The beginning of the holiday season is the time when people start thinking about helping those in need. But for a collection of Oak Park and River Forest women, every season is the time to help.
On a Friday morning, four current and former residents gather at a table at Buzz Café in Oak Park to talk about their efforts to help poverty-stricken people in Africa. While many of them have never met before, they are all helping in surprisingly similar ways, whether it’s through helping refugees, encouraging education for overlooked African women, or hiking Kilimanjaro to raise funds for libraries.
“At first I was struck by the poverty,” said Linda Stolz, describing her first trip to Africa in 2002, “but I was also struck by the warmth, hospitality and sense of giving.”
Stolz, Anne Sweeney and Amy Maglio all frequently travel to Africa to help through various charitable organizations, while Kate Wester, owner of Yoga Trek in Oak Park, is doing her part by hosting a fundraiser for Sweeney’s non-profit organization. The three shared the same experience when they went to Africa for the first time — surprised by the poverty but encouraged by the warmth and welcoming nature of the locals. They all knew immediately that they wanted to do their part to help.
For Sweeney, a former River Forest resident who now lives in Chicago, it’s about helping young female refugees in Nairobi, Kenya, find a way to be self-sufficient. She is the co-executive director of Heshima Kenya, a non-profit organization affiliated with the United Nations. She said all of the young women start off hopeless given their history of abuse or chaos.
“I know, for myself, I wanted to do something where people could really become empowered,” Sweeney said. “When I worked in the refugee camps, there was little I could do. The problem is so enormous. You try and find different ways to support them but little impact is made. So we wanted to do something where you could see impact. Every time we go back, you can see these girls in our program are growing.”
The group’s current project is to help the women gain confidence and become self-sufficient by teaching them how to make and sell tie-dye scarves, which will be sold at a fundraiser at 7 p.m. Friday, Dec. 3 at Yoga Trek, 911 S. Lombard Ave. The scarves will be sold for $30, which will go to directly assist the unaccompanied and orphaned refugee children in Nairobi, where more than 5,000 currently live.
“For me and a lot of Oak Park people, it about the plight of these young women,” Wester said
For Maglio, an Oak Park resident, the focus is on education. She is the executive director of the Woman’s Global Education Project, which focuses on educating young African women who often do not go to school for a variety of reasons, such as lack of money, household responsibilities or the overall lack of emphasis on the importance of education for women.
She recalls meeting a nine-year-old African girl when she was there with the Peace Corps in the ’90s. Originally, the girl could not attend, but with Maglio’s help, she was able to get into boarding school and is now training to be a nurse. Maglio said that is one example of how far the young women can go with the proper assistance, pointing out that every year of education statistically decreases common problems facing African women, like AIDS, infant mortality and malnutrition.
“We are doing what we can do at any level to get them into school,” Maglio said. “The issue is to convince them and the community of the importance of a girl’s education.”
Stolz, of Oak Park, want to help improve three existing African libraries and to build three more. She is the director of programs for the Global Alliance of Africa, a non-profit that helps vulnerable children across the continent. The organization Kili Climbs every year since 2002 to help raise funds. But this year, Stolz will be making her first climb of Mt. Kilimanjaro to raise funds for the library initiative. She will climb with her two sons, Paul, 22, and Jacob, 18.
The focus of both the library project and the organization as a whole is to lift Africans living in slums rural areas out of poverty.
For the women, the specifics differ but the overall goal is the same, to help vulnerable, abused or undereducated Africans rise up to a better life.
“If you address their basic needs, they will start seeing a future for themselves,” Sweeney said.
For more information or to help, go to www.heshimakenya.org, www.globalallianceafrica.org, or www.womensglobal.org.
