Computer for Addis

There was a time when Addis worked temporary jobs, aiming only to earn enough to get drunk each night. Ultimately, she realized that this was no life. She pulled herself together and found a steady job taking care of the elderly. More importantly, Addis joined a program designed to help women in poverty determine a direction and train them so that they can improve their lives. She comes regularly to the meetings, even when it is difficult to find a sitter for her one-year-old daughter, because she values the program’s support and the hope that it has given her for the future.

Addis, 31, has come to understand that what she wants to do is to help people. At the moment, she is considering whether to pursue work as a translator within her Ethiopian community or to work with the handicapped. In the meantime, it has become clear to Addis that she needs to improve both her computer skills and her Hebrew. Her program offers basic computer classes and, if she had a computer, she could do these, as well as her homework, from home.

Unfortunately, Addis’s earnings are too low to cover the purchase of the computer. Addis views computer skills as critical to her ability to build a stable life for herself and her daughter, but in order to move forward, she needs the computer itself.