About Operation Ethiopia

It all started in 2014, when our four children (aged 11–16 at the time) asked us to take them on a family volunteer trip to Ethiopia, in lieu of our usual summer vacation. Little did we know what an impact that one trip would have on our lives — and on the lives of tens of thousands of Ethiopians since.

During our weeklong trip we came face to face with a level of abject poverty we’d never before witnessed.

The masses of malnourished children and throngs of people lacking medical care left an indelible impression and we couldn’t help but return the following year, loaded with eye medications and eyeglasses we’d purchased ourselves, as well as Morris’ new Ethiopian medical license.

For eight years following, and at our own expense we went back again and again, and expanded our work. We set up Mobile Eyecare clinics, got funding to run cataract campaigns, started training Ethiopian ophthalmologists in Israel, and empowered locals with first aid and CPR training and more.

Seeing how much we’d been able to accomplish on our own, we realized we should take it to the next level and create an official NGO with funding to expand our work. In May 2022, we officially incorporated, and Operation Ethiopia was born.