Ehume is a small
village in Nigeria, West Africa. It is located in the Obowu local
government area of Imo State. According to history, Obowu had 14 sons,
and Ehume was the first son. In Obowu, Ehume is the "Okpara," a term
used in Igbo Culture to recognize the first son. The first daughter is
connoted by "Ada." These two children are the most respected and
honored in Igbo Culture. They usually have the rights in the family
that rivals those of other children. This very position explains the
importance of Ehume as a town in Obowu. The Ehume sons are endlessly
challenged to provide leadership and show other good examples. As the
old culture is fast giving way to new formal culture, the need to show
a new kind of leadership that revolves around education has become
urgent and necessary.
Ehume is not just poor. It is abjectly poor. Its
schools are shreds of ruin from the Nigerian-Biafran war. As the last
bastion of this murderous civil war, Ehume today remains a monument of
the effects of that civil war. Almost all educated children of Ehume up
until 1968 were either killed or very well destabilized in the 1967 to
1970 hostilities. Those who survived were overwhelmed with
responsibilities that left them as hopeless and useless as those they
were seeking to help.
Today, the situation is far better that in 1970, as at least one
secondary school has finally been built - a joint venture with a
neighboring village. Of the two functional elementary schools before
1967, only one has been "rehabilitated." This means it has a roof over
the head and a floor under the feet with a cement or concrete wall
board as a chalk board. Students must pay tuition to attend. The school
fees are used to purchase basic items of need to keep the place open.
As the collected fees are never sufficient for any project, the
headmaster can do only so much to ensure that reading, writing, and
arithmetic are available to the students.
Recent news from Ehume is that the secondary and primary schools have
leaky roofs and broken floors. They lack everything that is basic to
knowledge acquisition. The few members of the Ehume Clan in the USA,
many of whom were child-survivors of the civil war, have become a
lifeline for the needs of the town. Though completely overwhelmed, they
took an important collective first step by chartering the
Ehume Foundation in
1999.
At the Second Annual Meeting of the Ehume Foundation in
June 2001 in Greensboro, North Carolina, USA, the concept of an
independent non-profit corporation dedicated to improving the
educational system in Ehume began to evolve, and over the next few
months, the Ehume Foundation Education Funds was registered in the
State of Delaware and licensed to operate in the State of North
Carolina. Click here to read more about
Ehume Foundation Education Funds, Inc.