Honoring Bill & Betty Graff — ET Learns (Wolaita, Ethiopia)

In 1963, a young couple from the United States — Bill and Betty Graff — stepped off a plane in Addis Ababa as Peace Corps Volunteers, ready to serve in a country they had never seen before. The following year, they were sent to Wolaita Sodo, a rural town without running water or electricity, where they helped open the first high school in the area, starting with just 19 students (Peace Corps Worldwide, Peace Corps Worldwide – Betty Graff profile).

That early work planted seeds that would grow for decades. After returning to the U.S., the Graffs built careers and raised a family, but their connection to Wolaita never faded. In the late 1990s, they began gathering books for schools in Ethiopia — an effort that eventually saw around 300,000 books placed in high school libraries across the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples’ Region (SNNPR) (Peace Corps Worldwide).

These weren’t just book drops. Bill and Betty worked with each school to create book selection committees made up of students and parents, required principal approval, and established extended library hours six days a week. They even allowed overnight borrowing so students could keep learning after dark. The result was intense, joyful use — so much so that many books were worn out within just two years (Peace Corps Worldwide).

As the 2000s progressed, the Graffs began looking for ways to pair traditional learning with technology. Drawing on Bill’s technical skills, ET Learns piloted its first digital learning lab in Wolaita Sodo: a local server loaded with open-source educational content, including the Ethiopian curriculum and Khan Academy, paired with about 30 Chromebooks. Even with limited electricity, the system kept running during daytime outages. The pilot’s success led to three additional high school labs (Peace Corps Worldwide).

To scale and sustain this model, ET Learns adopted RACHEL — the Remote Area Community Hotspot for Education and Learning developed by World Possible — giving students offline access to thousands of educational resources. Over the next two years, they installed seven RACHEL-based learning labs in Wolaita (Peace Corps Worldwide). These labs quickly became hubs of learning; student proctors sometimes slept in the labs to keep studying late into the night, and usage remained high during the day as schools operated in split sessions.

By 2018, a Fulbright librarian’s field report documented around 11 ET Learns installations in Wolaita. At Bogale Walelu Secondary School, a sign acknowledged “Bill and Betty Graff, RPCVs” for donating nearly 500 books; the lab there recorded 2,000–2,700 database uses per week (Fulbright April 2018 report). Similar results were seen at Cacheno Secondary, with ~30 Chromebooks per lab, room monitors supported by ET Learns, and strong weekly usage numbers.

Their vision extended beyond Wolaita. Working with fellow Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Janet Lee, they established a RACHEL/Chromebook lab at the Axumite Heritage Foundation Library (Peace Corps Worldwide). They supported girls’ education, funded desks, latrines, and even installed a generator at one lab school. In partnership with World Possible and other RPCVs, ET Learns helped launch RACHEL learning labs in Tanzania, funding a BYU student to install one lab and sponsoring five more (Peace Corps Worldwide).

Bill also shared ET Learns’ work openly with the global education tech community, writing in World Possible’s RACHEL forum:

“ET Learns has been using RACHEL in Ethiopia for several years,”
offering advice and encouragement to others aiming to do similar work.

Today, ET Learns has touched tens of thousands of students in Ethiopia, giving them both the joy of a good book and the limitless reach of a connected world — even in places without internet or steady electricity. And as Bill and Betty step back, World Possible will continue their mission, carrying forward the same principles that guided their decades of service: practical solutions, community involvement, and unwavering belief in the power of learning to change lives.

From the chalkboard in that first Wolaita classroom to servers humming in modern labs, the Graffs built bridges that generations of students will cross. Their legacy is not just in books or computers, but in the spark of curiosity they nurtured — a spark that will burn as World Possbile carries on this legacy.