May 14, 2005 |
Terri Jo Ryan Tribune-Herald staff writer |
For 35 years, Christiana Owusu has been taking care of neighborhood youngsters in her village in Ghana.
She would pick up toddlers in her village, Twifo-Hemang, and take them to her family’s home, where she would look after them while their parents worked in the fields as subsistence farmers.
Last September, Owusu fulfilled a lifelong dream of opening a child care center in her village – a project made possible in large part through the support of Lake Shore Baptist Church in Waco.
The link between Texas and Ghana was formed about six years ago, said Lake Shore associate pastor Sharlande Sledge, when Owusu and her husband Robert, then a doctoral student at Baylor University, joined the church. Robert Y. Owusu, an ordained minister who was earning a degree in church state studies, graduated in 2003.
Christiana Owusu, who turns 46 on Tuesday , worked in Lake Shore’s child-care center during her husband’s Baylor years, Sledge said, and took an active role in church life during their stay in Central Texas. So when the African woman shared her dream of opening a children’s center in her homeland with her Lake Shore friends, they started chipping in.
“Lake Shore members have supported the development of the children’s center with donations of money, supplies, clothing, toys, medications and tools – and with our prayers,” said Sledge.
Tuesday, Owusu visited the weekly women’s morning Bible study at Lake Shore to thank her supporters and make new friends for Shalom Children’s Center, which opened for its first school year on Sept. 7. While her husband was teaching a seminary course in Atlanta this semester as a visiting professor, she came to Waco on May 6 to help in a garage sale some church members conducted to support the fledgling enterprise. They raised $700 in one day – not a princely sum, but one that goes a long way in an impoverished African nation.
“It had always been my dream to help the children of the village where I grew up,” said Owusu, in a brief interview before her flight back to Atlanta.
Even while she and her husband attended services in Waco during his student years, their hearts were back in Africa, she added. She recalled from her youth how village children were either left alone to roam, or left with older siblings who played rather than tend to their little charges.
The summer of 2004, Sledge said, Lake Shore raised funds to erect the children’s center. A piece of land covered in bamboo was cleared with machetes by Owusu’s family and friends, and a simple cinderblock building with four classrooms, two toilets and an office was constructed. Even with a dirt-floor, the center, for ages 2-5, is now the nicest structure in town, Owusu said.
All the cooking is done in an open-air field kitchen , with only a simple bamboo awning providing shade to the sweltering cooking staff. So Lake Shore is raising money for a kitchen/dining hall facility.
Sledge said church members are working on a sponsorship program that would buy chairs and tables for the school, as well as cover the cost of buying school uniforms for the students. Ghana law requires that students wear a uniform to school. Owusu also requires the children to wear shoes.
Another Lake Shore goal is to help with the school’s cash flow, Sledge added. The six teachers, for example, when they get paid, only get $30 per month for their services.
Owusu and her husband, who teaches at Central University College in Accra, Ghana, will return to Africa by the end of the month, Owusu said. They have a a 16-year-old daughter, Evelyn.
“Waco feels like a second home to me,” Owusu said. Even though she and her husband have met many Ghanaians like themselves in Atlanta, it is “a city full of strangers.”