Shitta Damte Kassa, who was 47 when he died of liver cancer on Friday, was an Ethiopian UNICEF official credited with reuniting more than 600 Sudanese children with their parents after being separated by famine and civil war.
Like other Ethiopians, Shitta (pronounced “shee-tah”) identified himself by his first name, not his father’s name.
Shitta had firsthand know ledge of the damage wrought by the famines and civil strife that plagued Ethiopia and Sudan. He was still in his 20s when he decided to become a social worker.
For more than 25 years before moving to Colorado, Shitta worked throughout Africa as an official with the United Nations Children’s Fund. During the 1980s and 1990s, his work focused on children in refugee camps throughout Ethiopia and neighboring Sudan. A 1995 BBC documentary profiled Shitta and his accomplishments for the children he called “the helpless.”
In 1987 and 1988, during the worst of the long Sudanese civil wars, more than 20,000 south Sudanese children left their homes, heading alone for the relative safety of refugee camps across the Ethiopian border.
Many of those children drowned or died, caught in the crossfire between the Sudanese government army and the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army. Others were conscripted into the rebel army or kidnapped.
When the Mengistu regime fell, forcing Sudanese refugees to return to Sudan, more refugee children died or were maimed by the Sudanese government’s bombs.
The result was chaos. Children waited in refugee camps, hoping to be reunited with parents who might be dead or in other refugee camps.
Shitta made it his mission to reunite as many children and parents as he could.
Each time he set off to find a child’s family, Shitta embraced his wife and children as if for the final time. Bandits, armed skirmishes and rogue rebels threatened every sortie, and he realized that sometime he might not return home.
Despite the danger, Shitta personally was responsible for reuniting 600 boys with their families between 1992 and 1994.
Among those boys was John Kathra Nynow, who was 5 when he left his home village, Leer, to walk 800 miles to Ethiopia. His older brother drowned when they crossed the Nile River. Another boy broke his leg when the children fled a pride of lions. It took them 9 months to reach Ethiopia.
When they fled back to Sudan a year later, Sudanese government planes bombed the columns of refugees. Shrapnel left a scar on Nynow’s head.
When Shitta finally found Nynow’s family, he gave the boy, then 10, crayons and paper and asked him to draw a picture of his journey. The result was a torrent of tiny, precise drawings of planes dropping vast bombs that exploded on bleeding torsos and mutilated bodies.
“Shitta would only hint at the horrors he witnessed,” said Shitta’s hospice nurse, Pam Fassione. “With me, he focused on the positive things. He was so proud of the children he reunited with their parents.”
With continuing famine and violence in Sudan and Ethiopia, Shitta worried about his own four children. He applied for the immigration lottery, and was elated when his family was chosen five years ago.
Shitta, his wife and children arrived in the U.S. two months later. All their possessions were in the suitcases they carried. Shitta found work at an Aurora bank.
He was diagnosed with late-stage liver cancer in March 2004, three days after Shitta’s supervisor told him that his job was being cut.
That May, the Hospice of Metro Denver took Shitta under its wing. When the hospice staff inquired about his final wishes, he said he could not die until he had returned to Ethiopia to bid his mother farewell.
“That is what an Ethiopian does,” he explained to his nurses, who helped marshal donations to finance the trip.
Three months later, he returned from Africa, weak and sicker than before, but elated about his visit.
“I got to say goodbye to my family,” he told Fassione.
He had no job and no health insurance. Word spread about the Ethiopian who had helped so many, and the response was huge.
The Hospice of Metro Denver donated caregiver services. John Horan, of Horan and McConaty, donated two concrete-lined grave spaces, a casket, headstone and memorial services. Chapel Hill cemetery is donating its graveside service.
“For all this good man has done for so many others, it is an honor to help his family,” said Horan, who was at the hospice on the night Shitta died.
Survivors include his wife, Tsehaynesh Yilma; sons Henok Shitta and Sofonias Shitta and daughters Miraf Shitta and Hellen Shitta, all of Aurora; father Kassa Damte and mother Tsedale Metaferia of Arusi, Ethiopia; brother Tilhun Kassa of Arusi; and sisters Abeba Kassa of Arusi and Alemenesh Kassa of Nairobi, Kenya.
Services will be held at noon today at St. Mary’s Ethiopian Orthodox Pewahedo Church, 901 17th Ave.
The family suggests donations to the Children’s Benefit Fund, care of the Hospice of Metro Denver, 501 S. Cherry St., Suite 700, Denver, CO 80246.
Staff writer Claire Martin can be reached at 303-820-1477 or cmartin@denverpost.com.
