AMERICAN GIVING | Strengthening communities through generosity
29 April 2008
"Girls Gotta Run" Donates Shoes to Help Ethiopian Girls
Gifts help girls stay in school and escape poverty, early marriage
Washington -- A Washington woman is helping to give shoes to girls in Ethiopia as an incentive for staying in school and to inspire their determination.
Patricia Ortman, a former professor of human development, in 2005 founded the nonprofit group "Girls Gotta Run" (GGR) to supply young female runners in Ethiopia with shoes they otherwise would not have.
Girls Gotta Run raises money, in part through the sale of art, to buy athletic shoes for Ethiopian girls training to become professional runners. Training to be athletes allows them to stay in school, avoid early marriage and gain personal independence.
For a girl, being able to run is a real statement of freedom that turns into power.
"When I dream, I see myself running so fast that I can bring up our living standard and buy all the girls of Ethiopia sneakers," said Sercalem Tesefay, a teenage Ethiopian girl.
Ethiopian girls as young as 12 can be sold as brides by parents desperate for dowry payments, according to Girls Gotta Run. Women are more likely to die in childbirth than reach sixth grade. In addition, Ethiopian cultural taboos prevent girls from walking long distances through desolate bush to school because parents fear rape and abduction, often done to force girls into early marriage, according to the nonprofit.
Girls Gotta Run helps persuade Ethiopian parents that their daughters should be allowed to go to school and delay marriage.
Running has become a powerful incentive in a country where seven of the 10 top-earning athletes are women.
Getting athletic shoes, however, is tremendously difficult. Inspired by the girls’ spirit and determination, and moved by their plight, a group of artists and others came together in early 2006 to form an organization to raise money to buy shoes for them. "Girls Gotta Run" thus was born.
"Running gives girls a lot of options and makes our bodies our own. And even if everyone doesn't make it, training opens up ideas to teach, to be a coach, to do anything you try hard at," said Ethiopian Olympic gold medalist Meseret Defar.
Virtually the only way teenager Tesdale Mesele could avoid being married at an early age into a life of housework and childbearing was to run.
So that's what she did. She ran along the rutted dirt roads and up the cracked steps to Meskel Square in Addis Ababa, the country's capital. Once she felt she was fast enough, Mesele ran around the country's only track, a rough ring of patched and potholed rubber inside Addis Ababa Stadium, hoping to be spotted by a running club and win a tiny sponsorship known as "calorie money."
Professional running in Ethiopia has long been dominated by men. Yet today, according to an Ethiopian sports magazine, seven of the 10 top-earning athletes in Ethiopia are women.
Inspired by these new national heroines, Mesele and thousands of other girls left their villages and came to the capital to live with relatives and train, dreaming of being able to compete.
But there are other, more practical reasons for girls to become fit and fast.
"I run so the boys know I'm strong and don't harass me," said Mesele, panting from her afternoon run from school to home in a ragged sweatshirt and sneakers. "I also run because I want to give priority to my schooling. If I'm a good runner, the school will want me to stay and not be home washing laundry and preparing injera," the spongy bread that is the staple of the Ethiopian diet.
Mesele lives in a mud compound with three other girls whose older sisters have brought them here from family farms to train as runners. But their real ambition is simply to stay in school. Girls sponsored by Girls Gotta Run are required to stay in school.
"I have so many hopes for her," said Mesele's older sister, Alamas. "When I was her age, my parents wanted me to marry an old man of 30. They were so angry when I ran away to the city. They didn't speak to me for years. But now, with my sister's dream of running, she has value to them. She doesn't have to have babies early."
More information is available on the Girls Gotta Run Web site.
