Regina Chacha, at the Mountain Mission School, in Grundy, Virginia, with visiting students from City of Hope.
B ecause inspiring stories tend to have one thing in common: they defy the odds. What are the odds that, in 1982, a young Canadian-American woman named Regina Horst and a young man from Tanzania named John Chacha would cross paths at Eastern Mennonite University, in Harrisonburg, Virginia? What are the odds that they would get married? What are the odds that they would establish a school and medical center in a poor, remote, sometimes violent corner of Africa? What are the odds that this effort, under the rubric of the couple’s Teamwork Ministries, would take root?
City of Hope is located in Ntagacha, in western Tanzania. Its Destiny Primary School today enrolls 450 students and is the No. 1 school in the area. Its new secondary school, named for John Chacha, who died in 2015, enrolls another 60 students. The orphanage is home to more than a hundred children. The clinic serves 3,000 people a year. This region of Tanzania, near the Kenyan border, lacks electricity and reliable supplies of water. Disruptions of many kinds have hit the herding and farming economy. Women in particular face grim realities, including genital mutilation and forcible child marriage.
Women are the specific focus of City of Hope’s latest effort, memorializing an important benefactor, the late Stacey Sauerberg. The Stacey Sauerberg Women’s Leadership Initiative, created by her family (her husband, Bob Sauerberg, is the president and C.E.O. of Condé Nast), promotes women’s education and women’s health and aims to combat cultural practices that harm women or otherwise hold them back. “The people it will help,” says Regina Chacha, “are primarily the orphans and vulnerable children in our children’s home and the students in our schools.” because the challenges remain immense.