Mary Ann McCoy found retirement a bit too leisurely. She played golf, traveled with her husband Michael, then said, “There must be more to life than this.”
In November 2000, Michael handed her a copy of Fortune magazine, saying, “You want something to do? How about this?” It featured a story called “Death of a Continent: Africa will never be the same. AIDS is killing its best and brightest, leaving a generation of orphans behind.”
The writer, Brian O’Reilly, noted that AIDS is “killing off the most productive people in Africa: the well educated, the prosperous, the powerful, the parents of young children.” Toward the end of the article, he said what “ordinary” people can do, and one suggestion was, “Persuade your church to bankroll a village orphanage.”
Mary Ann McCoy took it a step further. She searched on the Web for an organization to work with and found the AIDS Orphans Education Trust (AOET), and asked what she could do to help.
“They said they had a little girl whose mother had just died of AIDS, her father had previously died of AIDS, and they would appreciate the finances to keep her in school,” recalled McCoy. “I sponsored more and more, and then thought I’d have to get others involved.”
She also traveled to Uganda, where there are approximately 2 million children orphaned by AIDS. On her first trip she met Grace, an AIDS sufferer who was the arts and crafts coordinator at AOET, teaching women how to make items out of banana fibers. Grace also educated other Ugandan women about AIDS, said McCoy, and this was five years ago when people didn’t talk about it and families affected by it were ostracized.
“I got to know Grace really well,” she said. “She was probably 31, had two children of her own and two she was caring for whose parents had died of AIDS. We talked about her hopes and dreams and the children’s futures.”
“When I was getting ready to leave, she came up to me and told me she’d never see me again in this life,” recalled McCoy. “She turned to me and said, ‘Mary Ann, who’s going to take care of my children?’ I promised her I’d do everything I could.”
“That’s my commitment,” McCoy continued. “Because of her children, and her, I’m doing what I’m doing.”
Her organization, called Children of Grace, is a nonprofit volunteer program affiliated with the Community Presbyterian Church in Danville. It provides money and other resources to the orphans and widows of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Uganda, working with AOET.
“We’re mission partners,” McCoy said. “I raise support for their organization and sponsor children for their organization.”
AOET’s New Victory Primary School in Mbiko, a village that has been ravaged by HIV/AIDS, for a long time did not have enough funding to give every child lunch, although it was often their only meal of the day. Fifty students sponsored through Children of Grace were fed from a big pot of corn meal each lunch time but the rest of the 300 students went hungry.
“Danville volunteers that work for Children of Grace took on the project and went out and raised $8,000,” said McCoy. “They will use that over the next couple of years (to feed the non-sponsored students), then we plan to start a farming project at the school.” That project will enable the school to be self-sustaining with its lunch program.
Another big event in McCoy’s life is her newly adopted daughter Zahara, who became an American citizen when their plane touched down in Seattle on Christmas Eve. They brought her into their home two years ago on a student visa, and she attends the Athenian School.
“We fell in love with her and thought we’d better make her our daughter,” said McCoy. She said they completed the final adoption process in Uganda in a record two weeks, thanks largely to her husband’s efficiency in having every paper the government possibly could have requested.
“It was such a dream,” recalled McCoy. “My husband and I sat in the U.S. Embassies in Nairobi and Kampala and as I sat there I heard person after person denied. Some women left in tears because they hadn’t done all the paperwork.”
The night before they left Uganda, they held a celebration. “About 175 people from her village came,” said McCoy. “We had Father Christmas and a band.”
Groundbreaking ceremonies took place in June for the new Rehaboth Primary School in the village of Bugembe, being built by Children of Grace to accommodate 320 children affected by HIV/AIDS. People can still help out by purchasing desks, blackboards and school supplies as well as sponsoring children, said McCoy. The school will have eight classrooms with electrical outlets and overhead lighting, as well as a library and computer room, administrative offices, kitchen and restrooms with running water.
Children of Grace held a major fundraiser in 2004 at the Blackhawk Country Club for the construction of the school, which raised over $75,000. The Community Presbyterian Church donated $32,000 and other contributions total $25,000. The group sends teams over each year to volunteer at the HIV/AIDS clinics and schools.
Children of Grace is also working with AOET to build a better New Victory Primary School in Mbiko. “This is an extremely poor school with classrooms that are virtually crumbling,” said McCoy. “We have purchased 20 acres of land so that they can eventually build a new school on the property.” She said a donor here gave money for a permanent latrine, which should be started sometime this month, and they plan to put up temporary classrooms so they can stop paying rent at the old school.
Anyone who wants to help can donate money to help the farming project, she noted. “You can buy a pig for our piggery for $10. Chickens are five for $20,” she said. “It’s really nothing and it really makes a huge difference.” Sponsoring a child costs $30 a month, which provides school fees, uniforms, scholastic materials, lunch and health care. Contact Mary Ann McCoy at 736-7533 or e-mail maryann@childrenofgrace.com.
As director of Children of Grace and as the newly adopted mother of Zahara, she has learned there indeed can be more to life than a leisurely retirement.
On a mission
Danville couple energized by experiences in Uganda
When Velda Wardley-Boersma and David Boersma traveled from their home in Danville to Uganda last summer, they worked at schools and clinics to help the families affected by AIDS. She also left behind for the African women the light cotton skirts and blouses her mother made her especially for the trip.
David, a police lieutenant in Alameda, gave every child a badge that said “Junior Police,” which they proudly attached to their clothing. Velda, a nutritionist, counseled Ugandan women about the importance of eating well when they are HIV-positive.
Nonetheless Velda summed up the experience: “They gave us more than we gave them.”
“The Ugandan people are very friendly,” she said. “I can’t tell you how many people invited us into their homes to just talk to us, and find out where we’re from.”
They were part of a mission of 11 people sponsored by Children of Grace to help Ugandan orphans and widows of the AIDS epidemic. Family and friends helped them pay for the trip as well as a mission scholarship. They prepared beforehand with classes at Community Presbyterian Church on what to expect, plus had cultural training in Berkeley.
After a 10-hour plane ride to England and a seven-hour layover in London, the team still had a nine-and-a-half-hour plane ride to Entebbe, then a three-hour ride to the village. They traveled in three vans along the red dirt roads, weighted down with medical and school supplies as well as food snacks. They bunked in special quarters that house missionaries when they visit.
“We started work at 9 in the morning,” recalled Velda. “From 8:30 to 9, we had spiritual devotions; we would pray and sing hymns, and a staff member would give a mini-sermon.” She said AIDS Orphans Education Trust has a doctor, pharmacist, counselor and medical technician who go out into the bush to the villages several hours away to examine the people, test them for HIV and dispense medicine.
“Our first day, we went out on this medical outreach,” she said. “There were all these children, about 50 to 60 children, greeting us. They were in awe of us and we were in awe of them.”
They were staring, giving greetings and high-fives to each other, when Velda found herself surrounded alone in a circle of children in what she called an “incredible” experience.
“They put up their hands and started chanting,” she remembered. “I chanted with them. I could feel their energy–mine to them and theirs to me.”
She said the team examined many adults for HIV. David helped with the testing, putting the solution on the litmus paper, while Velda sat in on the examination with the doctor. They tested only one child. “Unfortunately she came out positive,” Velda said quietly.
They also worked at the school in the village of Bugembe, teaching arts and crafts with the supplies they had brought.
“Every single class stood up and greeted us with a song,” said Velda. “There was this one little girl named Ruthie we became very attached to. Both of her parents died of AIDS, she’s 10 and now being raised by her grandmother. The kids in her class wrote this song about AIDS, saying we shouldn’t stigmatize children because they have parents who died of AIDS, that it affects the old, the young, the Asian, the American. It was very touching.”
She said a lot of the children at the school were orphaned and being raised by neighbors. One of the directors at AOET is raising 14 children–his own five, another five of his brother who died of AIDS, and four of another family member who also died of AIDS.
They left with so many impressions–the eight-foot anthills; the pride of the people, who dressed nicely every day in colorful clothing; the children chewing on the sugar cane; the mud huts in the villages; the small shops in the towns where the people lived in back; the quiet and lushness of the villages with their palm and mango trees, and the corn fields; the red dirt roads that turned quickly to mud in the equatorial downpours.
David recalled that when they arrived in Entebbe it seemed destitute, but they were to visit much poorer places in the next two weeks. “On the way back, I thought, ‘This is really a nice place,'” he said with a laugh.
“These people have nothing,” said Velda. “They are lucky if they have a roof over their heads. They have to go to a well for water and if the well is on someone else’s property, they have to pay for the water.”
“What was amazing to me was how happy, how giving they were, of their love and their culture. And how happy the children are. How accepting they were of us and how grateful they were that we were there, even though we just gave them arts and crafts and played with them.”
