By Sarah Freeman | Yorkshire Post
The life story of Bekele Geleta could easily be turned into a bestselling novel. Born in Ethiopia to a poor family, he worked his way out of poverty to secure a job in charge of a railway company. Determined to fight for workers rights,his inability to turn a blind eye to injustice saw him imprisoned for five years. When released, he left Ethiopia – arriving in Canada with his wife and four children as refugees. Two decades later, he found himself named as general secretary of the Red Cross.
“Yes I suppose my life has been quite eventful,” he says, shortly after collecting an honorary degree from Leeds University, where he studied for a Masters in economics 35 years before. “I have known vulnerability first hand and I have always felt very strongly that as human beings we need to help those less fortunate.”
While Bekele may be quietly spoken, his modesty belies his lifelong determination to make the world a better place. The five years he spent as a political prisoner from 1978 to 1982 taught him that good can come out of even the most dire situations and when he was finally released he never looked back.
“If you ask me why I was imprisoned, the honest answer is I don’t know. I was just doing my job, but the authorities didn’t like it,” he says. “Prison was a big shock, but you have to make the best of it. There were a lot of intelligent people in there and we started our own school. It was a way of keeping ourselves busy, but it was also about
giving those who hadn’t had access to education a better chance on the outside.
“Teaching others was our own way of coping.”
After being released, Bekele decided to make a new life for himself in Canada. After being granted leave to stay, he quickly became involved in humanitarian work, eventually securing a position with the Red Cross. Having now found himself at the top of the organisation after seeing first-hand the impact of natural and man-made disasters, he knows his aims have to be realistic.
“The world is not getting any better, but you know what, it’s not getting worse either,” he says. “There will always be disasters and hopefully organisations like the Red Cross will always be there to help. We are lucky in that we have a special relationship not just with the communities in which we work, but with world governments. No other civil society has a presence in every country. The Red Cross is known everywhere by everybody, it’s an organisation people feel they can rely on and that’s as it should be.”
In his previous position, Bekele oversaw the rebuilding of thousands of homes wiped out by the devastating Boxing Day tsunami. The project in Indonesia was, he says, one of his proudest achievements, but with no one knowing what fresh disaster will be wrought as climate change takes its grip on the world, Red Cross resources could soon be even more stretched. In 2007, 200 million people were affected by natural disaster, an increase of 40 per cent on the previous year and the effect of flooding in countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh has already shown the chaos and human misery caused by severe weather systems.
“Globally, we all need to think about the increasing number of natural disasters,” says Bekele. “We are all contributing to climate change and we all need to take responsibility.
“When disasters happen the first hours are crucial, that’s when most lives can be saved. In the Red Cross we are lucky in that we have a huge amount of volunteers all across the world and over the years we have worked hard to build up resources in the most vulnerable places.
“Disasters never stop, conflicts will not end and people’s differences will always divide us, but despite all of that there is an overwhelming impulse of human beings to help others in need.
“At the Red Cross we may not always make the right decisions, but every life saved and every livelihood improved is an achievement and together we can all make a big difference.”
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