Overview

""From Maple Mud to Ethiopian Miracles"" is Bill Graff's memoir of a life shaped by service. It opens with a crumpled telegram - that pulled him from a graduate teaching post at Stevens Institute into the Peace Corps in 1963. Sent to Ethiopia, he taught in Addis Ababa, married Betty, and lobbied to be reassigned to Sodo, a remote Wolaita town with no electricity or running water. There they built a home, taught, witnessed the Miracle of Ajura, met Emperor Haile Selassie, and lived through Kennedy's death from afar. Decades later, after a career in technology and publishing, Bill returned to Ethiopia again and again - first stocking school libraries, then funding ""Christmas desks,"" and finally installing RACHEL servers and Chromebooks in Wolaita schools. Locally run, it became his late-life mission. He handed the work to World Possible before passing on September 14, 2025, the day after his 87th birthday.

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James ""Bill"" Graff (September 13, 1938 - September 14, 2025) was a Washington, D.C.-area entrepreneur, engineer, and lifelong believer in public service. He earned a B.S. in Engineering Physics from Drexel University, pursued graduate study in physics at the University of Alaska, and completed an M.S. in Mathematics at Stevens Institute of Technology. From 1963 to 1965 he served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ethiopia - an experience that shaped the rest of his life and to which he would return, in different forms, again and again. After the Peace Corps, he worked as an operations analyst and project manager at the Center for Naval Analyses in Arlington, Virginia, and then spent more than seven years at Honeywell Information Systems, rising from sales into product management with a specialty in data communications. In 1978 he founded the Washington Business Review, the first local business newspaper in Washington, D.C., which he led as president and publisher for nine years. In 1987 he established Graff Associates, his independent consulting practice, and he continued working on projects in Ethiopia up until the very end of his life. He also published a book reflecting on his Peace Corps years and a lifetime devoted to the value of service. Bill passed away on September 14, 2025, the day after his 87th birthday.

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