Dropping Everything for Their Mission

Jodie Schooley has sold her car. Lydia Schaeffer has given her furniture away. And Melissa Herrmann is attending a last round of farewell gatherings with family and friends.

All this in preparation for an unlikely plan: leaving the comforts of Southern California for indefinite servitude in a sweltering African town devoid of indoor plumbing and electricity but with a surplus of poverty, illiteracy and disease.

“I don’t think I’ll ever live in America again,” said Herrmann, 25, who, like the others, is giving up a comfortable job -- hers as a teacher’s aide in Costa Mesa -- to work long hours for a modest missionary’s wage. “I don’t think I could ever be satisfied here again.”

On July 4, in the small Tanzanian town of Moshi, the three officially begin their new lives as operators of a Christian orphanage for children of people with AIDS.

“It’s something the Lord put in my heart,” said Schooley, 31, until recently a registered nurse at San Antonio Community Hospital in Upland.

“I want those kids to have a chance.”

Added Schaeffer, 40, a fifth-grade teacher at Mission Hills Christian School in Rancho Santa Margarita: “Somebody has to do it. There’s such a great need.”

That need was recognized by Rita Langeland, executive director of Hidden With Christ Ministries in Tustin, the first time she traveled to Tanzania in 2003. A Christian radio broadcaster and associate pastor of a small Irvine church, Langeland had gone there to conduct a seminar on Christian leadership.

“I was really struck by the poverty,” she recalled. “There were children running around in the streets with no one to care for them.”

With a little research, Langeland said she discovered the country was home to just under 1 million orphans whose parents had died of AIDS.

“I came back home, told the story to our church and we began collecting things,” she said. Six months later, Langeland made another trip with boxes full of books, toys, bedsheets and Bibles.

“We did something immediately,” she recalled, “but I felt we could do more.”

That was the genesis of Treasures of Africa Children’s Home. Appealing to corporate, individual and church sources, Langeland raised about $40,000 in seed money. She leased a 6,000-square-foot, 15-bedroom former boarding house in Moshi for $835 a month.

And she didn’t have to look far for volunteers.

Two of them -- Schaeffer and Herrmann -- are members of her church, and Schooley is the sister of a friend.

“All three had been on missions with me before,” she said, adding that the women volunteered after hearing of her plans for the orphanage.

“I felt perfectly comfortable that they knew what they were getting into. They were going in with their eyes open, and I felt a lot better about that.”

Each has visited Moshi at least twice, though only Herrmann has worked abroad in another orphanage. She will be the home’s director, while Schaeffer and Schooley will take charge of residents’ education and health, respectively.

“This is my heartbeat,” Langeland said of what she hopes will be a permanent home to 36 children. “Our goal is to take them, educate them and raise them up to be the leaders of their nation -- we want them to have a heart for the poor. My job will be to stay here and raise money.”

All three women, who plan to learn Swahili, say they have no illusions regarding life in Africa. “It’s going to be a change,” Schaeffer said, “and I know it will be different.”

They have already shipped a 40-foot cargo container to Moshi, filled with such U.S. staples as mustard, apple sauce, Cheez-Its, animal cookies, Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal, ketchup and barbecue sauce. They have also stocked up on shampoo, deodorant, skin lotion, hair gel and toilet paper.

And they have bought regular mattresses to substitute for the blocks of foam on which most Tanzanians sleep.

At the heart of the adventure, the women say, is a desire to serve.

“I just love the people there,” said Schooley.

For Herrmann, the project represents a lifelong ambition.

“It’s been a dream since I was little,” she said.

“I used to get up on Saturdays and watch ‘Feed the Children’ instead of ‘Looney Tunes.’ At my birthday I’d always ask for National Geographics instead of Barbies.”