printer-friendly
cover story
A heart in Africa
A teacher takes her art, her love of children and her passion for service to short-term work overseas.
by Melanie Zuercher
Nan (Abrahams) Graber ’72 is having the time of her life.
For years, Nan dreamed of doing aid work overseas. She grew up in the Hillsboro area, the daughter of Ethel ’67 and Norman ’49 Abrahams. At Bethel, she majored in art and took her first trip out of the United States, to Colombia for a Bethel interterm. “I got independent study credit,” she says, “and I caught the travel bug.”
Also at Bethel, Nan met Don Graber ’71 from South Dakota. After marriage and graduation, Nan and Don worked for several years at Frontier Boys Village in Larkspur, Colo., in the Colorado Springs-Monument-Palmer Lake area where the Grabers have lived ever since.
Since then, Nan has earned a master’s degree in art therapy, which she practiced for a period of time. She has owned an art shop and been a professional potter, but “burned out my wrists by the time I was in my 40s.” Fifteen years ago, she began teaching K-5 art at Grace Best Elementary School in Monument. Don has a private counseling practice.
The couple has two daughters, Dana Graber Ladek, the Iraq specialist for the International Organization for Migration, based in Amman, Jordan, and Nichole Graber, who works for the American Red Cross in Washington, D.C.
For a while, Nan had to indulge her travel bug vicariously through her daughters, especially Dana, who lived in Costa Rica before settling in Amman and has traveled all over the world promoting human rights and human welfare.
Then came the Mennonite World Conference Assembly in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, in 2003, and Nan got to go.
Like her several weeks in Colombia, this was another pivotal experience, all those years later. At the MWC Assembly, “I was exposed to other Mennonites from around the world, and to the crafts and culture of other parts of the world,” she says. She had gone to the assembly “not just to attend meetings, but also to volunteer. They placed me with the youth in the Global Village, which was a great experience.”
But even more important was what happened while she was standing in the registration line – an experience she considers “a call from God.” It was a long wait, at least two hours, and as she stood there, she began talking with a young Zimbabwean man who was about the age of her daughters.
“I had a backpack full of stuffed animals [that I planned to give away],” she says. The young man told her about the AIDS orphanages in the city and she said to him, “Here, you take these toys to give to those children.” But he responded, “No, you’re going to come and give them away yourself.”
The next day, she took a public bus to the orphanage and distributed the stuffed animals. “Some of the children began to cry,” she remembers. “They had never even held a toy, much less been given one of their own.
“As an elementary school teacher, I wanted to interact with kids,” she says, and with the orphanage experience, she knew she had found her calling. When she returned home to Colorado, “I did two things – I started praying and I went on the Internet.”
For a variety of reasons, Nan knew that long-term service work was not what she was called to do. “I’ve always wanted to do aid work – I haven’t seen myself as a missionary,” she says. So she looked for opportunities in “an English-speaking country, that were short-term, since I wanted to stay married” (Don strongly supported her but didn’t feel a similar call for himself).
She discovered an organization called Hope’s Promise, based nearby in Castle Rock, Colo., with orphan ministries in several African countries. In the summer of 2005, Nan taught kindergarten in an AIDS orphanage in Rehoboth, Namibia.
Until this year (2008), Nan has taken a different short-term assignment each summer. “I wanted to explore different options,” she says, “and they have all been very positive.”
Anyone can do what she has, she adds. “There are many deserving non-profit organizations out there that are eager to have volunteers.”
In 2006, she worked in another AIDS orphanage (this time under the auspices of Christ’s Hope International) in Keetmanshoop, Namibia, an institution that grew out of work by Youth for Christ.
“There are so many tragic situations,” she says of working with children, from age 5 to 18, whose parents or caregivers have died of HIV/AIDS. “There is a lot of trauma – some children saw their parents die. There are lots of nightmares.” And sometimes the children are sick – Nan will never forget holding a baby girl as she died of AIDS. “Her parents left her on a riverbank, in hope that another caregiver, or maybe the river, would take her to a better fate.
“But I’ve also seen so much hope in the eyes of the children,” she adds. “They are eternal optimists. Children everywhere love to play.” She takes yarn and pipe cleaners, which are cheap, lightweight, colorful and easy to buy in bulk, for crafts projects. She has watched children enjoy a puppet theater made out of a stack of old tires.
Both times she worked in orphanages, she took knitted hats – the first time 50, the next time 75 – that her Grace Best colleagues had made. One of the hat giveaways was in a nearby shantytown, a painful contrast to the orphanage that had seemed bare-bones before, she says.
After her second summer in an orphanage, Nan learned about the work of a local woman, Becky Kiser, who had discovered the plight of “fistula girls” in Ethiopia, a situation that has since gotten much wider attention, thanks to “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”
Fistula girls are Ethiopia’s untouchables. The condition causes urine and feces to leak from their bodies and most often results from childbirth, when the baby, pushing through the birth canal, causes tears in the bladder and sometimes the rectum.
The condition is almost unheard of in the United States, where a Caesarean section would be performed before such a traumatic birth ever took place. In Ethiopia, however, many women are smaller due to malnutrition and marry earlier, sometimes before puberty. They often give birth without a doctor or midwife present and frequently are victims of genital mutilation with the wounds inexpertly stitched, which can further narrow the birth canal.
Many Ethiopians, both Muslim and Christian, think fistula is a curse from God, yet it can be fixed with a simple operation. Dr. Catherine Hamlin founded the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital nearly 50 years ago with her late husband, Reginald, and the hospital performs the operations free. However, it can do only about 1,200 a year and an estimated 10,000 new cases appear annually, so the wait is long.
Kiser discovered that many girls and young women were simply living on the streets of Addis Ababa for weeks, months or years, waiting for a hospital bed. So she founded a shelter, the Trampled Rose, which opened its doors in 2006.
In the summer of 2007, Nan traveled to Ethiopia to volunteer at the Trampled Rose. She quickly discovered that one thing the girls needed was something to do. She thought about Mennonite Central Committee’s Ten Thousand Villages, a distributor of fairly traded handicrafts, that not only gives people in poverty a means to an income, but also – perhaps even more important for these young women – a sense of self-esteem.
Knitting was popular with the girls, she says, but she felt that for marketing purposes, “it needed to be something traditional, something African.” She hit on the idea of Imbenge baskets – which not only immediately said “Africa” but could be made using reeds, which can be picked anywhere there is open water, and recycled plastic grocery bags, of which there is an endless free supply.
“It didn’t catch on right away,” Nan says. “By the time I left last summer, they were learning, but they hadn’t perfected [the technique].”
However, several months later, a group of volunteers from the Colorado Springs area returned from the Trampled Rose with 90 brilliantly colored Imbenge baskets. As of this writing, Nan has sold them all and raised around $2,000.
This summer, Nan is staying home to have surgery on her “blown-out wrists” to repair the effects of carpal tunnel syndrome. But she is still busy doing her Africa aid work.
She is collecting purged textbooks from local schools, which get rid of them after about five years’ use, to send to orphanages. In her three years there, she discovered that the schools had few or no books.
She is doing speaking engagements for local women’s groups, civic clubs or anyone who will invite her to talk about the fistula project – five since April, which have been good opportunities to market the Imbenge baskets.
Ongoing projects are financially sponsoring five AIDS orphans and meeting with a group of women from Mountain Community Mennonite Church two miles down the road from the Grabers’ house, where the family has been active for 25 years. The women get together in each others’ homes regularly for a meal, donating what they would have spent at a restaurant to the fistula project.
The church has been an important source of support, Nan says, in terms of finances and, especially, prayer.
“Africa is in my heart,” Nan says. “I’ll work on Africa aid projects as long as I can – it’s a passion.”
She adds, “I want people to know that my Bethel education helped to prepare me for this.” It wasn’t only the chance to travel outside the country, she says. “I was prepared by my art and teaching classes. I was prepared by taking math and marketing. I was prepared by the service ethic of Mennonites.”
She has long believed that “education and literacy is the key to advancement,” and that has played into the work she has chosen to do in Africa.
She gives much credit to Bob Regier ’52. “He was a mentor, a role model, an advisor,” she says. “He hired me as the art assistant for two years. He was always very supportive.
“I remember questioning, when I was at Bethel, whether I wanted to go into public education. I said, ‘So much needs to change [in the public schools].’ Bob said, ‘We need people like you to go into public education and start making those changes.’ Talk about something staying with you for years.”