Berihu Mesele on Vimeo.
Berihu Mesele comes from Mekele in Northern Ethiopia.
During the border conflict with Eritrea in June 1998, a school close to his house in Mekele was bombed. It was around 3 o’clock in the afternoon. Berihu ran to the school to see what had happened to the children. When he arrived, he saw people lifting children into cars to take them to the hospital.
As they were helping the injured people, the school was bombed for a second time. Berihu says he did not hear anything: “There was no sound, nothing. I was hit during that second bombing. I lost consciousness and I did not even know I was being brought to the hospital. When I woke up two days after the accident, they told me they had immediately amputated both of my legs.”
At first Berihu thought he had become a useless person, but he did not give up. He now works for the government in the financial and development sector. He married in 2002, and has two daughters, Selam and Fana.
Berihu has joined the Ban Advocates, a group of cluster munition survivors who campaign for a global ban on these weapons.
> Read more about Ban Advocates
