A Mighty Purpose (25 page)

Then, according to numerous UNICEF accounts and articles, Gubb asked Selamawit what she wanted to be when she grew up. The poised girl supposedly did not hesitate, replying in her native language, Amharic: “To be alive!”

Gubb does not recall whether she actually asked the famous question; it is possible, she says, that someone at UNICEF came up with that line for marketing purposes. Either way, she says, the photo of the striking little girl spoke for itself. “She was so vibrant, so full of life and delight, despite the gnawing poverty in which she and her mother and siblings lived,” says Gubb, “that she encapsulated the essence of UNICEF’s message.”

She sold the photo to UNICEF for thirty-five dollars. UNICEF officials immediately saw the fund-raising potential. Jim Grant had long been looking for a symbol for the child
survival revolution—now he had one. A range of collateral was produced with Selamawit’s face and words. On the poster, the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” floated over her image. Printed below in big capital letters was the reply: “ALIVE!”

Selamawit did not know about any of this. The British Save the Children staffer gave her family money, and UNICEF provided clothing for her and her brothers. Despite these gestures, her hardships only grew worse.

The family had lived for fourteen years in the dark little garage attached to the bigger house. The occupant of the bigger house was a Greek man, who had taken pity on the family and had allowed them to stay there. When he died in 1988, Selamawit and her family faced eviction.

Around this time, a confluence of fortuitous events took place. UN photographer John Isaac, a gregarious Indian man who had earned a slew of prestigious awards for his arresting images, decided he would try to find out whatever happened to the UNICEF poster child. He went to Addis Ababa. On a Sunday in March 1988 he visited the family in their home. “She was in a little hut [and had] no money, nothing,” Isaac recalls.

Even so, the grandmother performed the traditional Ethiopian coffee ceremony for Isaac, an elaborate affair for an honored guest that usually involves roasting coffee beans, pounding them with a mortar and pestle, and then brewing them. Isaac then learned that Selamawit’s leg had been badly injured in some sort of traffic accident (it’s not clear exactly what happened, but she may have been struck by a car while
walking in the street). She was somehow able to get medical treatment and told Isaac that doctors, at first, feared they would have to amputate her leg. Fortunately, a woman doctor was able to save it. Ever since that day, Selamawit had decided she wanted to be something else when she grew up besides alive—she wanted to be a doctor.

The family also told Isaac that Selamawit’s school fees had become too expensive, and that she might not be able to continue her studies. He gave them some of his own money. He even visited her teachers and told them the fees would be paid.

When he returned to New York, Isaac went to see Jim Grant. “Jim would like me to tell him stories,” Isaac says now. He told him how UNICEF’s poster child was faring, about the terrible poverty that had ensnared her family. He showed Grant pictures he had taken of Selamawit.

Isaac had decided to share this information with Grant specifically—because he knew Grant would take him seriously. Grant did.

The UNICEF leader had also heard about Selamawit’s life from the photographer who had first taken her photograph, Louise Gubb. At some point, probably before Isaac came to see him, Gubb was in Grant’s office to take his picture. She had been recommended by her friend Maggie Black, the author and UNICEF historian. Noticing the “Alive!” poster hanging on Grant’s wall, she began to tell him Selamawit’s story. “In order to relax him for the photo shoot, I chatted about Selamawit and the background to that photograph,” she recalls. “He showed great interest.”

Whether it was Isaac who spurred him, or Gubb—or both—Grant wanted to meet Selamawit. He wanted to see if he could help her. He would remark to several staff members that she had, after all, “done more for us than we could ever do for her.”

During a trip to Ethiopia in May 1988 for an important summit, Grant asked UNICEF communications program officer Yohannes Tsadik to find Selamawit. Bring the girl and her mother to his room at the Hilton in Addis Ababa, he said, at the end of the day. Tsadik obliged.

Selamawit was now around nine. It had been at least five years since that chance encounter when Gubb took her picture. She and her mother arrived at Grant’s hotel room after eight p.m. He welcomed them inside, shaking Selamawit’s hand and then her mother’s. “How are you?” he said. They both stood, seemingly unsure of whether they should sit.

“Please sit down,” Grant said, and the mother and daughter sat next to each other on a couch. Grant and Tsadik sat across from them in chairs. The mother was reserved and did not say much. Grant told Selamawit that he was going to order her some ice cream and then asked her mother if she wanted anything; she said she would like some mineral water. When room service arrived, Grant picked up the ice cream cone and handed it to Selamawit. She took it, her eyes wide. She had likely never tasted ice cream before. “She liked it,” recalls Tsadik. “She was so happy about it.”

Grant told them he would consult with the UNICEF Ethiopia office and do what he could to help their family. His tone was
friendly but cautious, recalls Tsadik, perhaps because he was unsure of exactly what he could promise.

The shy girl was awed by Grant. Either on this occasion or a later one, Grant told Selamawit that she would grow up to become a “great lady” and be very successful. It was crucial, he added, that she stay in school.

Though surely Grant did not intend this, she began to view him as a father figure, says Tsadik. “He treated her so nicely,” he says. “Such a big man, a well-known man, famous man, bringing himself down to the level of this little girl, buying her food, giving her money, buying her ice cream—so that’s how she considered him a father.”

The meeting at the Hilton was a welcome bright spot for Grant, who was still recovering from the shock of Ethel’s death. Worse was her obtrusive absence—she might have been with him on a trip like this. She would have loved meeting Selamawit. He must have wondered what she would have thought of her.

Once back in New York, Grant proposed something totally out of the bounds of normal practice: UNICEF would provide Selamawit’s family with long-term, regular cash assistance for school, food, and rent for a better house. The problem was that UNICEF did not sponsor individual children or families. The aid it provided was mostly channeled through governments, NGOs, and local organizations. But this, Grant insisted, was a special case.

Still, he had to figure out a way to justify the highly unusual arrangement. A trust fund was briefly considered but ultimately ruled impractical. The argument that Grant and his adviser
Michael Shower eventually concocted was put to staff in a memo from Shower: Selamawit’s photograph, which was widely used for fund-raising purposes, could “qualify in the category of ‘personal services’ and should be compensated accordingly.”

The initial agreement with Selamawit’s mother, drawn up at UNICEF headquarters in September 1988, stipulated that UNICEF would support Selamawit and her family for three years. Grant felt this was too short a period of time. On a draft of the document he wrote: “What happens after 3 years? Selamawit will be 13 and finished only 6 years of schooling—her brothers who are older will have had more. I propose that, after the first three years, we continue to pay Selamawit’s schooling, as long as she stays in school, through high school, and as long as she stays in school, we contribute to house rent and to subsistence.”

Grant prevailed, and UNICEF agreed to subsidize the family until Selamawit’s graduation from high school in 1999. This included about $1,300 per year, enough to cover school fees for Selamawit and her brothers, rent, food, and money for furniture.

UNICEF also moved Selamawit and her family from the decrepit, one-room garage that had been the only home she had ever known to the main house that had always loomed over them—just feet away but nonetheless in another world. With the UNICEF stipend, they could now afford to rent it. UNICEF renovated and furnished the six-room house. The family had suddenly vaulted into an entirely new and better life. Everyone had a proper bed. They had electricity and
plumbing, a bathroom and a kitchen. They even had a dining room table. Selamawit’s grandmother, who had become ill and so depressed she started refusing to eat, was now “in good health and happy to be alive,” according to a memo sent to Grant by UNICEF staffer Stanislaus Adotevi, who visited the family in their new home.

Local UNICEF staff arranged for Selamawit to be admitted to Nazareth School, a competitive private Catholic girls’ school in Addis Ababa. She started in the third grade and did well during her first year. “She understands this is a chance of a lifetime and is determined to succeed in her studies,” Adotevi wrote.

Grant would check in on her, every now and then, to make sure she was still in school and doing well. And for the next seven years, as long as he remained executive director of UNICEF, she was both. But several years after his death, her good fortune began to come apart. She was unable to finish school. UNICEF continued providing some support for her family’s basic living expenses but could not go on doing so forever. In 2008, when she was around twenty-nine and had children of her own, UNICEF paid her a final “goodwill gift” of $3,500. At this point, Jim Grant had been dead for thirteen years. (Efforts to contact Selamawit were unsuccessful.)

At the twenty-fifth anniversary summit of the Organization of African Unity in Addis Ababa on May 26, 1988, Grant brought
a special guest. Into the cavernous meeting hall, past a forest of tall flags, he walked with his hand on the shoulder of a small Ethiopian girl. Wearing a white robe, a neatly trimmed Afro, and a white necklace, she looked elegant, mature, and nervous. Grant led Selamawit Gebreyes up to the stage. He guided her to a spot to the right of the podium and then turned to her and smiled reassuringly.

She kept her hands crossed in front of her and looked down. Every now and then, her eyes took a quick scan of the big clamorous room, which contained thirty heads of state from throughout Africa as well as the secretary general of the United Nations. It is hard to conceive of a more intimidating atmosphere for a nine-year-old child who has never been in such a setting before.

Grant leaned toward a tangle of microphones.

“Mr. Chairman, your excellencies, Mr. Secretary General, distinguished participants, honored guests,” he began, glancing over at Selamawit, as camera flashes started popping. “It is a great honor … to address this session … in the year of the … African child.”

He then held up his hand briefly and made a somewhat awkward, pause-laden introduction to the girl who stood next to him. “Mr. Chairman … if I may first … take this opportunity to introduce … the African … child … Selamaweet …”

Reaching up, he gently clutched her arm and pulled her closer to him and continued: “… who has done the most of any child … to help promote … the child survival … and … development revolution.”

He spoke of his desire to find a “symbol” for this revolution and said he knew he had discovered it when he saw Selamawit’s photo. As he spoke, his hands, every now and again, spasmed in small frenetic loops, as though operating separately from his body—the hands of an overexcited child.

He relayed the story of how Selamawit’s picture was taken and then held up a copy of the poster that had made her a celebrity. “It has been seen by hundreds of millions of people, been on the cover of magazines,” Grant said. “It says on the top, ‘What would you like to be when you grow up?’ ‘Alive’ …”

He folded the poster.

“Now, five years later, it is my privilege to actually meet her in person … here in Addis Ababa.”

He told the audience that she was ranked second in a third grade class of one hundred and added that she was “of course, fully immunized.”

“Mr. Chairman, with your permission …”—here Grant held up his finger, like a lawyer asking to approach the bench—“may she say just a few words … to this distinguished summit?”

He adjusted the microphones and then stepped back. A man walked up and placed a stool behind the podium. Grinning widely, Grant took Selamawit’s hand and helped her to climb up and stand on the stool, so she could reach the microphones.

Standing at Grant’s height, she looked out at the crowd for a few seconds, her eyes big and discerning. Then suddenly, she began speaking breathlessly in Amharic, pushing the words out as quickly as she could, pausing two or three times to inhale. Her voice was high and faint.

When she finished, applause rippled across the hall.

“I am told,” Grant said, “that what she has said to us in Amharic is, ‘My name is Selamawit … A few years ago … someone asked me,
What do you want to be?
… I answered,
I want to be alive
. Now I am alive … I want the same for all children in Africa … so please help them. Thank you.’ ”

He looked at her and nodded his head very quickly, a crisp military gesture—a signal of approval, as if to say,
Ya done good, kid
. Then he lifted her off the stool and gingerly set her down.

In the middle of 1988, many people at UNICEF started to realize they might actually succeed—they just might make history. The global target for universal childhood immunization (UCI) had emerged from a fog of skepticism and, while not yet in reach, now hovered plainly in sight. They had come so far, so fast. Countries large and small—from China to Saint Lucia—had responded heartily to Grant’s call to immunize their children. Coverage rates had already doubled and tripled in some places—despite a suffocating recession, despite wars, despite nonexistent roads or roads that were mined, despite the near absence of health infrastructure, despite resistance from local doctors and medical personnel. An estimated 1.9 million children’s lives were being saved each year as a result. When the goal was set a few years earlier, even the most bullish believers had their doubts. Some had felt that even if they made it halfway, that would still be an extraordinary accomplishment. Many lives would still be protected. Many families would still
be spared the ultimate grief. In other words, maybe reaching the goal was not the main point—if that goal had nonetheless produced a significant payoff.