Jeffrey Dale Dawson

LITTLE ROCK — When Dale Dawson first visited Rwanda in late 2004, he encountered families living in tiny mud huts with no electricity, running water or sanitation, and children dying of diseases long forgotten in the United States.

But the Little Rock businessman didn't just see grueling poverty. He saw great potential.

"When you come to this part of this world, the needs are just screaming at you," Dawson says.

"There are people there with enormous dignity and enormous self-motivation willing to work as hard as anybody I ever hired in America, and yet they have absolutely no opportunity to have an education or get a job. I realized I could help create that opportunity. It gave me a purpose."

Dawson already had 25 prosperous years as a corporate tax adviser, investment banker and chief executive officer. He had spent much of his career helping struggling businesses become thriving enterprises.

Still, he had become restless. The alchemy of turning leaden industries into gold no longer thrilled him. He had recently left his post as the head of investment banking at Stephens Inc. in search of something more spiritually fulfilling.

"The deal I made [with God] was that 'I will be available to you,'" Dawson says, "'but the deal is, you have to give me passion.'"

With that Rwandan trip, he knew he had found his next calling.

"All of a sudden I realized I could be a businessman building businesses and that could be God's work," he says. "God's work is building businesses and schools that will produce opportunities for people."

Dawson now leads Bridge2Rwanda - a Little Rock-based Christian ministry that aims to create a new generation of leaders and build sustainable businesses in the east African country.

Rwanda - a country of about 10.5 million people where the life span averages 50 years - is still coping with the aftermath of the 1994 genocide when the Hutu majority slaughtered nearly 1 million Tutsis and their Hutu allies. As much as financial aid, the country needs human capital. Rwandan leaders seek what they call "borrowed talent," outside experts who can train and mentor native Rwandans.

Dawson now travels across the United States recruiting American investors and advisers to support Rwandan schools, provide college scholarships and do microlending.

Dawson has lost count of how many times he has traveled to Rwanda since that first visit. He made the journey - which takes two days of flying - six times in 2008, and has already been there twice this year. He takes no salary, and pays all his own travel expenses.

He credits his career change largely to the Rt. Rev. John Rucyahana, an Anglican bishop from Rwanda and Bridge2Rwanda's co-founder. The two met in Little Rock two years before Dawson's first trip to thecountry. Dawson saw in the bishop a visionary and fellow entrepreneur, and the two became fast friends.

Rucyahana, who speaks six languages, says he has relished working with Dawson and watching his friend grow in faith.

"He has the joy to listen to our visions and help us reach our goals from our context," Rucyahana says. "He wants to serve Jesus among us and engage with us in the redemptive transformation of Rwanda as one of us."

LESSONS FROM THE MILKMAN

Dawson says he has always been drawn to entrepreneurs.

"An entrepreneur is someone who has the vision and the drive to create something that other people can't even imagine," he says. "My definition of an entrepreneur is someone who doesn't run with the crowd."

That description, he says, fits not only Rucyahana, but also his parents.

Shortly after Dawson was born in Lubbock, Texas, his parents, Bob and Jewell, moved the family to Snyder, a west Texas town of about 17,000 then. His late father worked as a milkman, and his mother kept the books.

"We used to say my dad was the hardest working man in Snyder, Texas," says Dawson, the oldest of three sons. "He worked six days a week. He got up at 3 every morning. He delivered milk to every home, every school, every restaurant, every store."

On mornings when Dawson didn't have school, his father would sometimes come by the house around 5 a.m. and let the youngster join him on his route.

"It's one of the greatest memories I have - riding that milk truck with my dad," Dawson says. "He knew everybody in town. He knew what was going on. He was very well respected."

His parents taught him the value of education and hard work. His mother also introduced him to the basics of accounting.

Jewell Dawson, who now lives in Houston, recalled putting a small adding machine on her desk for her sons to play with while she balanced the books.

"They grew up seeing a lot of adding-machine tape," she says with a laugh.

When Dale was 10, his family moved to Houston. His father began working for Borden Dairy, eventually rising to vice president.

FROM FAITH TO FINANCE

Dawson grew up in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), but as a teenager he began to have the usual youthful questions and doubts about whether God existed and whether the Gospels are true. He says he got his answer when he prayed one night in the chapel with a volunteer youth leader.

"I didn't pray to be saved," Dawson recalls. "I just said, 'Are you real?' And, bam, he was. That sense has never gone away."

By the time he was a freshman at the University of Texas at Austin, Dawson says, he was a "Jesus freak." He joined a Christian group in converting an old fraternity house into a coffeehouse and shelter for runaways and vagrants.

But one evening, Dawson was talking with fraternity brothers who were struggling with their accounting homework.

"I sit there thinking, 'These guys are dumb as a box of rocks,'" Dawson says. "And these guys had some really attractive girls with them, and here I was with runaways and drug addicts."

He decided to ditch the Christian coffeehouse and entered UT's College of Business. He didn't regularly attend church again until he was 37 and a father.

But he felt he had found his calling. After earning a master's degree in accounting at UT, he joined an accounting firm in Dallas where he quickly became an expert on tax issues surrounding mergers and acquisitions.

Within six years, he made partner. He also met the love of his life, Judi, a fellow accounting graduate from UT who worked at the firm. The two met in January 1977, but tax season left little time for romance. They were just good friends when they decided in June to share a car trip to see friends teaching at Tulane University in New Orleans.

"I guess after 10 hours in the car both there and back, we both were surprised not to be tired of each other," Judi Dawson recalls. "In fact, we both really enjoyed each other. We both look back and say we fell in love in New Orleans on that trip."

The two will celebrate their 31st wedding anniversary in June.

They both maintained grinding work schedules in the early years of their marriage. Dale Dawson advanced within the accounting firm, and Judi became the owner of a chain of ceiling fan and light stores in Texas and Colorado called Light Ideas.

"In most married couples we knew, one person would try to bring balance to life and work," Judi Dawson recalls. "But we'd egg each other on. We worked all the time."

Dale Dawson met Jack Stephens while advising Texas oilman Ray Hunt. Stephens hired Dawson in 1985 and brought him to Little Rock.

A year later, the elder Stephens named his son, Warren, president of the company, and Dawson became the head of investment banking. His wife left the lighting business and joined Stephens as a stockbroker.

After the couple had their first child, Katherine, in 1989,they eased their work schedules. Their son, Jack, was born two years later.

IN SEARCH OF MEANING

The new parents also decided to return to church.

"The best description of me is that I'm the third soil in the parable of the sower and the seeds," Dale Dawson says. "When the sower throws the seed into the third soil, it takes root. But weeds grow up and choke it and it doesn't bear any fruit. It means there is a relationship there, but there is nothing to show for it."

That began to change, he says, after the family joined Pulaski Heights United Methodist Church. The Dawsons got involved in various church committees, and Dale Dawson became a Sunday School teacher.

In 1992, Dale Dawson found another career opportunity. In partnership with Stephens Inc., and other investors, Dawson bought a heavy-duty truck parts distributor. Dawson becamechairman and chief executive officer and the company, eventually called TruckPro, grew until it had more than $140 million in sales and nearly 50 stores across the country. He sold the company to AutoZone in 1998.

He took off a year to spend more time with his children and then went back to work for Stephens. But this time, he had the sense he "was professionally and personally treading water."

"Now on one level, I was in the best position I could ever be in to make a lot of money," Dawson says. "And yet I was on autopilot. ... I didn't get up each morning intensely focused on the task."

Around that time, friend Martha Vetter announced that she was moving to Rwanda. Vetter was director of children's ministries at St. Andrew's Anglican Church in Little Rock, which Rucyahana oversaw as bishop.

She had agreed to teach at Sonrise School, an elementary boarding school Rucyahana established. Most students were orphans of genocide.

"I remember [Dale] saying, 'Why in the world would you ever go there?'" says Vetter, who now lives in Boone, N.C.

Dawson acknowledged he thought the move was a terrible idea. All he knew of Rwanda was the genocide, and he feared for Vetter's safety.

When Vetter returned to Little Rock for her summer break, the Dawsons invited her to stay in their house, and they learned more about her experiences. In October 2002 Rucyahana visited Little Rock to campaign for the construction of Sonrise High School. The Dawsons agreed to host a fundraising dinner.

The bishop arrived two hours early, and spoke at length with Dawson about his dreams for his homeland.

"When I met Dale the first time, I first took him to be a very hospitable man," Rucyahana recalls.

"He also was very attentive to the conversation we had that afternoon. We not only discussed funding, we also discussed the nature of Rwandan problems, the willingness of Rwandan people to be better and our active hope."

Dawson still wasn't sure what else he could do to help, but Rucyahana fascinated him.

A year after his conversation with Rucyahana, Dawson left Stephens. He began working to get Opportunity International, a group that specializes in microfinance, to start a bank in Rwanda. His first trip to Rwanda was in support of that effort.

Eventually, he helped raise $5.5 million to launch Urwego Opportunity Bank. He still serves on the bank's board.

Urwego in the language Kinyarwanda means "a ladder up." People can open a savings account with as little as $2. That's more than a day's pay for many in a country where the median annual income is about $200 a year, Dawson says.

TRUE CALLING

As Dawson became increasingly involved in efforts to help the country, he knew he had his family's full support. He described his wife as "absolutely fearless."

"She was always telling me to go for it," he says.

Judi Dawson says she has seen divine providence in her husband's Rwandan journey. She and their children joined him on a trip in 2005.

"We actually met Rwandans on that trip who as we were leaving said they would pray for usbecause 'We fear for Americans that they are so lost among all the distractions of the Western world,'" Dawson says.

"They genuinely believe we have a harder time seeing God than they do because there is so much stuff between Americans and God."

Greg Murtha, chief connections officer for Halftime, was among business leaders "who rode shotgun with Dale" 18 months ago. At the end of the trip, they asked Dawson what he needed to establish Bridge2Rwanda.

A direct mail executive advised him on spreading the word. Another leader volunteered to design a Web site. People also volunteered to get scholarship sponsors. One couple donated$150,000 to a project they visited on the trip.

"He's contagious," Murtha says. "He's like a virus spreading the bug for Rwanda."

David Knight, general counsel for Stephens Inc., was also on Dawson's first trip to Rwanda. Knight also serves on the board of Hendrix College in Conway, and the trip inspired him to see what kind of international exchange opportunities there might be for Hendrix.

With Bridge2Rwanda's encouragement, Hendrix and a consortium of universities have helped provide scholarships so top Rwandan math and science students can earn their undergraduate degrees at American universities before taking their expertise home.

This academic year, 29 Rwandan students are studying in six colleges and universities. Next year, 52 more will come to the United States. Six more universities have joined the program.

The country is safe with a stable government and with a growing list of international supporters eager to invest in its future - in no small part thanks to Dawson.

"There is a sense that God's hand is somehow involved in this little country," Dawson says. "And for some reason, God has also put his hand in Little Rock to raise up people to connect with Rwanda in a multitude of ways."

More information about Bridge2Rwanda is available online at www.bridge2rwanda. org.