Tessa Davis sat inside the Salon Victor Magna day spa on May 21, surrounded by a group of gabbing women as beauticians cleaned, buffed, filed and then painted her toes and fingers. A cell phone rang out ” the old Nokia ring-tone hummed throughout the room.
Davis, a 29-year-old from South Dakota, picked up the aged phone and said hello. She had been working with the Peace Corps in Uganda for more than two years. She told the caller how shiny her face was; she just received a facial. She said she finally felt clean. A shower in Kiwoko, Uganda “” the village in which Davis had immersed herself for 27 months “” consisted of dumping a cup of water onto her head, she said.
“The physical discomfort was the easiest thing to adjust to,” Davis said. “It was the cultural differences that were difficult.”
So Davis sat inside the day spa, readjusting to a pampering culture, compliments of her new boss, Vivian Glyck, founder of Just Like My Child. Glyck created the La Jolla-area charity organization in 2006 after traveling to Africa, where she said the suffering caused her to want to take action.
“I thought, ‘What if that was my child? I’ve got what it takes to raise a kid,'” Glyck said. “It was started for the love of a child.”
Glyck described a series of serendipitous events that began in Africa and then ended in America with people donating money, which led her to start a 501c3 charity. She said Just Like My Child’s transparency helps donors to see where their money travels. Newsletters and video from Uganda document their progress.
“If I asked you for $1,000 to save my child’s life, you’d do anything to make that happen,” Glyck said.
Glyck hired Davis to continue her work in Uganda with them. Davis will oversee building a new school.
Because Davis hadn’t cut her long brown hair during her two-year stint with the Peace Corps, Glyck coordinated a spa day. Area businesses donated treatments and clothes to Davis before she leaves for another year in Uganda. First, Christie’s Boutique dressed Davis, and then Victor Magna styled her hair and gave her a manicure, pedicure and a facial.
While in Uganda, Davis said she paid strict attention to customs, including a women’s dress code, mainly for safety, but also to gain respect.
“Women are not empowered,” Davis said. “As a white woman in Uganda, I dealt with sexual harassment.”
Most villages had no electricity or running water, but Davis said a persistent hurdle to helping Ugandans that she struggled with was ingrained inside their psyche “” in the form of cultural myths. Part of her educational work counteracted these beliefs, which she said endangered citizens’ health.
Recently, Uganda’s newest president promised ” while running for election ” to provide schooling for all children, Davis said. Until then, the country only provided private schooling. Now villagers send kids to school with no supplies or food. So education is a primary initiative for many organizations operating inside Uganda, including Glyck’s.
Many Ugandan cultural myths also result in a high instance of malaria and HIV, creating a high percentage of double-orphaned children, Glyck said. Just Like My Child decided to combat these health challenges by partnering with the Clinton Foundation and a woman named Sister Ernestine Akulo, founder of Bishop Asili Hospital in Luwero, Uganda. Just Like My Child secured a generator and a CD4 machine for HIV patients and hired a doctor for the hospital, who saves many women by performing simple procedures like cesarean sections.
“It’s the first doctor the hospital has ever had,” Glyck said. “Finally, they do C-sections on women who would have died.”
Davis, who graduated with a teaching degree before joining the Peace Corps, said she decided to sign up for a third year with the organization, which has a two-year maximum. Davis followed Uganda’s many cultural rules and codes. That, along with her polite demeanor, resulted in a stellar reputation needed to continue working with the villagers, helping them with their education and health issues.
Davis spent her first three months in the country immersed with a family to learn the Luganda language, which is spoken throughout most of the country.
“Mostly what I did was educate. There was a primary school with 75,000 kids and no resources,” Davis said, explaining her Peace Corps function. “I taught them how to make learning materials out of local resources like banana fibers.”
According to Davis, she taught parents the value of involvement in their child’s education, along with HIV and health education. Davis’ skills and reputation would be vital to a growing charity organization like Glyck’s.
In 2006, Glyck said she awoke in the middle of the night wanting to help children.
“I was affected “” I woke up in the middle of the night and said, ‘I have to go to Africa.'”
So she flew to Africa, where she met Davis. Glyck didn’t realize at that time she would start her own organization inside Africa to combat suffering. Later, when Glyck heard Davis was available, she grabbed the Peace Corps woman to work for Just Like My Child.
“We’re building a school, and she’s going to be overseeing that,” Glyck said. “Everybody loves her. The trick is to become one [with the villagers].”
Glyck said she hopes to build the privately funded school, which will charge small enrollment fees for a short period of time. The school will give children supplies and uniforms, Glyck and Davis said. They said they hope it will sustain itself soon.
Davis said the village she will work in with Just Like My Child is near the village where she lived while with the Peace Corps.
“I’ll be able to transfer my skills because their goals are similar,” Davis said. “This will be more on an intimate scale, focused on one school for now.”
The two have far-reaching goals. Although Glyck’s focus is on one school, Just Like My Child works with a 48-village community, containing 600,000 people “” including a high percentage of double-orphaned children due to disease.
Just Like My Child uses a three-pronged approach, Glyck said. The charity organization focuses on education, health and micro-enterprise.
In addition to continuing their work with the hospital and building the school, Glyck began an economic strategy inside the communities. Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 in the field of micro-enterprise. Glyck said she partnered with Wekembe Microfinance to bring the Grameen Bank model to communities.
“Grameen Bank and the Village Bank Model are the gold standard,” Glyck said. “They are using support system loans [in the villages].”
These loans are not bank loans familiar to Westerners. Ugandan villagers “” who are mostly sustenance farmers “” utilize the loans with their livestock, grains and other goods. Glyck is using Just Like My Child to help villagers create more than they use, hoping to help them out of their current situation by creating a small economy.
“I think of it like three legs of their stool,” Glyck said, referring to healthcare, education and micro-enterprise. “If you pull one leg off, it falls down.”
Davis will return to Uganda to oversee the building of the new school in the next few weeks.
Meanwhile, Glyck hopes to install Internet access into the hospital where Davis will stay, to connect Americans to their efforts inside the country.
For more information about Glyck’s organization, or to contact Davis, go to www.justlikemychild.org. One year of lunches for 50 kids is a $250 donation. A new surgical suite is $2,500. Write to: Just Like My Child Foundation, P.O. Box 22025, San Diego, CA 92192-2025, or go online. For more information about the Clinton Foundation, go to www.clintonfoundation.org.
Salon Victor Magna is at 7840 Ivanhoe Ave., (858) 459-0895. For more information about Christie’s Boutique, go to www.christiesboutique.com.