My father Major Berhanu Derbew
My father was orphaned at birth — his mother, my grandmother, lost her life as a victim of early age marriage, a complication of childbirth she was too young to survive. He grew up without her, but he refused to let that loss define him. He educated himself and rose to become a high-ranking officer in the Ethiopian army — a self-made path built entirely on the belief that education could change what circumstance had denied him.
He instilled that same belief in me from an early age. He did not live to see how far it would take me — he lost his life fighting for his country before I even finished high school. But what he gave me stayed: the conviction that education is not a privilege, it is survival. Even through difficulty, I held onto that belief, and it carried me this far.
The YetmAyehu Foundation exists because of him — and because of my grandmother, whose life was lost to the very cycle we now fight to break.
