The couple from Peckelsheim would like to draw attention to the particularly difficult situation of the Ethiopians during the corona pandemic: “A ban on going out does not mean sitting at home with one or two children with good food. Staying in the small huts with several generations and many children often means crowded confinement, gathered around a smoky fireplace, without a place to sleep, ”explains Klaus Krekeler. The government ordered the use of masks and disinfection, “but people don’t have the opportunity to adhere to them. Once you’ve got hold of a mask, it is worn until it falls apart. ”

Rosi Krekeler knows: “It is normal to die of Corona in Ethiopia. However, it is not made public because hardly anyone is interested and there are few options for testing. ”Such a test is often not affordable for people and certainly not visits to the doctor or hospital – let alone medication. Often nobody knows whether the patient has died of corona or one of the numerous diseases. “Alone, sick, hungry and above all with no hope of recovery,” says Rosi Krekeler, “the children, women, and old people are sitting in their huts.”

Promote people in their own country
The couple from Peckelsheim see the only way to help the people in promoting them in their own countries: “Because all the young people, especially men, who come to us as refugees from Ethiopia, Eritrea or many other countries, have to actually be with their families on-site to help them maintain the infrastructure, till the fields, look after the elderly and much more.

So the Krekelers have again made it their main task, in addition to the sponsorships, the priests, and orders in Ethiopia, to provide the remaining families abandoned by the boys and men with food and medical care.

Klaus Krekeler reports: “The priests, often also heads of church schools and kindergartens, open the rooms again and again in order to supply the people there with grain and oil and to enable the children to take care of them and at least some schooling in between. The sisters of the orders also offer their services in their centers or clinics. ”But often there are simply too many people seeking help.

Construction of kindergartens or huts postponed
“Then you have to take out the worst affected and take care of them,” says Rosi Krekeler. A bitter experience that the couple has often witnessed or had to participate in. The construction of kindergartens or huts is currently largely postponed; it is only being completed. Everything else has to wait “until the worst emergency has been resolved,” explains Klaus Krekeler.

Despite all the misery, the conflicts in Ethiopia do not end either. The couple reports that marauding young men travel around the country: “They use existing ethnic conflicts to fight each other, often simply out of boredom, or to destroy shops and cars.” This also leads the government to its limits and destabilizes and worsens it the situation there additionally.