Ethiopian dancers share their culture with valley school kids
The Herald Journal
Sept 23, 2006,
NIBLEY — A group of Ethiopian girls educated by the pocketbooks of several Utahns have ended a month-long dancing tour in the U.S. that included performances at three schools in Cache Valley.
Friday marked the last show the 10 girls did at a school when they performed three dances at Nibley Elementary — something Principal Bill Lindauer said was a wonderful experience for his students to have.
“Whenever children can have an experience with another cultures — another international culture — the better it is for that child,” he said.
The Mesgana dancers, between the ages of 7 and 13, come from families all over Ethiopia that couldn’t afford to send their girls to school. Through the Utah-based Children of Ethiopia Education, about 700 girls throughout the eastern African nation attend private schools when they otherwise would be working manually for their families, taking care of siblings, married and possibly having children. One-hundred girls are still waiting for someone to sponsor the $200 it costs to educate them for a year.
COEEF Director Norm Perdue said taking the girls on tour is a way of creating awareness and spreading their culture throughout the U.S. It’s also helpful for American children to learn about the rest of the world, he said.
“For us, it brings awareness,” he said. “The kids here can see that they’re pretty lucky” after hearing about living conditions in Ethiopia.
Traveling with the group is also Meseret Defar, Ethiopia’s Gold Medal Olympian from the 2004 Games. She serves as a spokesperson for the group in Ethiopia and will participate in the Top of Utah 5K race in Logan today.
After one month in America and with plans to return to Africa Monday, emotions were mixed among the girls. Excited to see their families, they also had fun meeting people in the U.S. and visiting places they would never otherwise go to, Perdue said.
The hit of the trip was Disneyland and the California beach, Perdue said, adding that Cache Valley’s snow on Friday was a first for all of them.
Also during the trip, 7-year-old Firtuna Birush, who was not a part of the dance troupe, was able to have her first surgery, having her foot corrected at Shriners Hospital in Salt Lake City. After a car ran over it two years ago, Perdue said doctors in Ethiopia wanted to amputate her foot, but a series of surgeries in Salt Lake City over the next nine months will hopefully enable her to function normally.
Mesgana performed at Nibley and Millville elementaries on Friday and at Canyon Elementary Thursday. Lindauer said the children were thrilled with the girls’ performance as they filtered out of his school Friday afternoon.
“There were comments about how beautiful the dancing was, how pretty they were,” he said, but the most poignant he heard was a third-grade girl wishing she could have met her peers from halfway across the world after the show.
“When you can have children playing and performing for other children, that just really enhances your program and what you’re trying to do with children,” Lindauer said. “The state core curriculum doesn’t begin to touch what this assembly did in terms of human contact today.”
The dancers are just children themselves, Perdue said.
“They’re just kids,” he said. “It’s like all the sudden best friends (with American children).”
The girls will perform one last time at the University of Utah today, but Perdue wants to bring another group back to the states next year if an airline will sponsor the trip, like Ethiopian Airlines did this year.
A major portion of COEEF sponsors are from Utah, Perdue said, but the organization is licensed as a legal international non-governmental organization in Ethiopia. COEEF has partnered with several schools in different regions of the country. The dancers were chosen from five schools after auditions were held for what was originally planned to be a domestic dance group.
Consequently, several of the dances in the girls’ program come from different regions of the country and originate from different ethnic groups.
