Joanne Rowland returned to visit a small community in Kenya where she has invested twenty years of effort to support severely disabled children in a small rural town.
Anyone who is acquainted with Fraserville resident Joanne Rowland would likely describe her as someone with a great deal of compassion.
She is also known to put that sentiment into action. Joanne spearheads the community vegetable garden where she and other volunteers grow produce for the Millbrook Food-share. On Thursdays she can be found making sandwiches as a member of the local Sandwich Sisters cohort for visitors to visit One City Peterborough in search of a meal. For the last few years she has co-hosted a fundraising event to pay off the mortgage for a home purchased by One City to provide an affordable housing option for some of their clients. In town, she is a regular volunteer at Community Care’s New to You shop. Further afield, she has also provided ongoing support to youngsters in a small rural town in Kenya through an organization called A Better World(ABW) for the last ten years.
Her first trip to Kenya in 2006 was triggered by a request from one of her physiotherapy professors at Dalhousie University who was seeking volunteers to continue his volunteer work in Kenya where worked with disabled children. Joanne was easily convinced to take up the cause, and headed with a small group to an isolated rural school in Ndanai, Kenya where they set about examining children with severe physical disabilities seeking to be accepted as students at the local school. Unable to get themselves to and from school, their only hope to attend was to convince the local authorities to let them live on the premises as boarding students.
For the next twelve years, Joanne made annual pilgrim-ages to this small town, where she and her ABW colleagues examined new groups of disabled children seeking help to improve their mobility so they could go to school. They identified which children would benefit from surgery, which needed assistive devices such as wheelchairs, prosthetics or technological supports and provided rehabilitation activities to support the children’s mobility.
Many of the students Joanne has encountered in Kenya suffer from disabilities stemming from difficult births, resulting in cerebral palsy. Some have experienced crippling accidents where they lost limbs, and others have been affected by disease. Their physical challenges leave them unable to perform manual work; in fact, most of them are unable to walk. While their bodies are constrained, their minds are not, and they understand that with-out an education, their futures are grim.
Kenya has a government-funded health care program but most of it is dedicated to life-saving treatments while common disorders such as clubfoot and spina bifida often go untreated, and more severe disabilities are ignored. ABW operates a Surgery and Rehab program to develop services in rural areas to provide surgery, post-operative care and rehab for children to help them function.
After a six-year hiatus triggered by Covid, Joanne felt the pull to return to Kenya again this year. In June she joined a group of ABW volunteers headed overseas to some of the organization’s locations, but chose to spend all of her time in Ndanai. She was welcomed by a group of her former students. Some of them had become high school, college and even university graduates; others had started new businesses and started families.
Dramatic changes have happened in the town since Joanne’s first trip. The school at Nbanai has expanded, with more classrooms, dorms, a kitchen and dining area. The former dorm has been trans-formed into a rehab clinic. An orthopedic surgeon has set up shop in town. Surgical results are much improved thanks to the availability of post-operative care including physiotherapy. The project with the most dramatic impact was the development of a large community well which eliminated the need to haul water.
In her interactions with these hugely challenged young people, Joanne is constantly struck by their attitude of appreciation and their compassion for others. She believes that this stems in part from their acceptance within their community. These students are not perceived as outsiders or somehow “less than” their physically-whole counterparts, but are valued members of the community. They have attracted investments that benefit the entire area, and their energy, intelligence and creativity have allowed them to develop futures with potential defined by their own energy and effort. Despite some very severe physical limitations, these students find purpose and joy in their lives, and some of it comes from helping themselves and each other. A student called Jefferson exemplifies this attitude. Unable to use his hands, he has learned to write with his feet, which are also disfigured. He explains that “Missing hands and legs is not the end of life”. He wants to become a lawyer.
A Better World was established in 1990 by two young men in Alberta looking to invest $5,000 in a development project. They decided to pay for reconstructive surgery for 15 children in Kenya which enabled the youngsters to walk for the first time. The success of their venture attracted other donations to support their humanitarian work, and now A Better World has projects in 15 countries and has invested $35.7 million in education, essential healthcare and clean water.
Joanne is one of our neighbours who quietly shows us the many ways we can make this a better world with efforts large and small, at home or abroad. Thank you for your incredible example.