It was still dark and cool when 13-year-old Letikiros walked out the door to get water. She never came home. At 4 p.m. a man found her lifeless body swinging from a tree, a rope tied around her neck.
Meda is a large village of dust and rocks that sits on an Ethiopian plateau and sprawls from north to south over several miles. A steep gorge 100 stories deep cuts the village in half, with treacherous dirt footpaths snaking up and down both sides of the mountains, connecting the two sides. Arliew Spring, one of the village’s sources for water, is at the bottom of the gorge. There’s no bank in Meda, no post office, and no general store. There are no power lines or cellular towers. There’s no place to buy a Coke, a bottle of water, or AA batteries. A dozen eggs costs only six cents and while they are small, they are most certainly organic. Letikiros Hailu was born in the south side of Meda and inherited an impossibly difficult life from her mother, Chekolech. The difficulties started when Chekolech moved reluctantly to the village 25 years earlier in an arranged marriage. It was her bad luck at the time that her new husband happened to live in Meda, for she’d heard of the severe water problems facing women there. Yet she had no choice but to follow her parents’ wishes, and she packed up her things obediently.
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