In 2001, Skokie-based CHAMPRO Sports started the CHAMPRO School in Quarsa, a village where no school existed. The company started by offering first-grade classes and has added a new grade ever since until it now offers schooling through the eighth grade.
No formal education previously existed in the village, which has no electricity or running water, but CHAMPRO funded the recent construction of a cinder block school that includes a library and indoor bathrooms. Six hundred students now attend classes for free, says Hunt, a member of the Winnetka Covenant Church.
The curriculum includes basic math, reading and writing. A strong health component also is included. As a result, health has improved in the village and children have become more aware of the world around them, Hunt says.
The plan was for the children to follow up that education by attending high school roughly eight miles away in the capital city of Addis Ababa. But economic and logistics have kept the students from furthering their education, says Hunt.
“We’re at a frustrating point right now,” Hunt says. If the students don’t go on to high school, “we would have done this for nothing.”
Hunt, who is passionate about helping the people of Ethiopia, is working with others to figure out how to provide the extra education. He is bringing to the task the same dedication he has given to helping the country since he worked there with the Peace Corps from 1970 to 1972.
Getting permission from parents to let their children attend the school took some creative thinking. All of the villagers are subsistence farmers, and each member of the family, including children as young as five years old, are needed to work in the fields and with livestock. Parents feared that letting the children go to school would hurt the family economically, Hunt says.
To win parents’ approval, the school operates a shift in the morning and another in the afternoon. That enables at least some of the children from each family to work while the others go to school in the morning. The other siblings attend in the afternoon.
The current school is funded with profits from an apparel manufacturing factory CHAMPRO helped start in Addis Ababa. The company employs anywhere between 400 and 500 people.
“It has worked out surprisingly well,” says Hunt, who had previously tried to develop a large operation in the African nation. “This has worked out much better than I expected.”
Hunt says providing the jobs and education “makes going to work fulfilling. It’s about more than just making baseball and football equipment.”
A desire for fulfillment was not what first attracted Hunt to Ethiopia when he joined the Peace Corps. “It was more about adventure than it was about ideals at the time,” he says. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do after college.”
Now, it is the ideals that are pushing him to figure out how to get the children at least to high school.
