WOOLWICH

“The first time I met her, she was standing outside of the school. I said, ‘Why isn’t she in school?’

“And they said ‘No money,’” Woolwich resident Lolita Bowen said.

She was recalling her visit last year to Burkina Faso, an African nation where she met 5-year-old Latefatou, who lives in the village of Saon’re on the outskirts of Ouagadougou.

“I said, ‘OK, she needs to go to school right now. I will sponsor her.’”

Saon’re is where Bowen and her husband adopted their 11-year-old daughter, Wendkouni Rebecca Kabri Bowen.

Wendkouni, called Becca, came to stay with Bowen on a medical visa at 14 months old to get treatment for spina bifida and other health issues.

The visa expired when she was 3, and Lolita and husband Basil Bowen took her home to her family, where she stayed for two months before the medical visa was renewed and the Bowens officially adopted Becca.

The adoption took the better part of six years. The Bowens went back to Burkina Faso last year so Becca could reunite with her birth parents and meet her brothers.

Her father is the pastor at the church where students attend school, sitting on church benches and holding up their answers on small chalkboards.They have no desks.

Traveling through the village, Lolita Bowen said she saw young children not in school but instead carrying firewood or buckets of water, selling corn or phone cards and working in scooter shops.

Children there must pay to go to school.

The little girl, Latefatou, is one of the children Bowen is sponsoring to attend the school, named Jathniel.

For Christmas, Bowen asked family members instead of buying presents for her, to sponsor a child: It costs $63 to send a child to school for a year, she said.

Since her visit to the village in October 2011, the number of children attending the tiny school grew from about 180 to 281 students now.

The increase, Bowen believes, is in response to the programs the Bowens helped implement, and a new school under construction.

Bowen founded A Miracle in the Making, a nonprofit organization aiming to provide children with education, food and “hope for the future of the people and the country.”

She and her husband had been helping on their own to build a new school but the monsoon rains came and washed most of it away. Since then, progress has been made, Bowen said, and it is ready now for the roof, but they have run out of money.

A roof would cost $1,137 and the windows and doors, $542. The organization gets no assistance for its grassroots efforts.

The $63 to sponsor a child for a year covers the cost of teachers who earn $20 a month.

To sponsor a child, someone can also send them packages, fill a backpack with school supplies and snacks, or purchase toys such as jump ropes.

Bowen’s fledgling organization also has implemented a feeding program.

Many of the children travel a long distance to school and back home, often to return home “only to find there’s not even a morsel of rice” for them.

Through her program, the children are provided a portion of rice at school. Bowen said, “It’s our philosophy that you can’t feed their brains and educate them if their belly is growling the whole time because they‘re so hungry. So we feed them.”

She also welcomes donations of clothing to take back to the poverty-stricken village; and travelers to come along and help.

The Kidz Closet in Wiscasset donates unwanted clothing and Bowen hopes when she returns next spring to construct a small building that would store clothing that villagers could buy even for “their version of a penny.”

Jean pants and jackets are discouraged because they weigh down the luggage, but any clothing can be used. Temperatures range from 120 degrees in the summer, when children walk barefoot on the hot ground, to 60 degrees, which can be chilly when having no electricity and no windows and perhaps just a curtain for a door.

“I’d like to be getting my hands in there, throwing the bricks up,” Bowen said of the clothing bank while sitting at the table at her son’s home in Woolwich surrounded by photos of classes of children with their teachers.

She also showed two albums full of children in need of sponsorship. There are 40 children with sponsors and many more in need.

Bowen even puts together birthing kits for pregnant women in a country with high mortality rates for mothers and babies. There are no administrative costs, Bowen said; all the money goes toward the school.

Sponsors get a picture of the child they sponsor, any information Bowen can provide about them and updates every six months to a year.

She pulled a picture from her son’s refrigerator — a photo of a skinny barefoot boy named Simporé — then showed a new picture of the same boy, who had grown so much he no longer resembled the boy in the first picture.

Looking at a photo of the 40-pound Latefatou standing beside her mother, Bowen observed the blank look: “There’s no hope.”

It was the reason she had to get Latefatou started in school. She expects things have already changed for the girl who wouldn’t make eye contact and stared at her feet.

Bowen said, “These kids will hopefully be the future leaders of their country,” if not within the country’s government, “the future teachers; the future pastors.

“The future is theirs. By getting to go to school, the future will be theirs. And that’s the chance that I want them all to have. Because Africa — any (developing) country — is never going to change if it’s not for the children.

“It’s an old cliché but I want to give them a hand up, not a hand out.”

People here should also have a vision for what they can do to help using their own skills, she said.

If you knit, knit her some hats to take over; or if you are a carpenter and can afford to travel to Burkina Faso, “Come over and help build!” Bowen urged.

Bowen can be contacted by calling 443-4995, email [email protected] or visit the organization’s website at sponsorjathniel.com.

dmoore @timesrecord.com