The story of how KMG began starts with the story of a young girl who was born in Kembatta, left it to become educated, and returned to help her people.
Bogaletch Gebre was born in the early 1950s in a southern district of Ethiopia called Kembatta that is today one of the most densely populated rural areas of Eastern Africa. Her name means “Brilliant Light” in Kembattegna, an oral language that has no written roots.

Life for girls in Kembatta was – and still is – composed largely of hauling water and carrying out tedious household chores. She grew up in the village of Zato in the township of Durame in a round, thatched house that was divided in two. Women and children lived in back with the milking cows.

The front was for the men, their guests, and the animals they valued most: horses, mules and oxen. Village elders – men, never women – sat under a large tree to debate issues and resolve conflicts. Men were human beings whose sons were allowed to sit with them to learn wisdom. Women were laborers, chattel.

While staying overnight with a cousin when she was small, she saw the Amharic alphabet and memorized its 268 characters, afraid that when she returned home, she would not be permitted to see them again. Determined to learn to read, she ran six miles each way to a missionary school and became the first girl from her village to be educated beyond the fourth grade. Her mother was occasionally beaten for allowing her to attend school.
		Boge at Hebrew University, Jerusalem.

Like millions of African and Asian girls, she underwent an ancient rite-of-passage called female genital excision (FGE) in which external genitalia are cut away with blades or sharpened obsidian (without benefit of anaesthesia) in the belief it is necessary to prepare them for marriage. Boge nearly bled to death during her “surgery.” She lost two sisters in childbirth due to complications from scarring.

Escaping four attempted forced marriages by abduction, Boge (pronounced BO-gay) received scholarships to attend high school in Addis Ababa and Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where she studied microbiology and physiology. With money scrimped from scholarship stipends, she built a tin-roofed house for her father’s family, the first in the village. In a society where fathers are known by the accomplishments of their sons, people of Kembatta began to understand the value of educating girls when they saw the “house that Gebre’s daughter” built.

Boge became the first Ethiopian woman to join the science faculty at the University of Addis Ababa and received a Fulbright Scholarship to study parasitology at the University of Massachusetts. In 1985, as famine and war ravaged Ethiopia, she left epidemiological studies at UCLA to found Parents International Ethiopia (PIE), a U.S. 501(c)(3), which sent over 250,000 books to Ethiopia.

It was during this time that, through an American friend, she came to understand what she now calls the “physically and psychologically numbing” effects of FGE. “I realized that what they really wanted to excise was my brain,” she says. “It didn’t work. Recognizing that FGE was a symptom of a far deeper problem, Boge began running marathons in Los Angeles to help raise money to return to Ethiopia to start an NGO to help empower women to attain equal status with men. She returned to Ethiopia in 1997 and, with the support of her PIE board and private donors, established the Kembatta Women’s Self-Help Center, Kembatti Mentti Gezzima-Tope on land provided by the Municipality of Durame.

Boge addresses a large World AIDS Day rally crowd in Durame. This rally, the first of what will be an annual event, created public, community-wide dialogue about the once-taboo subject of HIV/AIDS.

KMG is building the first center for women in a region of nearly one million culturally diverse people, as well as helping develop an unprecedented Kembatta Mother and Child Health Center that will deliver medical services to women and children. In 2002, she built on KMG grounds a large thatched traditional roundhouse like the houses that are now being replaced with tin roofed buildings. The house is the site of community gatherings where topics include preserving Kembatta's language, culture and environment.

More than 3,500 participants applauded Boge’s plenary speech at the Bioneers Conference (www.bioneers.org) in San Rafael California, October, 2002. She spoke passionately and movingly of the forces for positive change that have been unleashed in Kembatta since the opening of the center, and the success of its inclusive, community-based educational program for women and men.

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