Anchorage Daily News

When Chaltu Degefa's parents died, she and her siblings became seven of Ethiopia's estimated 4.6 million orphans. It's likely her parents died of AIDS, although she doesn't know for sure.

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"We had to go and sleep on the streets," the girl wrote in a letter. "I don't know how long we lived on the street but we were still hunger and I was scared a lot."

Chaltu and her younger sister dodged a life of begging, starvation and disease when they were taken in by an orphanage in Woliso, Ethiopia, started by Anchorage nurse Catherine Miller.

The orphanage isn't an adequate home by American standards -- there's rarely electricity, no hot water, no refrigerator and the outdoor "toilets" are hotbeds for malaria.

But the children are fed, clothed and their school fees are paid. They sleep in bunk beds, and take turns on the only swing set in the city.

Chaltu wrote: "When I pray for someone to take care of me and my sister God gave me Catherine."

'NOTHING I HAD PLANNED'

In Miller's South Anchorage kitchen, a Mother Teresa quote is painted on the wall: "We can do no great things; only small things with great love."

As Miller grew up near Clear, in Alaska's remote Interior, her mother emphasized charity, encouraging her children to send their allowance to kids in need. Still, Miller never had goals of running a nonprofit.

Miller was a businesswoman. She dropped out of high school in 10th grade, forged a birth certificate and worked on the pipeline. After she earned her GED and graduated from University of Alaska Anchorage, she became a registered nurse and co-owned a chain of auto body shops.

"I had a good life," Miller said. "Trust me, this (orphanage) was nothing I had planned for my life."

Miller satisfied her family's charitable values by occasionally volunteering for Northwest Medical Teams, caring for refugees in places such as Kosovo, Uganda and Ethiopia. In 2005, her Ethiopian friend Estiphanos Dea -- who would later become her husband -- took her to visit a desperate man who had let 43 orphans live in his yard. He was trying to support them on his $25-a-month salary.

"All these kids were living in an outbuilding, sleeping on a dirt floor. You could see they weren't in the greatest of shape, nobody was in school and Eyob was struggling to feed them," Miller said. "It was awful, but you know, what was I going to do?"

"But when I got back to the United States, it was just one of those things that when I'd lay down to go to sleep at night, it would be running in my mind."

That year, Miller started Children of the World, a 501c3 nonprofit that built and funds the Woliso orphanage, a home for those 43 children. The orphanage hosts an after-school program serving an additional 110 children, largely orphans living with extended family members.

Children of the World also makes regular donations to an orphanage in Liberia.

According to tax records, Children of the World operated on $40,000 last year. Miller didn't take a salary.

ORPHAN CRISIS

There are more orphans in Ethiopia than there are people in Los Angeles, according to statistics from the United Nations Fund-Ethiopia.

Crowds of them rush stopped cars, begging for food and money. They lie by the roadside, sick and dirty, or idle their days away in alleys, because they can't pay the required school fees.

"Here, you don't see kids begging on streets and being treated badly and taken advantage of, so it's even harder when I go back after being in a place where kids are treated very fairly and very well," said Miller's husband, Dea, who works in Alaska Pacific University's information technology department.

He said the Ethiopian government offers few social services, relying instead on the traditional system of placing orphans with extended family.

But the traditional system has been overwhelmed as Sub-Saharan Africa flounders because of famine, war, political instability and poverty; it also bears the brunt of Africa's HIV/AIDS epidemic. The region has about 10 percent of the world's population but more than 60 percent of the world's HIV cases.

So children bounce from adult to adult until there is no one left to take them. Meseret Berhaue's father died, then her mother, so she and her brother went to live with a family friend. One year later, that woman died.

Meseret and her brother were homeless for about three years. He started stealing and got addicted to chat, a popular local drug. Meseret was given a place at the Woliso orphanage, and she wanted her brother to join her, but staff decided he was uncontrollable.

"Over the years she's suffered emotional problems, often going to bed for a week at a time," Miller said. "She says she has lost not one mother, but two, and she worries constantly about her brother."

RISING COSTS

At the Woliso orphanage, education is the priority, with an emphasis on English skills. Ethiopia has more than 80 languages, too many to create textbooks for, so English fluency is required at college.

"These kids in Ethiopia are different than kids here," Miller said. "These kids realize their only hope is education. From the youngest age, you ask what they like to do and they say study. They know it's their ticket out."

But the orphanage hasn't had any children leave and fend for themselves yet. Now about 17 years old (most orphans don't know their birth date, so staff assigns them one), Meseret is the oldest child at the orphanage. She has graduated from the 10th grade and is attending a two-year accounting school. But there are so few jobs in Ethiopia, Miller worries about her ability to land a position.

The staff has all it can manage just keeping the kids fed and healthy. Because of the current world food shortage and fuel price increases, in one year the cost of feeding a child has gone from $8 a month to $16. The kids tend cows for milk, chickens for eggs and a garden for vegetables, but the orphanage still has to buy beans and grain for injera, a regional flatbread. Last week, Miller sent an emergency $1,000 when the orphanage staff called to say the pantry was nearly bare.

Because of the social stigma and fears attached to HIV/AIDS in Ethiopian society, it took Miller six months to convince her staff that the orphanage's children should be tested for HIV.

"Remember when in America people were afraid to hold your hand, and some felt that people infected with HIV/AIDS deserved it?" Miller asked. "Those factors are still heavily at play in Africa."

She was shocked to learn that only four of the children had HIV -- she thought the number would be much higher.

The other deadly disease Miller contends with regularly is malaria. The orphanage has four holes in the ground that serve as toilets. In the rainy season, the open pits overflow and become a breeding ground for mosquitoes. Anchorage East Rotary has a $17,000 sanitation project in the works to install a septic tank, toilets and showers at the orphanage by October, said club member Sue Foley.

PIERCED EARS

The Ethiopian government taxes donations and doesn't allow some things into the country, like used clothing. Shipping prices make most physical donations cost-prohibitive. But Alaskans still have found ways to help. An Anchorage dentist gives toothbrushes annually. A local salon owner donated an ear-piercing gun and earrings.

"I must've pierced 60 ears that day," Miller said. "Then of course the neighborhood kids came over, and the teachers and the cooks. The kids don't come to the orphanage with anything, so for most of these girls, those earrings are the only things they own."

Children of the World board member Rebekah Cushing worked with child soldiers in Uganda last year and made a pit stop in Ethiopia at the orphanage. A cultural psychology senior at APU, she's impressed with the children's progress.

"You can see the difference between children that are in the home versus the kids that live on the street, literally across the fence," she said. "They're much more emotionally advanced and physically healthy than the kids in the surrounding neighborhood, due to the extra care they've had."

Three years after Miller incorporated her nonprofit, "Fundraising for Dummies" has joined a Bible and "The Oxford Handbook of Tropical Medicine" on her bookshelf. She's applying to graduate programs to study sustainable development.

When she gets frustrated about the skyrocketing cost of food in Africa, or anxious about the future prospects of the orphanage's children, she walks to her kitchen and re-reads the Mother Teresa quote on her wall.

"When I get discouraged and think I am not doing enough, the words comfort me."

Find Sarah Henning online at adn.com/contact/shenning or call 257-4323.

How to help Children of the World

For $61, Children of the World can feed, clothe and school a child for a month.

Children of the World accepts donations at its Web site, www. childrenoftheworld.info, and at Children of the World, 4264 Birch Run Drive, Anchorage, 99507.

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