Chicken-dance marathon

School project helps orphans in Kenya, Conway students

— About 5,000 Conway elementary school students flapped their arms and performed in chicken-dance marathons on Friday and Monday to celebrate how they’ve helped orphans in Kenya, plus needy fellow classmates.

Behind the happiness and laughter of the dancing is the heart-breaking reality of children living in the slums in Kitale, Kenya. It’s a situation that University of Central Arkansas professor Mark Cooper and other educators felt led to do something about.

“We believe very strongly that we want to transport more children from the slum to an orphanage that provides the tender, loving care that we believe every child should be afforded,” Cooper said.

In addition to fundraising to help children in the Kipsongo Slum in Africa, where Cooper’s son serves as a missionary, part of the money raised will go to the Conway School District to buy food to send home with needy students on the weekends.

The Service Learning Chicken Dance Marathon idea started in 2009 as a project of Cooper’s UCA students and Woodrow Cummins Elementary School.

Since then, students have raised approximately $34,000 and built two chicken coops and purchased chickens in Kitale, Kenya, and 25 percent of everything raised goes to the Conway district.

Last year in May, the project raised $9,000 to build a second chicken coop, and $3,000 went to the school district.

A few days before the chicken dances, students take home a plastic egg and ask their families and friends to donate.

“We purchased 7,000 little white plastic eggs, and we put those eggs in Chick-fil-A bags, because Chickfil-A has partnered with us on this project,” Cooper said.

Cooper and his wife, Linda, became involved in the situation in Kenya after their son, Jim, became a missionary there.

“Through my work as a professor at the University of Central Arkansas [and my interest] in service learning as a teaching strategy, all of this began to merge together,” Cooper said.

Cooper is a professor of early childhood and special education and director of the Mashburn Center for Learning.

He was teaching an early-childhood-education class in a classroom at Woodrow Cummins Elementary School in Conway in partnership with the school, he said.

Woodrow Cummins third- and fourth-graders met with Cooper and his UCA students, and Cooper shared pictures of three children from the Kipsongo Slum.

The Conway elementary students “were absolutely captivated by the idea of how absolutely impoverished those three children were,” Cooper said.

UCA students who are going to become teachers need to know more than how to teach academics, he said.

“Part of what we want to do is help our candidates become teachers who know how to teach service learning as a teaching strategy,” he said.

Woodrow Cummins Principal Charlotte Green was involved in the conversation between the elementary students and Cooper’s students.

“The question begged itself, ‘What is it that we need to do?’” Cooper said. “The response: ‘We need to help the children who live in the orphanage sustain support.’”

Cooper’s son serves with a Kenyan couple, Hellen and Richard Makani, who founded a feeding center and orphanage. They knew how to raise chickens, but they didn’t have a lot of resources, Cooper said.

“The [Conway] children, learning more about sustainability, said, ‘Let’s help them build chicken coops,’” Cooper said.

Jim Cooper sells the eggs to make money for the feeding center and the orphanage, Mark Cooper explained.

“In sitt i ng dow n w it h Charlotte Green, we decided, ‘Let’s help the entire elementary school learn about this partnership with Kitale, Kenya, and let’s do a chickendance marathon,’” Cooper said.

Green said students have some kind of service learning project every year, and she thinks the chicken-dance project is great.

“I think that the opportunity for our kids to give to others is a lifelong skill. It’s something that they need,” she said. “We’re teaching them how to give, and they get something out of it as well because we’re studying Kitale, and they’re learning that poverty is relevant. What we call poverty in America is really not poverty in other countries.”

Other districts participating in the Service Learning Chicken Dance Marathon include Greenbrier and Guy-Perkins in Faulkner County, North Little Rock, Cabot and England.

Natalie Hood, 6, a kindergartner at Julia Lee Moore Elementary School in Conway, knew exactly why she was dancing.

“For the poor - to help the kids that are poor and sleep in the slums,” she said. “We’re making more money to build chicken coops so they can have more food.”

The proceeds from the fundraiser are split 75 percent global, 25 percent local.

“We understand that thelevel of severe poverty in Africa is far greater than the level of poverty within the states,” Cooper said.

In 2010, Cooper founded the nonprofit organization Chicks for Children Foundation Inc.

“I founded Chicks forChildren basically to transport support between people in the states and the Mikanis,” he said.

The nonprofit foundation is run by local board members, including Green.

“Aside from the foundation, as a faculty member, I represent this as a professor at the University of Central Arkansas concerned about the education teachers who become conduits for helping children become successful academically, but also in how they address local and global needs,” Cooper said. “We want graduates who understand that holistic education.”

Cooper’s son, a graduate of Central Baptist College in Conway, has lived in Kenya since 2008, and Cooper made the trip in 2009. His wife has been there twice, and the couple plant to go back in July.

On his visit to Kitale, Cooper said he saw children come up to the feeding center, then walk back toward the slums, and it was only later when he saw photographs that the full impact hit him. Some children live unsupervised in trash “houses.”

“It was hard for me to even talk about,” he said.

The existing orphanage has 63 children, and Cooper’s dream, and that of the missionaries, is to build an orphanage for 100.

The Build an Orphanage: Brick by Brick campaign under way has a goal to raise $140,000.

Cooper said it sounds like a lot of money, but he believes the goal is attainable.

“I personally think that in our country, the United States of America, that there are enough people who could sacrifice a little that would generate a whole lot, enough to build an orphanage for$140,000 easily. Easily,” he said.

Cooper said sometimes people feel hopeless about poverty and think they can’t make a difference.

“That’s a misconception - we can do something. This is the something we’ve decided to do,” he said.

“We cannot all be Oprah Winfrey. We cannot all be a Make a Wish Foundation. But we can be, as Margaret Mead says, a small group of thoughtful, dedicated people who try to change somethingwithin the world that makes that world better for somebody.”

To make a donation, or for more information, go to the website, www.chicksforchildren.org, or mail donations to the Chicks for Children Foundation, P.O. Box 10753, Conway, AR 72034.

Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.

River Valley Ozark, Pages 59 on 05/24/2012

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