Help Rebuild Fendika Cultural Center

Team fundraiser

Thomas Eusterbrock and 2 others are organizing this fundraiser.

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Support Us to Rebuild Fendika!

Dear friends of Fendika, we are Hui Wilcox and Thomas Eusterbrock, longtime supporters of the Fendika Cultural Center in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, and friends of Fendika's founder and owner, Melaku Belay Emiru. We want to share this letter from Melaku, and ask you to support his vision.

Dear friends - by now, many of you know that the beloved building of Fendika Cultural Center was demolished on October 23, 2024, about a month after the systematic clearing of Kazanchis, one of the oldest parts of Addis Ababa, began as part of an urban development plan. The government is set to build only high rise buildings in the area. [Please read on after the photos.]

… Fendika before

… and after October 23…

An essential cultural institution and a beloved community space, Fendika is also my life’s work. A homeless youth in 1997, I started dancing in the small Fendika Azmari Bet, making tips only. The owner then allowed me to sleep under Fendika’s bar, taking me off the street. When I started managing Fendika in 2008, I broke away from the tips-only custom and started paying Azmari musicians regular salaries. In 2016, I founded Fendika Cultural Center to include an art gallery and Jazz concerts. In 2020, a community library was added and, through livestreaming concerts, Fendika lit up the dark, lonely COVID-19 lockdown for many people around the globe. With just 43 employees, we proudly presented 600 events annually. While Fendika grew into an internationally known and praised hub for culture and creativity, we honed our vision of building peace through valuing arts. We will never give up on that vision, even now, without an artistic home yet again.

Recognizing Fendika’s cultural, social and economic significance, the government promised that we can stay in our original location in Kazanchis – provided we can obtain a permit to erect a 20 story building, with a start-up capital of $1,250 000. Building a 20-story building is an immense financial and organizational task and certainly not our first choice; but it is the government’s mandate if we are to keep Fendika’s location. This mandate does inspire bigger dreams for Ethiopian cultural development. Our vision is to build a multi-level cultural center to house performance spaces (a traditional Azmari bet and a hall for concert performances), rehearsal studios, a recording studio, an art gallery, a library, meeting spaces, and guest rooms for artists-in-residency. It can be a vibrant center for Ethiopian culture and arts, and for intercultural exchanges.

While we are exploring our options to secure the required funds for such a project, in the meantime we have lost our space to present music and arts, and therefore the source of income and livelihood of all Fendika coworkers. We are homeless, and not because of our fault.

During the previous Covid related financial crisis, we had the amazing support of donors worldwide, which enabled us to keep Fendika vibrant through the Pandemic, and to let us grow to an even higher level afterwards. We are now trying to establish an alternate interim space for Fendika performances. In the meantime we will need to pay for rental space for sound equipment, furniture and art work, as well as for living spaces for our coworkers who used the Fendika Center as their home.

All of this requires funds which we presently cannot earn. We ask all of you who appreciate our work and our vision, to support us by donating to this fundraising effort. We also ask you to share this with friends who might be equally supportive of the arts and artists.

I cannot thank you enough, without the support of its community Fendika could not exist. I promise to do all I can to keep the Fendika dream alive.

Yours, Melaku