Dominic Chavez   is a Boston-based free-lance photographer who specializes in global health coverage. In the last 18 months, the Ministerial Leadership Initiative has supported Chavez and writer John Donnelly's travel to all five countries that work with MLI: Ethiopia, Mali, Nepal, Senegal, and Sierra Leone. In this fifth of five segments, one from each country, Donnelly interviewed Chavez about his work and about the images below. What follows are his perspectives on his assignment in Ethiopia, which focused on the Federal Ministry of Health and its efforts to bolster community-based health care.

As seen on April 15th, 2011 on Global Health Magazine's blog 

SHERA DIBANDIBAN, Ethiopia - Seventy-one kilometers southeast of Addis Ababa, the country capital, two of the country's 45,000 health extension workers said it wouldn't be hard to find a model family among this village's 639 families.

That's because all 639 were model families, they said.

It was kind of hard to believe. I had traveled out of Addis, on a trip sponsored by the Ministerial Leadership Initiative for Global Health, to learn more about the country's so-called model families, and was expecting to see an exemplary model family. I was curious as to what one a model.

Just a day before, Health Minister Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus had told me that the model families were the leading edge of his ministry's five-year efforts toward health reform.

In Shera Dibandiban's tiny three-room health post, Almaz Alemu, 22, and Lomita Bekene, 26, said that all the village's families had met three-quarters of the 16 requirements under the country's model family plan, and thus qualified for the designation "model family" as well as becoming eligible for such prizes as large blue water jugs. The requirements included HIV prevention, knowing first aid and emergency measures, immunizing all children, and seeing a health worker during pregnancies.