How we began…
When founder, Eayoall Atsbeha, got the chance to return to his home country of Ethiopia, he had been gone for more than ten years. This was the summer of 2011. Atsbeha was an active member of the nonprofit, Myfight.org, which works in Ethiopia. They had enlisted Atsbeha to accompany them on a trip geared towards forming relationships with organizations on the ground. But when Atsbeha returned to his hometown, however, the experience was not entirely comforting. He reunited with his family – mother, father, grandmother, and five younger sisters – but he noticed that many of his peers who had remained in Gara Muleta were not doing very well. Atsbeha encountered one of them begging for food, a cripple with no real opportunity or dreams beyond where he was.
…what next?
After Atsbeha returned to America, it began to seem more and more as if he had won a lottery ticket, that something was required of him for this good fortune, something more than occasional work for a non-profit or charity. He couldn’t get the faces of the street kids of Gara Muleta out of his mind.
With friends and volunteers, Atsbeha held a dinner of authentic Ethiopian food to raise money to build a dormitory to house orphans. The funds from this – and other fundraising events that followed, such as the 5K Mountain Man Run – paid for the Gara Muleta church to build the dormitory, allowing the church to provide relative stability in the lives of a significant number of street kids.
Change starts small.
Our Mission
Gara means “mountain,” inspired by the hometown of founder, Eayoall Atsbeha. The name of the town, in full, is Gara Muleta – roughly translated as “the mountain you can see.” Mountains, for us, are also places you can see from, inspiring us to dream dreams.
The hopeful things in our world are small things. We started our work by helping a church in a rural village of Ethiopia expand its reach in the community. We believe, in fact, that real change is grass roots, growing from the ground up, however small it begins, in economies, families, individuals.
As we have seen in recent history, big economies can fail quickly. Big pocket aid from the developed world is often lost in the sieve of corruption. Planting small seeds, however, can have dramatic results.