Food and essentials for families in Lalibela
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Food and essentials for families in Lalibela
I visited Lalibela in Ethiopia in 2025. I went to see its extraordinary rock-hewn churches, and ended up sharing food, praying, playing football, and spending time with the people who live there. I also bought notebooks, pens and dictionaries for local schoolchildren.
I stayed in touch with friends there. Most of the families we are trying to help depended on tourism for their income. In Lalibela, visitors support guides, hotel and restaurant workers, drivers, artisans and small shops. When visitors stop coming, the loss of income reaches whole households.
Tourism was hit twice. COVID-19 brought travel to a halt in 2020. Then the war in northern Ethiopia, followed by renewed conflict in Amhara from 2023, kept visitors away and made recovery much harder. Families who had earned their living welcoming people have faced years of uncertainty.
The pressure is still there today. On 24 September 2026, Reuters reported that flights to Lalibela were suspended because of fighting nearby. FEWS NET’s September update, based on information available through 30 September, describes conflict disrupting markets, transport and access to food and essentials in northern Ethiopia, including parts of Amhara.
Le Monde’s July 2026 reporting described a hotel worker in Lalibela with very little work who was struggling to buy food for his family, even while tourism was recovering elsewhere in Ethiopia.
Read the reporting:
This is why I want to help now. A food package cannot replace a lost livelihood, but it can help a household cover its immediate needs while income remains uncertain.
I want to raise a small fund to buy food and essentials locally for families in Lalibela, with people I know there helping to organise it.
Meet Sisay, our local coordinator
My friend Sisay lives in Lalibela and has experience in hospitality and guiding. He will be our main local contact for this campaign. He has offered to check market prices, coordinate purchases, welcome friends helping with collection and distribution, and keep records of what we buy and what each household receives.
I’m also asking another friend in Lalibela to review the proposed package and prices, so we can agree on what is useful and fairly priced before buying. I will organise the fundraising, transfer the available funds and publish updates.
What your donation will help buy
The package we are discussing includes grain or flour, lentils or split peas, cooking oil, salt, onions and soap. The final contents will depend on what families need and what is available locally.
Sisay is checking current market prices. The initial €500 target is provisional. I’ll share the confirmed budget and the number of households we can support once we have those details.
Local contacts will help identify households with the most urgent needs and coordinate collection with Sisay. We will consider household size when deciding quantities and arrange help for people who cannot collect their package.
How the money will reach families
I will receive the donations through GoFundMe and transfer the available funds to Sisay through Remitly for the agreed purchases. Funds will cover food, essentials, necessary local transport and packaging, and fundraising and transfer costs. I will report those costs separately so you can see how much reaches the distribution.
We will keep receipts wherever possible and a simple record of purchases and packages distributed. I’ll post updates showing what was bought, how many households received support and any money remaining. Receiving support will not depend on agreeing to appear in public photos.
Goals and a public support log
You can follow the campaign, meet Sisay and see the goals, budget status, transfers, purchases and distribution updates on our dedicated page:Lalibela campaign: goals and public support log
The first milestone is to confirm local prices and the package. Then we will fund and document the first distribution. Additional donations will support more households or another round of food packages, with each round recorded separately.
If we raise more than the first distribution needs, the remaining money will fund additional food packages or another distribution for the same purpose. Any change to that purpose will be explained before the money is spent.
This first campaign is for immediate food and essentials. Sisay has also proposed a longer-term farming project, but that would need its own budget and assessment.
A few moments from earlier visits
The photos here show earlier visits and Sisay’s collection. They introduce the people and place behind this campaign; they are not evidence of a distribution funded by this fundraiser. Future purchases and distributions will have their own dated updates.
If you would like to contribute, thank you. Sharing this campaign with a few friends would help too.
Antonin ❤️
Church image credit: Hervé Doulat, “Eglise Saint George de Lalibella”, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. Resized and cropped for display. Source: Wikimedia Commons source License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Organizer
