STEMM orphanage drive halfway there
Meyers push for adoption of Tanzanian orphans
By John Quinlan, Journal staff writer | Posted: Monday, October 29, 2007
A Le Mars college student's summer visit to a number of hospitals and orphanages in AIDS-devastated Tanzania was a real eye opener.
"I really didn't know what to expect when I went," said Kendra Homan, 23, a recent Briar Cliff graduate who is a grad student at Mankato State University in Minnesota. "The trip was definitely worth it for me in that it opened my eyes to what was really going on in the world, and helped me really grow in my faith.
"But for me, the most important part was just being there with (the orphans) and being able to give them the undivided attention that they don't get normally."
Homan is one of 19 Siouxlanders who returned in August from STEMM's semi-annual trip to Tanzania.
STEMM (Siouxland-Tanzania Education Medical Ministries) was started 11 years ago by Siouxland orthopaedic surgeon Dr. Steven Meyer, STEMM's president.
The late summer trip was a success as the STEMM group visited six or eight hospitals in Tanzania, looking at ways to expand both orthopaedic and non-orthopaedic medical services. In 11 years, Meyer figures he has performed more than 500 orthopaedic surgeries in Tanzania.
And visits to Tanzanian orphanages and schools gave the STEMM folks some ideas about how to manage the $1 million orphanage they hope to build in that country thanks to a fund drive that the group launched at last November's annual auction gala.
Halfway there
Meyer said STEMM is about halfway through its fundraising campaign, with $500,000 donated or pledged. This includes eight or nine major donors, those giving at least $50,000. His goal is to have $750,000 before the annual STEMM fundraiser Nov. 29 at the Marina Inn in South Sioux City.
"We are trying to raise $1.2 million. That will not only build it, but endow it," he said of the orphanage. The plan is to have 20 modest Tanzanian-style homes on a 100-acre plot surrounding a basic community center. Each house would have a real family unit, housing eight to 10 kids ranging in age from newborns to 15-year-olds -- each house supervised by a hired "mama."
Homan said it will be "awesome" that the kids will get undivided attention from this mother figure. "They've never had it before. I can't wait to see it get started," she said.
And Meyer hopes that each of the 20 individual houses will be directly linked to a major donor.
For example, his office, the Center for Neurosciences, Orthopaedics & Spine at Dakota Dunes, has decided to fund a house. "So every time we go to Tanzania, we will take with us letters and gifts and shoes from our office to the kids in that house, and then we'll bring back letters and pictures from those kids, and really intimately develop a relationship with the donors and those kids," Meyer said. Eventually, a guest house will be built on the orphanage grounds, a place for visiting Siouxlanders to stay.
"We really look at this as being an opportunity to develop that two-way street between Tanzania and Siouxland, getting people's lives involved in the Tanzanian kids' lives," he said. "I think that has a real impact on how your perspective is."
Land bought, contractor next
Meyer and his wife Dana plan to hire a contractor when they return to Tanzania in December. The land has already been purchased. The original plan was to buy a 10-acre tract, but the opportunity arose to get 100 acres at half-price, so they took it. "The hundred acres is going to allow us to not only be self-sustaining from a food standpoint, but give the kids an opportunity to learn Tanzanian skills that they would have learned had they been in their villages," he said.
The STEMM volunteers also visited the schools that are teaching 550 Tanzanian children who STEMM is putting through high school. The group's initial goal 10 years ago had been to send 50 kids a year to high school. A $150 scholarship donation to STEMM, Meyer noted, can send a child to high school for one year.
Dana Meyer, making her first visit to Tanzania in 10 years, said the poverty is overwhelming. "But for me it was great to see firsthand the kids. To see them -- that was overwhelming to me," she said.
Over the last 11 years, though, STEMM volunteers have been such regular visitors to these orphanages and hospitals that they are easily recognized. "People will walk by and they just start, as we're playing with the kids and we're doing chalk and playing volleyball and cleaning the house and sweeping outside" he said, "And people walk by and say, 'Oh, the moms and dads are back!'
"Yeah, the moms and dads are back. We're like surrogate parents."
Adoptions possible?
Though Tanzania frowns on international adoptions, the STEMM orphanage project may give Siouxlanders an opportunity, at some point, to adopt Tanzanian orphans, Dana Meyer said.
"They have really strict rules because culturally they have never needed to have adoption," Dr. Steve Meyer said, "because there were very few orphans. If a mom or dad died, the cousins or aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters would take the kids in."
The AIDS epidemic has changed that dynamic, wiping out entire villages and the family members who would be there for the orphans. "And so now there is this need for adoption, but the infrastructure's not there," he said.
Meyer said there is also an unfounded concern that kids adopted out will lose their heritage.
"We want to bring in this shared concept of Tanzanians and Siouxlanders working together to help these kids at an orphanage setting to assure them that if these kids are adopted, we'll connect them with their heritage and that they will become the next generation of STEMM leaders, so to speak," he said.
And adoptions will free up space at the orphanage to accommodate more children, he added,
A proposal for relaxed restrictions on foreign adoptions is one the Meyers hope to present to Tanzanian leaders in December when they attend the wedding of Lazaro Nyaland, an Iowa-educated member of Tanzania's Parliament who is a co-founder of STEMM. At the wedding, Meyer noted, they will be seated at the guest table with the country's president and prime minister who they hope to petition for approval of a test case involving possibly 10 adoptions through STEMM. Other Tanzanian government ministers will also be present.
"So we'll basically make a commitment to screen and get these kids in the right families," he said. "And then we'll report back to the government consistently how the kids are doing."
If this works, then a decade from now there could be thousands of foreign adoptions, Meyer said, "placing these kids that literally are dying daily in the streets of Tanzania as orphans into great loving Christian homes throughout America and Europe."
"I really didn't know what to expect when I went," said Kendra Homan, 23, a recent Briar Cliff graduate who is a grad student at Mankato State University in Minnesota. "The trip was definitely worth it for me in that it opened my eyes to what was really going on in the world, and helped me really grow in my faith.
"But for me, the most important part was just being there with (the orphans) and being able to give them the undivided attention that they don't get normally."
Homan is one of 19 Siouxlanders who returned in August from STEMM's semi-annual trip to Tanzania.
STEMM (Siouxland-Tanzania Education Medical Ministries) was started 11 years ago by Siouxland orthopaedic surgeon Dr. Steven Meyer, STEMM's president.
The late summer trip was a success as the STEMM group visited six or eight hospitals in Tanzania, looking at ways to expand both orthopaedic and non-orthopaedic medical services. In 11 years, Meyer figures he has performed more than 500 orthopaedic surgeries in Tanzania.
And visits to Tanzanian orphanages and schools gave the STEMM folks some ideas about how to manage the $1 million orphanage they hope to build in that country thanks to a fund drive that the group launched at last November's annual auction gala.
Halfway there
Meyer said STEMM is about halfway through its fundraising campaign, with $500,000 donated or pledged. This includes eight or nine major donors, those giving at least $50,000. His goal is to have $750,000 before the annual STEMM fundraiser Nov. 29 at the Marina Inn in South Sioux City.
"We are trying to raise $1.2 million. That will not only build it, but endow it," he said of the orphanage. The plan is to have 20 modest Tanzanian-style homes on a 100-acre plot surrounding a basic community center. Each house would have a real family unit, housing eight to 10 kids ranging in age from newborns to 15-year-olds -- each house supervised by a hired "mama."
Homan said it will be "awesome" that the kids will get undivided attention from this mother figure. "They've never had it before. I can't wait to see it get started," she said.
And Meyer hopes that each of the 20 individual houses will be directly linked to a major donor.
For example, his office, the Center for Neurosciences, Orthopaedics & Spine at Dakota Dunes, has decided to fund a house. "So every time we go to Tanzania, we will take with us letters and gifts and shoes from our office to the kids in that house, and then we'll bring back letters and pictures from those kids, and really intimately develop a relationship with the donors and those kids," Meyer said. Eventually, a guest house will be built on the orphanage grounds, a place for visiting Siouxlanders to stay.
"We really look at this as being an opportunity to develop that two-way street between Tanzania and Siouxland, getting people's lives involved in the Tanzanian kids' lives," he said. "I think that has a real impact on how your perspective is."
Land bought, contractor next
Meyer and his wife Dana plan to hire a contractor when they return to Tanzania in December. The land has already been purchased. The original plan was to buy a 10-acre tract, but the opportunity arose to get 100 acres at half-price, so they took it. "The hundred acres is going to allow us to not only be self-sustaining from a food standpoint, but give the kids an opportunity to learn Tanzanian skills that they would have learned had they been in their villages," he said.
The STEMM volunteers also visited the schools that are teaching 550 Tanzanian children who STEMM is putting through high school. The group's initial goal 10 years ago had been to send 50 kids a year to high school. A $150 scholarship donation to STEMM, Meyer noted, can send a child to high school for one year.
Dana Meyer, making her first visit to Tanzania in 10 years, said the poverty is overwhelming. "But for me it was great to see firsthand the kids. To see them -- that was overwhelming to me," she said.
Over the last 11 years, though, STEMM volunteers have been such regular visitors to these orphanages and hospitals that they are easily recognized. "People will walk by and they just start, as we're playing with the kids and we're doing chalk and playing volleyball and cleaning the house and sweeping outside" he said, "And people walk by and say, 'Oh, the moms and dads are back!'
"Yeah, the moms and dads are back. We're like surrogate parents."
Adoptions possible?
Though Tanzania frowns on international adoptions, the STEMM orphanage project may give Siouxlanders an opportunity, at some point, to adopt Tanzanian orphans, Dana Meyer said.
"They have really strict rules because culturally they have never needed to have adoption," Dr. Steve Meyer said, "because there were very few orphans. If a mom or dad died, the cousins or aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters would take the kids in."
The AIDS epidemic has changed that dynamic, wiping out entire villages and the family members who would be there for the orphans. "And so now there is this need for adoption, but the infrastructure's not there," he said.
Meyer said there is also an unfounded concern that kids adopted out will lose their heritage.
"We want to bring in this shared concept of Tanzanians and Siouxlanders working together to help these kids at an orphanage setting to assure them that if these kids are adopted, we'll connect them with their heritage and that they will become the next generation of STEMM leaders, so to speak," he said.
And adoptions will free up space at the orphanage to accommodate more children, he added,
A proposal for relaxed restrictions on foreign adoptions is one the Meyers hope to present to Tanzanian leaders in December when they attend the wedding of Lazaro Nyaland, an Iowa-educated member of Tanzania's Parliament who is a co-founder of STEMM. At the wedding, Meyer noted, they will be seated at the guest table with the country's president and prime minister who they hope to petition for approval of a test case involving possibly 10 adoptions through STEMM. Other Tanzanian government ministers will also be present.
"So we'll basically make a commitment to screen and get these kids in the right families," he said. "And then we'll report back to the government consistently how the kids are doing."
If this works, then a decade from now there could be thousands of foreign adoptions, Meyer said, "placing these kids that literally are dying daily in the streets of Tanzania as orphans into great loving Christian homes throughout America and Europe."
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