In 2008, CottageCare® owners Tom and Sheri Schrader were visiting Cyabatanzi, a small village in Rwanda, to survey plots of land that would soon be filled with children’s homes funded by CottageCare® revenues.
Off in the distance, about 100 feet from the church, was an old woman in a home that was only pieces of tattered tin roof. She was raising her two orphaned grandchildren in the home, and she was blind from cataracts.
Tom and Sheri stood and stared.
“When we saw this, we were both so moved by it,” Tom said. “We felt like God had put her in our path, and we needed to do something about it.”
This experience would lead to the first of many Rwandan lives who the CottageCare® family would soon positively affect.
Building the Foundation
It began in 2007, when Tom and Sheri felt compelled to help a third-world country in any way they could. They remembered an acquaintance of theirs who was building children’s homes around the world, and they thought that would be a good way to give back – but in what country?
Rwanda, they decided.
“We cannot for the life of us come up with why Rwanda,” Tom said. “We don’t know anyone there, we’ve never been there, but when it came time to do it, we decided on Rwanda. A couple of days later I thought, ‘Where did Rwanda come from?’”
Rwanda actually turned out to be the perfect choice because of the needs of the country’s citizens and the humane services CottageCare® hoped to provide.
The country of Rwanda is located in Eastern Africa near the equator. Of the 11 million people who live there, 10 percent are orphans. “Though they are a vibrant, stable country and a building democracy, but they still have the scars of the 1994 genocide that started a cycle of widows, orphans and aids,” Tom said.
Thus, the CottageCare® Widows and Orphans Relief Fund was formed.
Laying the First Brick
During their first trip to Rwanda, Tom and Sheri partnered with a local pastor, Norman Paul Desire, who had been helping to improve local orphans and widows’ lives for many years.
“We met him through word of mouth,” Tom said. “Someone said to ‘check him out; he might be your man.’ It turned out, he was.”
Norman lacked the funds to do as much as he’d like within the local villages, and Tom and Sheri lacked the experience of how best to use the relief funds in a foreign country. The two parties immediately clicked and began working on ways to benefit the lives of the local orphans and widows.
The new partners spent much of the next 1 ½ weeks huddled around a table in meetings planning, brainstorming and budgeting how they could best assist those in need.
“We walked away with two programs that CottageCare® now funds 100 percent,” Tom said. “The first was for vulnerable children, for whom we would provide health care and education. The second was for the construction and support of children’s homes.”
Two plots of land were purchased to build children’s homes: one in Cyabatanzi and the other in Ntunga. But before they could build multiple homes, they had to build a model home as an experiment.
Tom and Sheri soon encountered the blind grandmother in Cyabatanzi and decided she and her orphaned grandchildren would be the recipients of the relief fund’s first home. The fund would later support her to visit an eye clinic in Tanzania to relieve her of cataracts.
Over the next few years, dozens of orphans would be provided homes, education and health care, and many widows would also be supported as caregivers in the homes. However, Sheri said that it was important to them that they did not create a situation of dependency.
“For the women, one thing we want for them is to have dignity of work, purpose and self-sustainment,” Sheri said. “We don’t want to give to a point of complete dependency. We love being able to help them because they need it, but we don’t want to do it 100 percent because we want them to maintain their roles within their families and villages.”
An example of this is a group of widows who make jewelry and asked Tom and Sheri to sell it for them back home.
“The jewelry is selling like hotcakes,” Sheri said. “We are very excited to be able to send extra money to them because people are buying it. Twenty dollars is an amazing amount of money over there in those conditions.”
A Better Place
In February 2012, Tom and Sheri returned to Rwanda to see the two new children’s’ homes that had been built. Norman had a surprise waiting for them.
“When we got there, Norman and his wife Mutesi had choreographed this event so all 70 kids were under one roof for a little presentation for us showing their appreciation to the CottageCare® family,” Tom said. “It was really cool seeing all of them at the same place.”
The CottageCare® Widows and Orphans Relief Fund provides school uniforms, books and school supplies to them that otherwise prevents them from attending school, and it also covers school fees. Furthermore, the relief fund continues to pay the orphans’ healthcare premiums.
And finally, once construction is finished, the CottageCare® family will have helped build 10 to 12 children’s homes which will house 6 to 8 orphans each.
During this trip, Sheri found herself walking through one of the children’s homes reminiscing how this project was just an idea five years ago. “It is almost indescribable to walk in and see their bunk beds, their blankets, their backpacks full of books, and that they are dressed, cared for, and actually have smiles on their faces,” Sheri said. “I don’t know how to fully describe it, but it is truly an awesome feeling.”
Tom says that every CottageCare® customer should be proud of what has been accomplished in Rwanda, and that everyone involved, whether customer or employee, is a benefactor of the relief effort.
Tom said, “I find myself wandering around the houses there too, and I don’t equate it to something that just Sheri and I have done, but something that has been done by many people, including every CottageCare® customer and employee, and how really cool that is.”
