Native of Africa registers charity to help Ghanaians

By Jeanne Starmack

Poverty in Ghana is worse than any you see in the U.S., says a local woman who wants to help children there.

HERMITAGE, Pa. — Juliana Ferguson-Yasnowski never liked what she saw on the dusty roads in the remote countryside in Ghana — now, she’s realizing a dream to try to change it.

The Hermitage woman, who traveled a long road of her own from childhood in the West African nation to the life she has here, wants to make a difference for those she left behind.

For her now, it’s All About Children’s Needs, the nonprofit organization she’s formed to help kids in Africa.

As a child, Juliana used to ride out from her home in the township Medina with her grandfather to visit in the Volta region, where he was a public official.

In Medina, which is near the capital city of Accra, she and her family lived a comfortable, middle-class life in a modern home. Her father worked hard and made a good living as a land surveyor, she said, while her mother was a stay-at-home wife.

But on the sandy back roads that led out through the countryside, as she was jostled around in the car as it hit the potholes, she often saw children who weren’t living as well.

With no shoes, they would walk many miles to get a bucket of clean water to take back to their homes — small, mud huts grouped close together in the trees.

She saw 10-year-olds thrust into the role of adulthood, trying to take care of their smaller siblings.

She would see five or six of them eating from the same bowl because there wasn’t enough food for each of them to have one.

“There are children who cry every day because they don’t have enough food,” she said.

Poverty there, she said, is not like poverty in the United States, where at least there are social programs to help people with basic needs.

There are no such safety nets in Ghana. “It doesn’t compare,” Juliana said.

Lack of education, she believes, is the main reason such poverty exists there. If there are schools in the villages, it’s usually just one, where children of every age are crowded in.

Parents who didn’t go to school themselves don’t leave the countryside for jobs in the city because they don’t conceive of a different way to live. Their children grow up like them, she said.

When she turned 18, Juliana’s own education seemed about to come to an end.

“I wasn’t doing anything, and there wasn’t money for more education,” she said.

But she was lucky. A group of missionaries from a Lutheran church in Minneapolis had come to Medina, and they’d needed a host family.

She encountered them at her church, talked to her father, and the group came to live at her home. She showed them around and helped interpret for them.

The missionaries ended up asking her if she would like to come to the United States to continue her education.

“And they said they would try to get me a scholarship,” Juliana said.

That scholarship came through — a two-year ride at a Lutheran school in Iowa called Waldorf College.

Freshman homesickness was even more intense in another country and with a language barrier. Though English is Ghana’s official language, no one really uses it much, she explained. She spoke a language called Ewe — one of many local languages there. Her English, which she uses fluently now, was learned mainly after she arrived in Iowa.

She spent a lot of time there, she said, crying on the phone to her parents.

They encouraged her with words used by parents of college freshmen everywhere — “You can do it.” But this freshman had to tape-record all her professors’ lectures, because they talked “so fast” and she couldn’t understand them.

She persevered and did well, maintaining at least a 3.0 grade point average to keep her scholarship. Because of her interest in kids, she studied early childhood education. When her two years at Waldorf were up, she transferred to Thiel College in Greenville on another scholarship.

Juliana graduated from Thiel in 1999. She wanted to go back to Iowa, where she had friends. But she ended up getting a job in the area working in a wraparound program, attending school with kids with special needs. After four years, she went back to school at Westminster College in New Wilmington and got her master’s degree.

She now works as a behavior specialist for MCG Services in West Middlesex, and she’s very much settled into her life on Madison Street with her husband, Dan Yasnowski, a Sharpsville native she married in 2005, and their two toddlers — Alec, 2, and Lexa, 1.

But she hasn’t forgotten the children she saw in Ghana on those back roads.

This year, she registered her nonprofit organization. She and Dan are taking monetary donations to buy and ship basic items such as clothes, shoes and school supplies to Ghana, with the plan to eventually help children in other African nations as well.

She’ll also use family and friends in Ghana, she said, to help her set up deliveries of perishable food and clean water to the villages.

She says she would like to help children get an education by paying the fees they need to attend school. Eventually, she would even like to finance the building of schools where there are none.

The money from her organization, she said, mostly will be used to buy supplies — unlike other organizations that have to use some of their funds for administrative costs. She doesn’t rule out having to hire more employees in the future, though, “if we grow.”

Juliana would even like to educate teenagers about the consequences of pregnancy, because many babies are abandoned.

Even adults can be helped with education and small loans, she pointed out.

“There are so many ways to help people in Africa,” she said.

starmack@vindy.com