Friday, September 22, 2006

Fishing for a better world

Valley fly-fishing guides raising funds for African orphans


By STEVE BENSON
Express Staff Writer

Ever think casting flies for trout in the tranquil waters surrounding Sun Valley could lead to a better life for an African orphan?

On Wednesday, Sept. 27, a six-hour guided fishing trip with Silver Creek Outfitters will help feed, educate and paint a brighter future for children in the Mapalo Orphanage in Zambia, Africa.

The third annual event, known as Fishing for Life, will begin at 10 a.m. in Memory Park, directly adjacent to Silver Creek Outfitters in downtown Ketchum.

"The most amazing thing is that not only are we feeding these kids but we're educating them in a first-rate way and sending them to the best schools in the country," said Silver Creek Outfitters guide Peter DeBaun, who spearheaded the fund-raiser three years ago.

According to the Department for International Development, Zambia is one of Africa's poorest countries, with more than two-thirds of the population (about 7 million people) living below the national poverty line of less than 93 cents per day. One in six children dies before their fifth birthday. Maternal mortality rates, child hunger rates and deaths from AIDS are continuing to rise.

For up top six months every year DeBaun teaches classes at Northrise University, the first private university in Zambia. Several years ago, one of his students at the university, who had the responsibility of taking care of the orphans, was struggling with limited resources and assistance. Wanting to help, DeBaun realized he was sitting on a gold mine in Sun Valley.

"Me and a bunch of guides got together and started talking and realized that a day's worth of guiding would feed an entire orphanage for a month," DeBaun said. "We decided to come together and pitch in a few guide trips. Then the shop, and (Silver Creek Outfitters owner) Terry Ring got involved.

"It just snowballed from there."

Now all employees at Silver Creek Outfitters donate an entire day's worth of wages to the cause. The Ketchum and Hailey Rotary clubs, local business owners, churches and passionate locals also got involved.

"In the last two years we raised somewhere in the neighborhood of $50,000 a year," DeBaun said. "We went from an orphanage school the size of a two-car garage with one teacher and a good deal of sick and hungry kids to building a 63-meter school, hiring five more teachers, providing healthy food, health care, school books, and sponsoring five children to attend college."

This year, DeBaun said he hopes to raise twice that amount to sponsor a college education for an additional 15 orphans.

"A lot of kids that we were sponsoring at the orphanage are kids that are now going to Northrise," DeBaun said. "It's a neat deal because Northrise has the highest hiring rate of any university in the country.

"It's a pretty amazing project considering a bunch of guides got together and started it."

To reserve a spot next Wednesday, Sept. 27, call Silver Creek Outfitters at 726-5123.

"We need all the help we can get," DeBaun said.

Zambia is a landlocked country that has land borders with Tanzania to the northeast, Malawi to the east, Mozambique and Zimbabwe to the southeast, Botswana and Namibia to the south, Angola on the west and Zaire to the northwest.

The country has one of the lowest population-to-land ratios in Africa—10 million people in a country half the size of Europe.

Employment opportunities offered in its post-independence era in the nation's copper mines and associated industries led to a strong rural-to-urban migration. The result has been to make Zambia one of the most urbanized countries in Africa. About one-fifth of the population lives in the copper belt to the north of the nation's capital, Lusaka. This great urban migration has resulted in massive tracts of uninhabited land across the country.

Zambia's contemporary culture is a blend of values and spiritual traditions of more than 70 ethnically diverse groups of people. Most of the tribes moved into the area in a series of migratory waves a few centuries ago.




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