Winthrop Junior Aids Ethiopians

Winthrop House junior Henry D. Elek spent the summer helping famine-stricken Ethiopians survive. Now, Elek is on leave from school and trying to raise enough money to go back and continue his work there.

Elek needs another $1000 and has already raised at least that amount. A native Pennsylvanian known to his friends as Hentzi, Elek went in a group of seven New England college and graduate students calling themselves the "American Scholars Against World Hunger."

"He's an incredible idealist," said Lowell House resident Sheila J. Hogan '87 of Elek. "In talking to him you get this energy--you get this feeling he has this real calling to help mankind."

Elek said he was one of 40 foreigners in Wad Sherife, a refugee camp of 100,000 on the eastern border of Sudan and Ethiopia. Oxfam, CARE, the American Refugee Committee, and the Swiss Red Cross jointly administer the camp under the authority of the Sudanese government.

Elek and the others provided aid to the five doctors and 15 nurses who administered medicine, clothing, and 500 grams of food per day to each person. Both uneducated farmers and fairly educated city workers fleeing famine and guerilla warfare were in the camp. "We were all doctors. All the white men are doctors to these people," Elek said.

"You go there thinking its black and white. You can build roads and life would be solved. But it's very gray. There are so many different variables. African governments are uncooperative or unstable. Some resent foreigners. All of these things make developing a comprehensive policy difficult," he said.

Elek also worked as a chief organizer for the Ride for Life, a Harvard-Radcliffe based group that bicycles across the United States each summer, donating the proceeds to hunger organizations.