Pegg named to Nigerian council of chiefs

By Diane Brown

Since October 2000, Scott Pegg, political science professor at IUPUI, and his wife, Tijen, have raised $11,500 for the Bebor Model Nursery and Primary School, a private school in the rural southeastern Nigerian village of Bodo.

Tijen (back row, second from left) and Scott Pegg (back row right) pose with village adults and schoolchildren outside the building the Peggs helped construct.

Leaders of the African village this summer appointed Pegg to their council of chiefs in appreciation of his fund-raising efforts to build classrooms for the village school of about 400 students. Bodo residents, members of the Ogoni tribe, turn to the coun cil to settle property disputes and other matters before going to police or government agencies.

The first of three gifts the Peggs have made to Bebor literally put a roof over the heads of the school’s older students and included hundreds of dollars the couple requested as donations to the school instead of wedding presents.

The Bodo school, started in 1995, first met in borrowed space in a neighborhood Anglican church. Since then, enrollment has jumped from four to 400 and has outgrown the available space provided by the church.

Through the organization they founded, International Friends Committee of Bebor Model Nursery and Primary School, the Peggs raised $2,800 to pay for the roof of a five-classroom building started with monies from the Canadian Embassy.

The couple’s second and third gifts funded the construction of a six-classroom building for preschool students.

On June 8, when the couple visited Bodo to deliver the last funds for that building, Scott Pegg was named “Mene Edee” (Chief of Light) during a ceremony attended by about 1,000 people, including the Ogoni King Felix Sunday Bebor Berebon. Berebon’s officia l title is Gberedeela the VII of Bodo City.

Prior to the June festivities, the Ogoni women renamed a women’s group the Tijen Pegg Mother’s Committee in honor of Pegg’s wife, who is working on a doctoral degree at IU.

Scott Pegg met Bebor School’s director the Rev. Moses Nyimale Lezor, in 2000 during a visit to Africa to attend the funeral of Ogoni writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa. Several years earlier, while earning a doctorate degree in Canada, Pegg became a friend of the activist’s younger brother during protests to draw attention to injustices that Nigerians experience as foreign corporations do business in their homeland.

In addition to raising funds for new buildings, Pegg and his wife this year personally provided the equivalent of about $246 to cover the annual tuition for 29 students whose parents are too poor to pay.

Currently, the couple is soliciting funds to complete another six-classroom building at the school which serves children pre-school through grades 3 and 4. Additional classroom space is still needed for the younger students who represent about 80 percent of the school’s enrollment.

About 100 of those students daily attend classes outdoors, under a mango tree.