Above: The Girls Gotta Run Foundation-supported Simien Girl
Runners team was highlighted in a segment of the British TV
documentary “Joanna Lumley’s Nile.” (Photo – GGRF)
Tadias Magazine
By Tadias Staff
Published: Sunday, May 16, 2010
New York (Tadias) – A new documentary travel series hosted by the British actress Joanna Lumley features the Simien Girl Runners, a track team supported by the Washington, D.C.-based Girls Gotta Run Foundation.
The film traces Lumley’s journey as she follows the river Nile from northern Egypt to its source. The actress encounters the young athletes near the majestic Semien Mountains during the Ethiopia segment of her exploration.
The foundation – which was profiled here on Tadias Magazine in October of 2009 along with an interview with the organization’s Executive Director Patricia E. Ortman – was established in 2006 to provide funds for athletic shoes, clothes, meals, coach subsidies, and other training-related expenses for impoverished Ethiopian girls who are training to be professional runners.
Regarding Joanna Lumley’s Nile, Dr. Ortman points out that in her otherwise captivating documentary, the narrator makes a few errors.
The popular British actress “doesn’t get everything quite right, including the name of the team, which is the ‘Simien Girl Runners’ and not ‘Girls Gotta Run’,” Ortman said in an email sent to GGRF’s supporters. “She also mistakenly credits a Debark hotel for donating after practice meals to the team, meals that in fact GGRF pays for. And the girls who hold up their ‘bad’ shoes at the meal they share with her there are not GGRF-sponsored members of the team, but girls who sometimes run with them because they would like to be members of the team.” But, she adds, “It is still fabulous footage, a heartwarming segment, and clear she is quite taken with our girls.”
In an interview with ITV.com, Ms Lumley was asked, “Who was the most interesting or fascinating person you met on the trip?” Her answer: “The Simian girl runners have stuck in my heart.”
And what was the most amazing country Lumley visited? “I think the most astonishing country was Ethiopia,” she says.