International Womens Day Blog Series (4 of 4)
In the build-up to International Women’s Day on the 8th of March, I’ll be writing a short blog series regarding some of the famous and not-so-famous women of the world; women who have triumphed in the face of adversity and overcome challenges both worldly and personal. In our final instalment of the series, we look back on the life (so far) of the director of Vandu, Mebrak Ghebreweldi.
Mebrak was born on the 23rd of January, 1965 in Haiyellow, Eritrea, a small village just over 20km from the capital city Asmara. One of nine children, she grew up on her parents’ farm living in a small building with little more than a stone fence between her family and the animals they looked after. She would have to walk miles to get to school in the neighbouring village, making her way through a landscape that would flip-flop between semi-aridness and verdant greenery, with tall hills and mountains surrounding her. Once she turned 11, she moved to the capital for further education and upon finishing her Eritrean equivalent of GCSE’s, Mebrak joined the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front, a group of fighters working against the Ethiopian regime, initially as a barefoot doctor giving first aid to men behind the frontline and later as a communications officer, both in the headquarters and in the field. Mebrak would be part of this army for a decade, and the experience would shape her approach to life instilling a sense of discipline and determination to an intelligent young woman. In 1991 when Eritrea finally won independence Mebrak quickly returned to education, going to university as an international student in Sweden and then England in 1992, where she met her soon to be husband and had two children, Aaron and Joshua.
Unfortunately, Mebrak and her husband divorced a few years later which left Mebrak with very little money and two more mouths to feed, so she borrowed from a friend and set up Vandu Language Services, then known as South East Interpreting. She supplemented her income by taking on foster care, and within a year and a half she had paid her friend back and was making a profit from Vandu. Building a successful business is hard enough as it is, but to make it in a different country, with a different language and culture whilst also caring for two sons is quite an achievement. The company has been going for just under 20 years, and along the way she has developed many young adults via the apprenticeship scheme, earned a Master’s in business, become a qualified life coach and founded a new social enterprise in Diversity Resource International, which provides leadership and business management programmes in Africa and the UK. As Mebrak has grown older her mind has turned back to Eritrea and Africa and while DRI is a response to that, she also does a lot of work for ERA-UK, a charity that looks specifically at Eritrea and its youth; every year she has either hosted a large charity dinner or ran the London 10k in name of ERA-UK.
Like the other women in this blog series, Mebrak Ghebreweldi has had to overcome many obstacles to enjoy success; the scale might be a smaller, but Mebrak and the other ladies in the series are testament to the strength of women throughout the ages, and are a wonderful reminder of the capabilities of the female gender.
