By Elaine JarvikDeseret Morning News
Norm Perdue used to have a home office he called his "Ethiopia Room." Those were the days when he was able to contain this project to one desk and a few walls.
These days, his Children of Ethiopia Education Fund has taken over his house and his life. COEFF, which he began in 2001 as a small nonprofit, now helps 800 girls attend school in a country where most girls either don't get any education or are encouraged to drop out early. But the number of children who could be helped seems endless, which is why photos of shy faces stare up from a pile of 150 applications in his Murray home. These are girls whom Perdue helped interview on a recent trip to Ethiopia; the next step is to match them up with sponsors.
Perdue used to be an official photographer for the Utah Jazz, so he knows how to take a good picture. But he also knows, in the world of nonprofits, that he's competing with hundreds of other worthy projects, each with brochures and Web sites full of endearing smiles and touching stories.
So two years ago he helped audition the best dancers from the program's 22 schools and launched the Mesgana Dancers. The troupe, he reasoned, could reach American audiences in a different way — less a plea and more a confirmation that his program is turning out girls destined for a future that doesn't include prostitution or an early marriage. Although many of the students come from impoverished backgrounds, Perdue focuses on possibilities rather than pathos. "Mesgana" is Amharic for "gratitude."
This week, Perdue and 10 members of the dance troupe, ages 7 to 12, will arrive in New York City to begin their second annual dance tour. This year's is twice as big, with performances in 16 cities, including Chicago; Atlanta; Washington, D.C.; New York City; Salt Lake City; and Los Angeles. The tour is also sponsored by
Ethiopia Reads, a nonprofit that describes its mission as "building a reading culture in Ethiopia by connecting children with books."
As they tour the country, Perdue hopes the Mesgana Dancers will also unite Ethiopia's sometimes factional immigrant communities. He is proud of a comment, made during last year's tour, by the leader of an Ethiopian center in California: "I've never seen anything bring our community together like this."
Perdue — known as "Mr. Norm" among the students and parents in Ethiopia — fell into all this one day in the summer of 2001 on a humanitarian trip with his wife, Ruthann, who is a nurse. It was then that he met a chatty 12-year-old girl named Kidest, an orphan who lived with her grandmother.
At the time, Kidest (whose name in Oromo means "the blessed child regardless of her bad circumstances") was attending a Seventh-day Adventist school. Kidest's grandmother was working several jobs to pay her tuition, but her health was failing and it looked like Kidest might have to drop out of school. Government-run schools in Ethiopia are free but are overcrowded and poorly run, Perdue says. The private schools, while modest, provide better teachers as well as sports and health programs.
When Perdue found out that tuition was less than $200 per year, he immediately cashed some travelers checks and offered to pay for Kidest's schooling. When he got back to Utah, he told friends and co-workers what had happened and they offered to sponsor other girls. Six years later there are now more than 600 sponsors in 40 states on several continents. Greg Farley of St. George became a sponsor and then joined COEFF's board of directors. In the spring of 2006 he visited Ethiopia to see the project firsthand.
"We think we can prepare ourselves for a third-world country, but the poverty is so overwhelming," says Farley. The Perdues, he says, "want to get more and more girls off the street. And they want to get enough money to make sure these girls get at least one good meal a day."
Perdue has received a small grant that enabled him to quit his government job to work full time for COEFF. He travels to Ethiopia for a month several times a year to make sure the 22 private schools that COEFF girls attend continue to meet high standards.
Among COEFF's accomplishments last year: All eight of the students who took the 10th-grade national exam passed, "an amazing accomplishment considering more than 90 percent of students fail the exam," according to Perdue. COEFF also provided a second year of support for a school in rural Ethiopia, serving more than 250 girls and boys who would otherwise not get an education. The nonprofit also has begun a pilot project in Tanzania and hopes to eventually provide funds so young Ethiopian girls can attend college.
After last year's Mesgana Dancers tour, Perdue says he received a few "hate letters" asking why he was spending so much time helping Ethiopians instead of American children. "Sometimes people are jaded about Africa," he says, then adds, "I don't want to say 'prejudiced.' But I feel it's a world community now."
