Church Builds Shanty To Spread Message About Human Dignity

“The message God gave me is this,” says Cathy Woller. “We are not serving these people so they can have dignity. We are serving them because they already do.”

Cathy and Tim Woller, both Mount Horeb natives, are standing in front of a recently-constructed tin shanty on the lawn outside Evangelical Lutheran Church (ELC) in the heart of the village’s downtown. The structure’s construction and placement were accomplished by an estimated 50 church members, from young children to senior citizens, and it is intended to raise awareness about the conditions in which people – people with the same dignity as anyone else – live in much of the world.

Volunteers and members from the church worked together to build the shanty, a similar structure to what thousands of people in Kenya live in, in partnership with Saba, International, a charity founded by the Wollers in 2009. ELC supports Saba through its monthly Benevolence Program. The Wollers, who are members of the church, dreamed up Saba after living in Kenya, where Tim was stationed during his time in the Air Force.

“I was an attaché at the embassy in Nairobi, Kenya for three years,” he says. “It’s a huge international community, one of three international UN headquarters.”

During their time there, the Wollers saw need and poverty. They decided to volunteer. It was there they first encountered a home primarily for children whose parents were either dead, uninvolved or incarcerated. It was called “The Nest,” which today is funded in part by Saba.

“When you are there, the U.S. government kind of protects you, puts you in a fine place,” explains Cathy. But it didn’t take long to find the city’s slums, and Cathy soon got a job teaching at a school in one of them. When they eventually moved back to the United States, living in Washington, DC before heading back to their hometown of Mount Horeb, they didn’t want to stop helping.

Their plan worked in part because during their three years in Kenya, the Wollers had already established close relationships with The Nest Children’s Home and New Dawn Educational Center. They added Bethel Outreach Children’s Center in 2012.

In Kenya, they saw a veritable sea of shanties, without access to clean water or basic sanitation, stretching as far as the eye could see.

The lone shanty at ELC gave church members an opportunity to see, feel and think about the ways people live. It was not intended to inspire guilt, shame, or pity. It was intended to inspire hope and compassion.

“This is about life in the slums, but it’s not meant to be depressing,” Cathy says. “It’s meant to be inspiring. Those kids have the same hopes and dreams as anyone else.”

“You could see it on the faces of [ELC members working on the shanty],” she continues. “Some of it was sadness, but it was mostly ‘wow.’”

The shanty was built without windows because in Kenya it would be packed, back-to-back and side-to-side, with others just like it. Like those, it was built primarily with waste and leftovers from other projects.

“It wasn’t really about poverty,” Cathy says of the project. “It was about dignity.”

Visit elcmthoreb.org or sabainternational.org to learn more.