By Nicholas L. Dean
Jamestown Post Journal
JAMES TOWN, NEW YORK – In only three years, John McKay and the Awassa Youth Campus have accomplished ”a good amount” for youths in Ethiopia and the rest of Africa.
Formed initially as simply a place for youths to go, the Awassa campus has grown into a multi-faceted organization – featuring everything from a performing theater troupe, recording studio and an Aikido dojo to the only paved basketball court in Ethiopia.
”We see ourselves as providing the rock clay and the kids kind of mold the organization,” McKay said about the growth of the organization. ”We’re simply providing the tools for the kids and then letting them provide the substance.”
Now, for the first time in its three-year history, the Awassa Youth Campus’s founders, which include Meshu Tamrat and Tesfay Tekalu as well as McKay, are touring the U.S. to raise awareness about their program.
On Thursday, the group will stop in Jamestown for a 7:30 p.m. performance at the Reg Studio Theater.
According to McKay, the current tour is to put a face on the program and does not feature the full 30 youths who participate in the One Love AIDS/HIV Awareness Theater. A first step for the program, McKay said he hopes this tour will lay the groundwork to bring the full theater to the United States in the future.
Before there was the Awassa Youth Campus and the Awassa Children’s Center orphanage, there was the Awassa AIDS Education Circus – which Arts Council and Reg Lenna Civic Center Director David Schein helped found with friends from Germany. In 2002, Schein went to Ethiopia to work with Tamrat and Tekalu on building an educational show.
”They were great gymnasts and in two weeks we had a script,” Schein said. ”These young, barefoot, hungry kids started something really, really big and they do marvelous theater. At the same time, they’re realizing themselves beyond their wildest dreams. I’ve been there six times in the last seven years and that initial circus gave way to two non-profits – the orphanage and the Awassa Youth Campus.”
The initial force behind the Awassa Youth Campus according to Schein, McKay arrived in Awassa to help with the previous projects – which is where he met Tamrat and Tekalu.
”We started talking about programs and they saw the same kinds of gaps inside programs that I had seen from traveling in Africa,” McKay said. ”So out of that, we decided to build this youth campus. We wanted to separate it from the orphanage and let the orphanage focus on providing direct care and support and we’d start to take over the outreach kind of stuff.”
Reacting to the ”business” of AIDS prevention in Africa and the industry around orphan care in Africa, he envisaged a whole different way to empower African kids – and with Tamrat and Tekalu broke away and founded the Awassa Youth Campus.
”He ‘gets’ the way that the arts are a pathway to development and self-realization and has made that one of the cornerstones of the Youth Campus,” Schein said.
”We just wanted to build an organization,” McKay said of the Awassa Youth Center. ”It’s just youth-focused programming in Ethiopia. We just wanted to provide place for kids to go that basically serves the same function and works the same way as a Youth Center in the U.S. does. Through the activities that the kids participate in, they do HIV/AIDS awareness and other outreach programs – and this trip is really just to put a face on that, to show the personality of the program.”