Life is about to change for the better for mobility impaired Amaresh Tekle. “I put in an application for a plot in some land being allocated by the municipality to disabled veterans”, she explains.

“The Tigray Disabled Veterans’ Association helped me to do it. The application was successful, so now I am building a house. I borrowed 300 birr (around US$30) from some relatives to pay for it.” At present Amaresh lives in a rented house on the outskirts of Shire with her niece and her divorced sister, also a veteran. Married with no children, her husband is a soldier and his salary provides the main income for the family. Amaresh supplements this with the profit she makes from selling milk.


A picture of Amaresh with her cows

Amaresh looked after livestock from a very young age. “My parents died when I was nine”, she recalls, ‘So I had to go to live with neighbors. I looked after their cows and goats and did the milking. Then, when I was 17, I joined up as part of a group of 30 from my area. Eight of us were girls.” For the first year Amaresh was in charge of preparing food for the soldiers. “I was not allowed to fight because my sister and my two brothers were already fighters”, she explains. “Eventually I insisted that I become a soldier and after nine months’ training I began to see action.”

A year later Amaresh sustained a bullet wound to her left leg. Two years later she was hig again, this time in the abdomen. “That year the fighting was very heavy and difficult”, Amaresh recalls. “A lot of fighters were dying.” Amaresh returned to active service when her wounds had healed, and continued to fight until she was sent to school. “In the south of Ethiopia, where the coffee grows”. Here she did two grades each year. “The humidity of the area had a bad effect on my health”, Amaresh says.