Kindle: Amazon's 6" Wireless Reading Device

Note: Amazon donates a 10% referral fee to HopeEthiopia on each qualifying Kindle device sale they refer. This includes both Kindle and Kindle DX.

Kindle DX: Amazon's 9.7" Wireless Reading Device

A Walk To Beautiful - NOVA

A difficult journey that begins in loneliness and shame for thousands of Ethiopian women ends in a productive new life and hope for the future in this award-winning film. Shot against a starkly beautiful landscape, A Walk to Beautiful shares the inspiring stories of three women, rejected by their husbands and ostracized by their communities, who leave home in search of treatment for obstetric fistula. Once common in the pre-industrial United States, this life-shattering complication of childbirth is now relegated to the poorest regions of the world. In Ethiopia alone, there are an estimated 100,000 women suffering from untreated fistulas.

Black Gold ~ Tadesse Meskela (DVD - 2007)

The documentary is as riveting and jaw-dropping as anything currently starring Leonardo DiCaprio. But Black Gold transcends both dramatization and the dry presentational quality of a film like An Inconvenient Truth by telling the story of Ethiopia's coffee farmers like the epic tragedy that it is. --Corina Chocano, L.A. TIMES

Beneath the Lion's Gaze: A Novel by Maaza Mengiste

Beneath the Lion's Gaze is an extraordinary novel, which assembles a dauntingly broad cast of characters and, through them, tells stories that nobody can want to hear, in such a way that we cannot stop listening. Although set more than thirty years ago, Mengiste's novel is timely and vital: Its illumination of a world unfamiliar to most Americans shows us how individuals will fight to retain their humanity in the face of atrocity.

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese (Hardcover)

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Lauded for his sensitive memoir (My Own Country) about his time as a doctor in eastern Tennessee at the onset of the AIDS epidemic in the 80s, Verghese turns his formidable talents to fiction, mining his own life and experiences in a magnificent, sweeping novel that moves from India to Ethiopia to an inner-city hospital in New York City over decades and generations. Sister Mary Joseph Praise, a devout young nun, leaves the south Indian state of Kerala in 1947 for a missionary post in Yemen. During the arduous sea voyage, she saves the life of an English doctor bound for Ethiopia, Thomas Stone, who becomes a key player in her destiny when they meet up again at Missing Hospital in Addis Ababa. Seven years later, Sister Praise dies birthing twin boys: Shiva and Marion, the latter narrating his own and his brothers long, dramatic, biblical story set against the backdrop of political turmoil in Ethiopia, the life of the hospital compound in which they grow up and the love story of their adopted parents, both doctors at Missing. The boys become doctors as well and Vergheses weaving of the practice of medicine into the narrative is fascinating even as the story bobs and weaves with the power and coincidences of the best 19th-century novel. (Feb.)

The Hospital by the River: A Story of Hope by Catherine Hamlin (Paperback - April 15, 2005)

The awe-inspiring story of the life and mission of Dr. Catherine Hamlin who, with her husband Reg, established what has been heralded as one the most incredible medical programs in the modern world.

"These are the women most to be pitied in the world. They're alone and forgotten, bearing their injuries in shame." -- Dr. Catherine Hamlin

"Almost four decades after her work began, it's understandable why Hamlin has been called 'The new Mother Teresa for our age' by the New York Times, and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. This fascinating account of Dr. Hamlin's work will break your heart -- and offer hope that even the worst circumstance can be changed if we care enough to help. Keep the Kleenex handy." (Cindy Crosby Faithful Reader )

Notes from the Hyena's Belly: An Ethiopian Boyhood by Nega Mezlekia (Paperback - Jan 5, 2002)

"Hyenas are the most common, notorious predators in Ethiopia," notes Mezlekia, thus their power in local myth and as a metaphor for the forces that have torn Ethiopia apart in recent decades. This lyrical memoir of an Ethiopian childhood echoes both the myth and the violence of the hyena. In the first third of his literary debut, Mezlekia intersperses accounts of his mischievous, rebellious childhood with the magical tales told by his family to interpret various experiences: magic and spirits were part of everyday life for young Mezlekia. He also carefully delineates the customs of and relations between the Christian and Muslim communities in his hometown of Jijiga. (Mezlekia's mother, though a Christian, took her son to a Muslim medicine man to cleanse him following a series of boyish escapades.)

This lovely and terrible memoir will undoubtedly be well reviewed and thus reach readers interested not only in the fate of Africa but also in a lyrical account of a foreign childhood.

There Is No Me Without You: One Woman's Odyssey to Rescue Her Country's Children by Melissa Fay Greene (Paperback - Sep 4, 2007)

Not unlike the AIDS pandemic itself, the odyssey of Haregewoin Teferra, who took in AIDS orphans, began in small stages and grew to irrevocably transform her life from that of "a nice neighborhood lady" to a figure of fame, infamy and ultimate restoration. In telling her story, journalist Greene who had adopted two Ethiopian children before meeting Teferra, juggles political history, medical reportage and personal memoir. While succinctly interspersing a history of Ethiopia, lucidly tracing the history of AIDS from its early manifestation as "slim disease" in the late 1970s to its appearance as a bizarrely aggressive [form] of Kaposi's sarcoma in the early 1980s, and following the complex path of medication (a super highway in the West, a trail in Africa), Greene rescues Teferra from undeserved oblivion as well as rescuing her from undeserved obloquy (false accusations of child selling).

Qooqaa Addaa Afaan Oromoo =: Special Oromo Dictionary: Oromoo-Oromoo, Oromo-English, English-Oromo by Ibsaa Guutama (Paperback - Jan 2004)

Oromoo-Oromoo, Oromoo-English, English-Oromo, with purposeful front part and Appendix of rich information including grammar notes, plant names, time and measurement, parts of the body, Oromiyaa, Africa, UN, traditional Oromo personal.

This would be of strategic importance for those going over to the Oromo areas of Ethiopia and wanting to show a willingness to respect the Oromo culture. Their language is considered by them to be most important, and by using Amharic, the highest level of respect is not shown to them. As you know, even a very limited attempt by native English speakers to use a few of their words with them will demonstrate a positive impression.