The single biggest thing you can do to help this project is to donate funds to it. Our partnership with the Indiana-based non-profit 501(c)3 organization Timmy Global Health means that all contributions are fully tax deductible. There are two main ways that you can donate to this project.
1) To make an online donation with a credit card, please click here and select “Nigeria – Bebor” under the “please use my donation” heading (it defaults on unrestricted).
2) To send a donation by check, please make your check payable to Timmy Global Health and write “Bebor, Nigeria” in the memo line. You can mail your check to:
Melissa Dulaney
Timmy Global Health
407 W. Smith Valley Road # 933
Greenwood, IN 46142 USA
or to
Scott Pegg
5639 Spindrift Lane
Indianapolis, IN 46220 USA
Thanks in advance for whatever support you can offer. It is greatly appreciated and will be put to wise and judicious use. All donors will receive a personal thank you letter from Scott Pegg, from the schools in Nigeria and a 501(c)3 acknowledgment of their gift from our partners at Timmy Global Health.
FAQs with Scott Pegg:
Personal
Q: When did you first get interested in Nigeria and the Niger Delta?
A: Like many people, I first paid attention to oil production in the Niger Delta in the run-up to the trial and hangings of Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni leaders in November 1995. I heard Ken’s younger brother Owens Wiwa speak in Richmond, British Columbia about a month after the hangings and got involved with a group of Vancouver-area activists in a group called the Ogoni Solidarity Network. Our claim to fame was doing 52 consecutive weeks of protests at every Shell station in Vancouver from the first to the second anniversaries of the hangings of the Ogoni 9. Gradually, I also started doing academic research on oil production in Nigeria.
Q: When did you first visit Nigeria?
A: I first visited Nigeria in April 2000 to attend a memorial service for Ken Saro-Wiwa in his home village of Bane, Rivers State.
Q: How many times have you visited Nigeria?
A: As of now (October 2020), I have visited Nigeria eleven times. My first trip was in April 2000 and my most recent trip was in November 2019.
Q: Is this your full-time job? Do you receive a salary for your work with Bebor?
A: No. My full-time job is being a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). That is how I pay my bills and support our family. My work with these schools in Nigeria is purely voluntary. It is something I do on nights, weekends and in my spare time. I have never received any salary or monetary compensation for doing this work.
Q: Do you contribute your own money to support this project or do you just raise funds for it?
A: My wife and I have been contributing our own funds to support this project since its inception. We are among the 10 largest contributors to this project and donate to it every year. We also cover various expenses associated with this project (postage, printing, website hosting, etc.) out of our own pocket.
Schools
Q: Did your work with Bebor come out of your first visit to Nigeria?
A: Yes, it did. Owens Wiwa asked a guy named Patrick Naagbanton from the village of Bodo to show me around and keep me out of trouble in the run-up to Saro-Wiwa’s memorial service. Patrick took me to Bodo to meet his mom and other relatives and, while there, he introduced me to Reverend Moses Nyimale Lezor, the director of Bebor Model Nursery and Primary School in Bodo. Reverend Moses asked for my address and later got in touch with a request for assistance.
Q: So how did this project first get started?
A: At the time, my wife Tijen and I were engaged to be married. We talked about it and decided that we had everything we needed and did not really need any wedding gifts. We asked everyone to please consider donating to help Bebor Model Nursery and Primary School in Bodo, Rivers State, Nigeria instead of getting us a gift. I figured that I knew 20 people who would give $100 each, that would make $2,000 and they could “do something” with that. That was the sum total of my initial vision. I had absolutely no idea we would be doing this decades later or that the program would expand the way it did or that we would exceed my initial monetary goal by more than 125 times.
Q: When did this project start?
A: We don’t have an exact starting date but since it started just before our wedding, we use October 2000 to mark its start.
Q: This project started with one school in one village. Can you explain how and when it expanded to 6 schools in 5 different villages?
A: We started working in Bodo in October 2000. For the first few years of this project, that was the only school we helped or supported. In March 2003, we expanded to Ken Saro-Wiwa’s home village of Bane which is about a 30-minute drive from Bodo. In 2012, our school director in Bane, Leelee Wiwa Tanen, opened another school in Bori, the commercial capital and main transit junction in the Ogoni region of Rivers State, Nigeria. Bori is between Bodo and Bane but closer to Bane. In 2015, one of our main Nigerian partners, Dr. Nenibarini Zabbey, suggested that I meet with Father Abel Agbulu from St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in Bodo. St. Patrick’s Nursery and Primary School already had most of its own facilities in place, but Father Abel Agbulu responded enthusiastically when I asked if he would like us to bring our health program to their school. In 2018, Father Abel Agbulu’s successor at St. Patrick’s, Father Stephen Amadi, took me to visit Our Lady’s Nursery and Primary School in the village of K-Dere (about 5 minutes’ drive from Bodo) which St. Patrick’s supports. We extended our health program to their school in 2019. In November 2019, we met with Father Denis Asomugha at St. Bernard’s Catholic Nursery and Primary School in Biara (5-10 minutes drive from Bodo). We started helping them by constructing and equipping a sickbay for their school in February 2020. So, we have been helping in Bodo since 2000, Bane since 2003, Bori since 2012, St. Patrick’s since 2015, Our Lady’s since 2019 and St. Bernard’s since 2020.
Q: I see you are supporting three Catholic schools. Is this a religiously based project?
A: No and yes. No, it is not religiously based in that we receive support from donors of multiple different faiths and no faith, and we would consider it equally valuable to do the work we do at Bebor with children of different religious backgrounds. Yes, in the sense that the Niger Delta where we work is overwhelmingly Christian. Most of the children who benefit from our support are Christians, but we support them because they are extremely poor, not because they are Christian.
Q: Has the thematic work of this project changed over time?
A: Yes. Initially, we started supporting schools that did not have proper classroom buildings or facilities. They were typically meeting in churches that weren’t designed to be schools and typically did not have separate classrooms in them. So, the first phase of our work was constructing classroom buildings. The good news is this phase is largely done. We now have seven finished classroom buildings (3 in Bodo, 2 in Bane, 2 in Bori) and St. Patrick’s had its own facilities before we started helping them. We periodically have maintenance work to do and there are upgrades we would like to make, but this phase of our work is mostly done, other than possibly trying to provide better facilities for Our Lady’s Nursery and Primary in K-Dere and, to a lesser extent (because their facilities are better), St. Bernard’s Nursery and Primary in Biara.
Shortly after getting the kids into proper classrooms, we realized that we had hundreds of kids in schools that did not have toilets or drinking water. So, phase two of our work was water and sanitation. With the generous support of Safe Child Africa (previously Stepping Stones Nigeria) we were able to provide boreholes for safer or improved drinking water and boys, girls and teachers’ toilets at our schools in Bane, Bodo and Bori. St. Patrick’s again had its own water and sanitation system already in place. Our Lady’s Nursery and Primary in K-Dere still lacks water and sanitation in its rented facilities.
Now that we had kids in proper classrooms with toilets and safer drinking water, we decided it was time to invest more directly in the children themselves than in the facilities needed to support them. As such, the third phase of our work was health. We started a pilot health program for 100 children at our school in Bodo during the 2012-2013 school year. Over time, we have come to focus our health program on three main activities: 1) providing basic sickbays at our schools (done in Bane, Bodo, Bori and St. Patrick’s, almost done at St. Bernard’s); 2) providing mass immunizations (measles, polio, tetanus, typhoid, yellow fever for the older children and Vitamin A supplements); and 3) providing deworming treatment to keep our students worm-free. The mass immunizations and deworming treatment are now done at all six of the schools we currently support.
In February 2017, we started the fourth phase of our work which is nutrition. We started a pilot nutrition program for 50 of the poorest or most vulnerable students at our school in Bodo. Our nutrition program is largely based around the three locally available and locally familiar ingredients of crayfish, soybeans and millet. Each 1 kg of “Ogi Soy Plus” contains 0.5 kg of soybeans, 0.2 kg of millet, and 0.3 kg of crayfish. In combination, those three ingredients check a lot of nutritional boxes. Our great hope, funds permitting, is to be able to expand this nutrition program first to all the students in Bodo and then, over time, to all the other schools we support.
Q: How many children are enrolled at these schools?
A: Our enrollment ebbs and flows at each school. Based on 2018 and 2019 census headcounts, we currently support more than 1,450 nursery and primary school students across all six of our schools (Bane, Bodo, Bori, St. Patrick’s, Our Lady’s, St. Bernard’s). This is probably a low figure as it only counts students who were in attendance on the day we visited. Anyone absent that day for any reason would not show up in these figures. Please click here for a more detailed breakdown on our enrollments.
Q: What percentage of your students are girls?
A: Based on 2018 and 2019 census headcounts, 50.45% of all nursery and primary school students across all six of our schools (Bane, Bodo, Bori, St. Patrick’s, Our Lady’s, St. Bernard’s) were girls and 49.55% were boys. Our percentage of girls’ enrollment ranged from a low of 39.10% in St. Bernard’s to a high of 55.43% in Bori. We strive consciously and deliberately to ensure that our enrollment is at least 50% girls. Please click here for a more detailed breakdown on our enrollments.
Q: What is the age range of your students?
A: The youngest nursery school students are 3-4 years old. Most of the primary students are between 6-12 years of age, although we do occasionally have older children who did not initially enroll in any school and got a late start to their education.
Q: What subjects do these schools teach?
A: A lot of the basic stuff you would expect any school to teach – reading, writing, math and science. Our schools follow and comply with Nigerian curriculum requirements.
Q: Do the children speak English?
A: Yes. Nigeria was a former British colony so English is widely spoken. Nigerians are very inventive and creative with the English language and their version of pidgin English is widely spoken throughout West Africa. There are also hundreds of indigenous languages such as Igbo, Ijaw, and Yoruba. The native or indigenous language in Biara, Bodo and K-Dere is called Gokana and the native or indigenous language in Bane and Bori is called Khana.
Partner organizations
Q: What is your relationship with Timmy Global Health?
A: We have been working with and through Timmy Global Health (formerly the Timmy Foundation) since March 2002. We are now Timmy’s second-longest continuously supported program (their work in Ecuador is the longest). Dr. Chuck Dietzen, the founder of the Timmy Foundation, traveled with us to Nigeria in 2004 and was made an honorary chief in the village of Bane for his support of our work there. Our relationship with Timmy Global Health means that American donors make their contributions to Timmy Global Health and receive a 501(c)3 tax deduction letter from them. See the donations section above for more information on how to do that.
Q: What is your relationship with the Center for the Environment, Human Rights and Development (CEHRD) in Nigeria?
A: The Center for the Environment, Human Rights and Development (CEHRD) is arguably the leading human rights organization operating in the Niger Delta. They are, for example, one of Amnesty International’s core partners in Nigeria. We are extremely proud to be affiliated with them. When we transfer funds to Nigeria, we transfer them to CEHRD. CEHRD then gets in touch with our school directors and arranges with them to transfer the funds to them or to purchase the supplies or hire the contractors they need. CEHRD staff members also offer invaluable local advice to us and have helped us initiate several programs, including our health and nutrition programs. We typically travel to and from Port Harcourt to our schools in CEHRD vehicles. CEHRD has provided support to us in many different ways. Outside of our school directors, they are our core partners in Nigeria supporting the work we do.
Donations/support/getting involved
Q: Can I visit the schools in Nigeria?
A: As is the case with any other country, there are certain risks involved in traveling to Nigeria. You probably need to get some shots or immunizations before visiting, you need to get a Nigerian visa in order to be able to visit and there are some security concerns involved with traveling to the oil-producing areas of the Niger Delta where our schools are located. That said, we have to date taken nine different supporters of this project to visit the schools in Nigeria and all of them had pleasant, rewarding and moving experiences visiting our schools. In 2018, I took my then 12-year-old son Kerem to visit our schools which I obviously would not have done if I felt it was too dangerous or difficult to visit.
Q: Can your organization sponsor my trip to Nigeria or help cover my costs?
A: No. We have extremely limited funds and all of those funds are used to support our schools. Everyone who travels to Nigeria to visit our schools (myself included) covers all of their own costs out of their own pocket.
Q: What percent of my donations actually make it to support these schools in Nigeria?
A: Since 2010, 7% of your donations go to cover the general and administrative expenses of our partners at Timmy Global Health. Given the numerous services that Timmy provides to us, I believe this is a fair charge to help ensure their longer-term viability as an organization. Aside from this, Timmy Global Health has also generously provided far more support to our work in Nigeria than we have contributed to them as administrative fees and we remain extremely grateful for that support and proud to work with them. We do everything we can to ensure that the other 93% of your donations go directly to our schools in Nigeria. I personally absorb a lot of costs like postage to mail thank you letters, registering the bebor.org domain name and having our website hosted. Our local Nigerian partners at CEHRD also provide several free services and absorb many costs themselves. Anyone who travels to Nigeria to visit the schools, will continue to pay all their own costs out of pocket with no support coming from donated funds. In short, if you donate $100, $7 goes to Timmy Global Health and $93 goes directly to support our schools in Nigeria.
Q: I don’t want to give money, but I would like to “do something” to help. Can I donate used books or clothes instead of contributing financially?
A: The overwhelming thing we need is your financial support. Please donate and donate generously. If you have specialized skills or resources that you think could help, please get in touch. Otherwise, we do not want or need used books or used clothes or any other items like that. To use books as an example, we would only want age and culturally appropriate books. If you donate 500 books, are you donating the funds to ship those books to Nigeria? Are you going to provide whatever fees are requested to clear those books out of Nigerian customs? Are you providing transportation to get those books from the port of entry to our school(s)? If not, then you should consider donating money and asking us to earmark your donation toward books or books and supplies. The school directors know exactly which books they need and how many of them they need. They can use your funding to purchase them on the local market much cheaper than they would cost in your home country.
Q: How can I donate to this project?
A: Go to the top of this page for two different ways you can donate to support our work in Nigeria.
Q: Do you accept corporate matching gifts?
A: Yes, of course. We have received corporate matches from Apple, Bank of America, GSK, XCEL Energy and others. If your employer provides matching gifts, please make sure to notify them of your donation and get that process started.
Q: Can I set up a recurring monthly donation?
A: Yes, that’s what I do. We have several supporters who choose to contribute in this way. If you donate online with a credit card through Timmy Global Health, this is easy to do.
Q: I cannot offer much support myself, but I am a member of a church or school or civic organization that might be able to help. What should I do?
A: Please get in touch with Scott Pegg via smpegg@iupui.edu and help facilitate a meeting or introduction with your principal, pastor, rabbi, imam, president, etc. Personal introductions can result in long-term partnerships that generate significant support for our schools. Please help get your organization involved.