Opening Doors to Girls’ Schooling

Jacqueline Audigé was only 8 when her parents chose her over 13 older siblings to send to school two hours from their home in Cameroon. Increasingly burdened by the lack of emotional and financial support, she was forced to drop out of high school.

Today Audigé ’04, M.A. ’07 hopes to save girls in rural Cameroon from enduring similar hardships. She is founder and CEO of Aumazo, a nonprofit that seeks to stimulate girls’ interest in education and develop secondary schools with free tuition. The construction of Aumazo’s first boarding school is under way, and Audigé hopes to welcome the first 50 students in Fall 2012.

“Girls will feel valued and safe where they are,” she says. Audigé spent 10 years separated from her family to pursue her education in the city of Mbanga because there was no middle or high school in Bankondji, her native village. Because of the distance, her parents could only visit once a year.

Such stories are common in the African nation, where due to poverty, gender inequalities, cultural traditions and lack of facilities, only 22 percent of girls are enrolled in secondary school, compared to 28 percent of boys, according to UNICEF.

When Audigé married and moved to the United States with her family, she began her education anew, culminating in undergraduate and master’s degrees from the university—all while raising five children. “May 20, 2007, was the best day of my life,” Audigé says of her last graduation day.

While earning her graduate degree at the Robert H. Smith School of Business, she launched Aumazo. She formed its name from the “Au” of her last name and the “Ma” and “Zo” that begin her children’s first names.

Aumazo was recognized nationally in 2010 in the Great Nonprofits’ Top-Rated List of Women’s Empowerment Nonprofits. She also was one of the “heroes and ultimate viewers” on the “Ultimate Favorite Things” episode of “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in November. Audigé is auctioning some of the prizes she took home to raise more money for the school. —MLB

FROM TICKET BUYER TO IMAGE MAKER

JARED PAUL '99 WENT from seeing the Smashing Pumpkins perform at Lollapalooza to managing them just over a decade later.

The former theatre major has built a successful career as a music manager, comanaging “American Idol” finalist and Oscarwinning actress Jennifer Hudson and “Dancing with the Stars” dancer and country singer Julianne Hough. This summer, he’ll repeat his role as manager of the highly popular Glee Live! tour.

He credits his Maryland experience with a large part of his transformation from ticket buyer to image maker, whether it was learning production and set design or balancing classes with a full-time job booking gigs at the Verizon Center in Washington, or his work with Student Entertainment Enterprises, or SEE.

“What I learned at Maryland—sound, lighting, PR and marketing in theatre—was key,” he says. “I learned that prep work is everything, especially in live entertainment. If you haven’t done your work ahead of time, when something does go wrong, it’s like a house of cards; it all comes down.”

The Rockville native began his foray into entertainment as a DJ for hire in high school, a business he brought with him to Maryland.

Paul and SEE helped bring George Clinton, Bob Dylan and the Fugees to campus.

Now a partner with Azoff Geary Paul Management, a division of mega-entertainment firm Front Line Management, Paul not only brings shows to stages, but he also helps to shape what is presented.

“It is challenging, even with a show like ‘Glee.’ What was most exciting was to watch a cast—who started out not as a true group since they read lines on set and recorded their vocals separately—become a unit,” says Paul. “When they walked out on stage they became New Directions [the television show’s glee club]. It was an amazing thing to watch.

“I love being a part of the creative process, working hand in hand with the artists,” he says. “If someone’s going to part with their hard-earned money [for a ticket], you’d better come with a lot of value.”

Creativity, a strong work ethic and the willingness to do just about anything, says Paul, make anything possible. The pecking order in entertainment is not as black and white as in other industries, he says. “Your first foray out of school could put you at the top. You could create a one-person show for Broadway or be the next big lighting director.” —MAB

GETTING DOWN AND DIRTY IN THE GULF

Teresa “Terry” McTigue’s goal was to beat the oil to shore.

The deputy director of the National Oceanographic and atmospheric administration’s center for coastal Monitoring and assessment and her colleagues abandoned their offices just days after the Deepwater Horizon well began spewing oil into the gulf of Mexico. in two weeks, McTigue ’84, who is an ecologist, and chemists and biologists conducted tests on 62 sites from the Brazos River in Texas to the Florida Keys to establish a baseline of the level of contaminants in the water, sediment and oysters.

Along the way, the researchers hit up friends along the gulf coast for available boats, subbed in zip-close bags and canning jars for lab equipment that didn’t arrive, and were touched by the kindness of local officials who opened parks to them or fishermen who simply gave them oysters.

“We were just screaming our way along the coast,” McTigue says. “it was an amazing experience. it felt like the communities we were going through were on our team.”

She and her NOAA team returned in November for more testing—at a less frenzied pace—to start determining the extent of the oil contamination on the environment and habitat. eventually, the data will become part of the federal government’s case against oil company BP.

McTigue got her first taste of fieldwork, in the Chesapeake Bay and at the Patuxent Research Refuge, while earning her zoology degree at Maryland.

She laughs as she recounts how her dad, who wanted her to become “an educated woman,” threatened to make her leave the university after seeing her first-semester grades. a part-time job in a professor’s lab washing glassware, she says, helped her focus on science. (it grew into a fouryear internship studying plankton.)

She says the research experience and broadbased education, including courses in geography and geology, gave her a leg up when she went on to earn her master’s at the university of south carolina and doctorate at Texas A&M. McTigue’s entire career has been with NOAA; after six years managing the restoration of 25,000 acres of wetlands along coastal Louisiana, she returned to Maryland to the agency’s headquarters to continue her work on a national level.

“I could be in my office all the time and be safe,” she says. “Or i could be out doing the cool stuff.” —LB

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