrorist attack on the $360 million dam project were so great that the government wouldn’t allow anyone to drive near it. But Tek made some calls and got special permission for his driver to pass through a service road inside the dam—with an armed military escort, of course. Tek’s handiwork saved us a full day of hiking.
We drove into the dam a little after 9 a.m., and ten minutes later we arrived on the other side, blinded by sunlight and staring at the end of the road. We unpacked the car and sent the driver back to town. As REST had promised, a vendor with a thin camel and the weak-legged donkey were waiting for us. The animals would carry our belongings for the nine-hour hike. After negotiating a price with their owner, Gebremariam and I were off.
For the weeklong journey, I’d brought a solar backpack (to keep my laptop, camera, GPS device, and satellite phone charged), a tent, a sleeping bag, tons of sunscreen, and enough clothes to change every few days. Not knowing what we’d find when we reached Meda, we packed five days’ worth of dry food and water, and a small water filter.
It was the toughest walk of my life. The earth, hard and crumbling under my feet, was bleached tan from the constant beating sun. It looked like we were roaming the barren landscape of Luke Skywalker’s Tatooine homeland. Ethiopia’s Simien Mountains towered in the distance like amber palaces.
We reached Meda just as the sun was setting. As advertised, there was no power or running water. No internet, no post office, no general store where you could buy a Coke or double-A batteries. Just 2,800 people living completely off the grid on a dusty plateau. As we trudged into town, the village elders greeted us, offered us roasted goat and injera, and promised to introduce me around the community. At 8:30 p.m., I pitched my tent outside the village chief’s house, tucked myself into my sleeping bag, and passed out under a full moon.
The next day, I woke up sharply at 4:45 a.m. to the sounds of rustling outside my tent—Meda’s version of rush hour. I looked out to see dozens of people walking about, tending to goats and chickens, laughing and talking. Women were tying yellow Jerry Cans to their backs to begin the daily walk for water. The scene felt disorienting in the moonlight.
When the sun came up, Gebremariam took me to meet a woman named Chekolech. She was Letikiros’s mother. Her short dark hair was wrapped into tight braids, and her brown tunic was fraying at the bottom. I could see the faded rings of tattoo ink around her neck, the kind that so many Ethiopian women use to adorn themselves. When Chekolech told me she was fifty-three years old, I was surprised. She looked at least sixty-five.
Gebremariam stood next to me, ready to translate.
“I came to learn about your daughter,” I said.
“She was born in this house,” Chekolech said. “She lived here with me, her sister, and her husband until she died on May 19, 2000.”
“May I ask, how old was she?” I asked.
“Thirteen.”
“I’m sorry, thirty?”
“Scott. No, no, no,” Gebremariam said. “Only thirteen. Just a little girl.”
I was stunned. This wasn’t what I’d imagined at all. How could a thirteen-year-old have killed herself over spilled water?
“Please, could you tell me more about Letikiros?”
Chekolech and I spent the morning together talking. I learned that just before she died, Letikiros had been married to a handsome priest’s servant named Abebe. Arranged marriages were common in the community. But Chekolech had been abused by Letikiros’s father, the result of a poorly arranged marriage. (She later divorced him with the rare support of the male village elders.) So when it was time for her own daughter to marry, Chekolech chose thoughtfully.
Abebe was only a few years older, poor like them, but kind and gentle. Chekolech knew he would take good care of Letikiros. She watched her daughter fall in love easily with the young man. But not much else about Letikiros’s life in Meda seemed easy to me.
Chekolech told me that her daughter began walking for water at eight years old. Although most girls quit school once they marry, Letikiros was determined to continue. So, three days a week, she attended class part time. The other four days, she strapped a ten-pound clay pot to her back with a frayed rope and headed out to Arliew Spring, the closest water source.
To make up for the water they missed on Letikiros’s school days, the family paid to rent a donkey, which could carry four pots of water on a single trip. But they didn’t have enough money to cover the donkeys every week. Also, even when she could go to school, just getting there took a tremendous effort. The nearest classroom was a six-hour round-trip on foot. Letikiros quickly fell behind in her lessons, and by thirteen, she’d only completed the equivalent of third grade.
The next morning, with my notebook and camera in hand, I joined the women of the village on their walk to Arliew Spring. It was a treacherous hike up and down a cliff-side footpath strewn with loose, slippery shale. I learned that several women and girls had fallen seven hundred feet to their deaths on this path. Looking down, I had no doubt that this was true.
As we reached the bottom of the ravine, I imagined Letikiros getting in line behind the others here, waiting to collect the water that trickled through the large boulders, which I could see were covered in baboon excrement. This spring trickled enough water to fill about three pots every hour. Chekolech had said that Letikiros would regularly come home around nightfall with about five gallons.
Over the next four days, I fell into the village’s routine: early to bed and even earlier to rise. Around noon, when the sun beat down and temperatures reached the mid-nineties, I’d go inside the chief’s tiny stone house and take a nap on a goatskin cot. I’d listen to his four children playing while their mother cooked injera on the stove.
Chekolech said that on the day Letikiros took her life, she’d walked to Arliew Spring with her best friend, Yeshareg, who still lived in the village. Toward the end of my trip, I went to see her. Happily married now, with three children, she was twenty-seven—the same age Letikiros would have been.
“She was different,” Yeshareg said of her friend. “Letikiros always dreamed of a better life for us. She would talk about leaving Meda one day, and helping to bring back health care, water, better education.”
Yeshareg remembered meeting her friend on the path to Arliew Spring the morning of that final day. “Neither of us had taken breakfast, because we wanted to get there early,” she said. “To get a good spot in line.”
She showed me a clay pot in her house. I picked it up by the handle and saw that the surface was badly chipped. The pot bulged at the bottom and felt old and fragile.
“They have the yellow Jerry Cans now,” Gebremariam explained. “But this was what Letikiros would have been carrying that day.”
Yeshareg recalled that they’d filled their pots at the spring by noon and began walking home together. Around 3 p.m., they reached the fork in the path and parted ways. It was the last time Yeshareg saw Letikiros alive.
Piecing together her story, I imagined Letikiros walking the rest of the way alone. Somewhere along the path, she stumbled. Maybe it was hunger, coupled with the forty pounds she had on her back. Perhaps her legs failed her, or she tripped on a rock. All I knew for sure was that when she went down, her pot smashed against the ground, shattering into tiny pieces. The precious water she’d spent ten hours collecting was gone in an instant, sucked up by the thirsty ground.
Shortly afterward, a village elder was passing by when he saw Letikiros’s limp body hanging from the branches, and the pot nearby, broken into pieces. He wailed in grief. People came running. Someone cut her body loose, and another person covered her with a white sheet. They put her body on a board, like a stretcher, to carry her home to her mother.
When Chekolech saw her daughter’s body, she was inconsolable. She went into such a frenzy that she threw herself against the jagged stone walls of her house, permanently injuring her back. Abebe wasn’t home. He’d been traveling to the market for provisions, a trip that always took a few days. Someone dispatched a messenger to give him the news, and he rushed back to Meda, arriving just after the funeral.
On my last day in Meda, I met the seventy-year-old priest who’d led Letikiros’s memorial service. He said she looked so beautiful, a child dressed in white.
“A thousand people came,” he said. “Children, adults, everyone.”
He walked me to the graveyard, a plot of dry earth behind the church. There were no markings as far as I could tell, but he knew where everyone was buried. He pointed to Letikiros’s grave, a simple pile of fifteen or twenty rocks. The broken shards of the clay pot, he said, had been scattered far from the village, where they’d never be seen again.
Another elder took me to the tree where Letikiros had taken her life. It was gray and weathered, like a giant piece of dead driftwood jammed into the rocks. It didn’t even look strong enough to hold the weight of a body. But I knew that a thirteen-year-old girl here, where food was scarce, might weigh as little as sixty pounds.
“Why do you think she did it?” I had asked Yeshareg. “Why not go back for water the next day?”
“I think she would have been overcome with shame for her carelessness,” she said. “Her mother was waiting for that water. They needed it. And now she had also broken the pot.”
I had to remind myself that although she’d been married at the time, Letikiros was just barely a teenage girl, prone to the same emotions and whims that capture so many adolescents’ minds. She’d lost five gallons of water and a valuable family possession in one fell swoop. It must have been just too much to bear.
Before leaving Meda, I bought my host family a goat and gave away my flashlights. Gebremariam and I started the long journey back well before dawn, and by evening I’d checked into Gheralta Lodge, showered, and fired up my laptop. I wrote Letikiros’s story in one long exhale. The staff at REST fact-checked it, and we sent it to charity: water to be posted online.
“I loved your story,” Vik said when I called her from Gheralta. “It reminded me of how you used to write when you were with Mercy Ships. You haven’t done that in so long.”
“Do you really think it’s good?” I asked.
“Yes. So good.”
“Vik, I’ve been so preoccupied with the business of charity: water—all the CEO stuff—I think I almost lost the thread…why we do this.”
“I know, babe,” she said.
In some ways, my time in Meda made me feel like I’d been underselling the urgency of our work. Seeing that tree made me so angry—the injustice of it all. Letikiros’s story reminded me that the water crisis is a real crisis. And it’s urgent.
I know that we’re all guilty of becoming numb sometimes. But all the sound bites are true. The awful stories are real. And they’re happening right now. There are thirteen-year-old girls around the world just like Letikiros who are fed up and can’t take it any longer. There are mothers like Chekolech who live every day with the pain of losing a child, an injury that never heals. There are fathers who will never see their sons and daughters grow up. Their pain felt all the more real to me when I considered that I was about to become a parent myself.
Six months later, on August 18, 2014, Jackson Scott Harrison came into the world. Vik was a champion through eight hours of labor, and I stayed with her in the delivery room, holding her hand and coaching her along, just like my dad did when I was born.
“You’re doing great!” I kept saying. “Keep pushing!”
Jackson came out yelling, with big healthy lungs, ten fingers, ten toes, and a perfect Apgar score. He looked like a little, slimy, cone-headed alien. I couldn’t wait for us to take him home and just stare at him.
Instead of asking for gifts, we celebrated his birth with a fundraising campaign. I couldn’t think of a better way to welcome a child into the world. Vik and I personally donated the first $10,000, and 231 generous donors pitched in to raise $256,000—enough to bring clean water to more than eight thousand people in Niger, West Africa. (Why not Meda, you might ask? Field studies determined that there was simply no reachable groundwater, and the only solution would have been a massive pipe system costing upward of half a million dollars. Our team couldn’t justify sending that much money to help one village, plus we didn’t believe it would be a sustainable solution. It’s one of the hard realities we deal with all the time. The government has been slowly building a road to Meda, and we continue to watch and hope that it might change our options for a solution in Meda one day.)
Over the next few months, as I settled into the rhythm of fatherhood, I thought a lot about what Dr. Gary had once said: the hopes and dreams in a mother’s heart are the same anywhere in the world. From the time we met, Vik’s and my hopes and dreams had been wrapped up in building charity: water. But now we had a son. It changed my brain chemistry. Jackson became our new everything.
Spending time with him and Vik brought into sharp focus the fact that I’d been drowning for almost three years in reports, spreadsheets, and legal briefs. That just wasn’t how I wanted to spend my time and energy anymore. Retracing Letikiros’s steps and sharing her story with the world—that was the job I really wanted. Storytelling was the work I’d missed the most. And now, as a new parent, I felt more connected than ever to the mothers and fathers of Meda, Kal Habel, Moale, and all the other places where we tried to bring a better life to future generations. I became obsessed with finding new ways to share those feelings, and the urgency of that need, with our supporters.