Ethiopian on mercy mission to ease hunger back home

Quality and abundance are relative terms to those who know something about daily life in Ethiopia, where the continuing drought has a choke hold on millions who are starving.

So it is American grocery store aisles that haunt Marta Gabre-Tsadick.

The Ethiopian native, who lived for 28 years in Indiana during the communist takeover of her nation, has come once again to the United States — including the LDS Church's Welfare Square in Salt Lake City on Friday — to sound the alarm. The founder and executive director of Project Mercy lives daily with the reality of starvation and want among her native people.

On her visits to gather U.S. aid, it's difficult for her to walk inside even the humblest of American grocery stores. The quality and abundance are overwhelming compared to the desperate lack of food where she comes from.

Even more chilling are customers' complaints about the produce, because its availability doesn't depend on local rainfall or weather. A tall, gracious woman with kindness in her eyes and a grasp of your hand, she's had many long conversations with disgruntled customers in such settings.

"I think I've done most of my 'preaching' there. I'll stop and talk with them for a half hour sometimes. There's snow outside and strawberries on the shelves, and you hear people say, 'This looks terrible.' I really tell them, 'You just don't know. The choices you have are unbelievable.' Yet because they haven't seen anything worse, they complain."

The daughter of Christian missionaries, Gabre-Tsadick knows both the abundance of life in the United States and the nothingness that is part of daily existence for millions of Africans. As the first woman senator in Ethiopia during the reign of Emperor Haile Selassie, she had to flee her native land in 1974 when the communist regime came to power.

She and her husband, Demeke Tekle-Wold, became refugees in Kenya, where they found the financial seeds of what has become their life's work through a friendship with a man who inherited Britain's Pilkington Glass. That friendship is one of many key relationships the couple has been "blessed with" during the past 30 years that helped grow the desire to help others into an organization now recognized internationally for its efficiency and scope.

She and her husband have never had great wealth financially, but they've always been rich in friends, she said. It was through one such friend named Grace Nelson, the wife of Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida, that they came into contact with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.