Bolingbrook Teacher Answers Call to Help Children in West Africa

Brooks Middle School seventh-grade social studies teacher Kathy O’Dwyer hands a ninth-grade school diploma to 17-year-old Liberian student Johnson Moore. Tragically, Moore later contracted the Ebola virus and died. Submitted by Valley View School District.

The Bolingbrook community is well aware of the fact that for 13 years Brooks Middle School teacher Kathy O’Dwyer has played a key role in the learning process for literally hundreds of Bolingbrook middle school students.

But what many folks don’t know is that, for much of that time, O’Dwyer and her husband, Bob, have also played key roles in the lives of hundreds of West African students through educational, religious and residential facilities they helped found in Liberia.

“We’re lay Franciscans. We believe in helping the poor,” O’Dwyer said. “We believe this is our calling in life.”

Formed more than a decade ago near the end of the 14-year Liberian civil war by a group of supporters from coast-to-coast, the Franciscan Works Liberia Mission began with a small make-shift school for eight boys.

“There were many children with no family at all,” the Brooks 7th grade social studies teacher recalled. “We felt a calling to help them.”

Today the complex, located in Black Tom Town just outside Monrovia, includes a school with more than 300 students in grades K-9, a church, a dormitory that houses 110 children attending the school, and a working farm.

“Things have grown,” said O’Dwyer, who serves as a member of the group’s Advisory Board while her husband is President of the overall organization. “We recently celebrated our first college graduate. And 10 of our students just graduated from high school and will soon go to college. We are so proud.”

With the Ebola crisis flaring, the school recently fulfilled a more important role for the country, according to O’Dwyer, who said regular classes were suspended and the 25-acre campus became a quarantine area for roughly 30 children who had been exposed to Ebola in their communities. Keeping them on campus allowed the children to continue their education at a time when most educational facilities in the country were (and continue to remain) closed.

“All of them have been healthy and the 21-day quarantine period ended (in late November),” O’Dwyer said, adding Liberia is making huge inroads in the battle against the virus which gives her group hope the complex can return to normalcy soon. (Recent news reports confirm that the epidemic is indeed easing in Liberia.)

O’Dwyer, who has been able to visit the complex several times during the summer, says helping with fundraising is one of her biggest duties.

“It takes a lot of money to take care of a kid and put him through school,” she said. “We’d like to build another campus. We’d like to have more students with us. The people in our village would really like us to build a high school.

“I wish I could do more. If we had more resources, we could do more,” she added. “It’s what everybody should be doing. If everybody did one little thing to help someone else, the world would be a much better place.”

More information on the group is available at www.franciscanworks.org