Hope and Ethiopia

A little boy becomes the catalyst for a project that grew from a single donation to changing an entire community

This is a story about how one small boy has helped make a big difference in two communities half a world apart.

In October 2009, Patric and Holly Campbell traveled to Ethiopia to adopt their youngest child, Miles, who is now 4 years old. They also have a 7-year-old daughter, Lauryn.

To better understand where their son came from and to help answer questions he might ask later, the Eugene couple traveled to his home village and later toured a clinic that Holt International, the Eugene agency that arranged the adoption, is expanding in Shinshicho, near Miles’ birthplace.

“It was in a very, very poor state,” Patric Campbell said. “We got there early in the morning and within hours there were multitudes of people coming in on donkey carts, on hand-held stretchers, coming in from villages sometimes 10 kilometers away.

“They had one doctor. It was an overwhelming experience to see that many people and that much need.”

With the exception of a couple of outposts staffed by nurses, the clinic was the only provider of health care in an area with about 250,000 residents — roughly the population of Eugene-Springfield, said Phillip Littleton, president and CEO of Holt International.

After he returned to Eugene, Campbell couldn't shake that image from his head. He called Holt and asked how he could help. The agency was raising money to build a small hospital at the clinic site, so Campbell made a donation, “and that was that,” he said.


Then about eight months later Campbell, who oversees property and day-to-day activities at Campbell Commercial Real Estate, was in a construction meeting for Slocum Center for Orthopedics and Sports Medicine in Eugene. Slocum was upgrading to digital X-ray equipment, making two full rooms of analog X-ray equipment obsolete.

The question came up, “What do we do with this older equipment?” Campbell said.

“These are orthopedic quality X-ray machines, developers and everything you would need to take a high-quality X-ray,” Slocum’s president Thomas Wuest said. “They still have a ton of life left in them — probably 10 to 20 years.”

Campbell immediately thought of Ethiopia and suggested that he contact Holt to see if the hospital being built there could use the equipment.

Campbell called Holt donations director Larry Carter, who was excited about the idea. But Ethiopia receives lots of donations, some of them not usable, so Campbell soon found himself sending over serial numbers, photos of the equipment, and plans for the X-ray rooms, for Ethiopian government officials.

Finally Carter called: “We got some good news,” he told Campbell. “They’re going to accept the equipment. I’m going to send you a document of the other things they need.”

He sent over an eight-page Excel spreadsheet listing beds, gurneys, IV poles, scrubs...

“You name it, it was on there,” Campbell said.

“It was great,” he said. “But all of a sudden it was a little overwhelming.”

List in hand, Campbell started meeting with hospital and clinic administrators to see if they could donate any of the items.

Northwest Speciality Clinics provided X-ray viewing boxes and Urology Health Care donated a portable ultrasound machine, Campbell said.

“I was making some headway,” he said. “I figured we had enough to send over one small container.”

So in August 2011, Campbell called Tucker Davies, a certified moving consultant at Lile Moving & Storage, which Campbell had worked with before when moving tenants.

“I have an off-the-wall question for you,” Campbell told Davies. “I need to get a container from Eugene to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.”

Campbell explained that he wanted to send donated medical equipment to a hospital in Ethiopia.

Davies, who was then president of Eugene Delta Rotary, had just arranged to ship similar equipment for the service organization to Honduras, Peru and the Philippines.

“Send me the list, and I’ll get back to you,” Davies told Campbell.

Davies called back a couple of days later with the names of two Rotarians who had been collecting medical equipment for hospitals being built around the world.

“They’ve looked at your list, and think they can help,” Davies said.

“Wow!” Campbell said. “That’s a heck of a lot easier than what I’ve been doing.”

Over the next 10 months, Campbell and other Rotary volunteers hopped into Lile moving trucks, with Davies at the wheel, and picked up equipment that had been stashed in storage units from Scio down to the north spit of Coos Bay, Campbell said.

All of a sudden the equipment and supplies were growing exponentially.

“Now we needed a place to store it,” Campbell said.

Lile and Big Y Storage stepped up with space where the medical equipment will stay until Holt gets the green light to ship it, hopefully this spring, Campbell said.

“Patric called me to get a regular rate on shipping a container to Ethiopia, and it blossomed into this,” Davies said.

“We do international shipments all the time, and we get paid for it, and that’s nice,” he said. “This one we’re not getting paid for, but there’s something that’s better about giving that makes it all worthwhile. That’s what it’s providing us and a lot of other people involved in the project.”

Reflecting on how one phone call could connect him to a volunteer group that accomplished so much more than he could have on his own, Campbell said, “There’s almost a serendipitous aspect to all of this.”

Serendipity intervened again when Campbell made a quick five-day trip to Ethiopia in 2011 with Holt officials to check on early-stage construction of the hospital in Shinshicho.

Returning to Eugene, the group flew out of Addis Ababa and reached the airport in Frankfurt, Germany at 5 a.m. Bleary-eyed as he made his way to his gate, Campbell noticed a cluster of Oregon State University Beavers in black-and-orange athletic garb.

Campbell said to them, “I went to Oregon State. What are you guys doing here?”

“We’re Beavers Without Borders,” a student-athlete service group, came the answer. “We’re in Macedonia building a house.”

Campbell said, “I’ve read about this; it’s run by some football guy.”

A moment later, he was shaking hands with former OSU football player Taylor Kavanaugh, one of the service group’s leaders.

With just minutes to talk, shuffling boarding passes and business cards, Campbell told Kavanaugh: “I’m coming home from Ethiopia. I think I have your next project.”

Back in Eugene, about a week after the encounter, Campbell got a call from Kavanaugh.

“I hear things happen for a reason,” Kavanaugh said. “We need to make this happen.”

In June 2011, a group of 13 student athletes from Beavers Without Borders built houses of mud, straw and eucalyptus for two struggling families in Silti, a town near the hospital site in Shinshicho.

“It’s been a nice partnership” between Holt and Beavers Without Borders, Littleton said. “We’re in discussions with them right now about the next project. There will be one for 2013.”

Patric and Holly Campbell joined the OSU group in June, helping to distribute in Ethiopia 350 pairs of new and gently used shoes they had collected in Eugene.

It was a side project that Holly organized after noticing in photos of the hospital construction that laborers were working barefoot around rebar and other building materials.

If a worker’s foot is cut, it can become diseased, leading to disfiguration or even death, Patric Campbell said.

The gift of shoes to community members who would help build the hospital was about more than just the shoes, said Dan Lauer, Holt’s vice president for Africa and Haiti. “It was, ‘I’m going to wear these shoes working on this project,’ ” he said.

At its peak, the hospital project employed about 500 members of the Shinshicho community — and about half of them are involved in Holt’s humanitarian programs to help keep families together in Ethiopia.

Holt is well known in the United States as an international adoption agency, but since its founding in 1956, it has evolved into an international child welfare agency operating in 13 countries, said Jack Wharfield, Holt’s vice president of development.

Last year, Holt served 31,534 children worldwide who are orphans, or whose families are at risk of disruption, by arranging in-country adoptions, and by strengthening families through donations of livestock, school supplies and other assistance. Of that total, 561 children arrived home in the United States through Holt’s adoption programs.

Holt has raised $1 million for the Shinshicho hospital, and needs to raise another $250,000 to finish it, Littleton said.

The community in Ethiopia has raised $150,000 for the hospital, and is raising another $100,000, he said.

The medical equipment that Campbell and others have collected for the hospital reduces the bill to equip it, Lauer said.

“It’s an exciting piece of this project that we didn’t plan on from the beginning,” he said.

When the Campbells went to pick up Miles in Ethiopia three years ago, they had no inkling where the experience would take them.

“If there’s a catalyst in all of this, it’s him,” Patric Campbell said. “The amazing part for me is he doesn’t even know the impact he’s had on two communities and the world.”

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