A woman originally from St. Petersburg will set up an African orphanage. It won't be easy, or cheap.
By WAVENEY ANN MOORE, Times Staff Writer
Published April 23, 2006
ST. PETERSBURG - Rita Leongomez Langeland says her Catholic upbringing in St. Petersburg inspired her commitment to serve the poor.
"Going to Catholic school was so precious to me. The nuns really inspired me,'' she said. "I was a freshman in high school at St. Petersburg Catholic when one of the nuns made a decision to move to Appalachia. I remember being so struck by that. Her name was Sister Jo-Ann. I've never forgotten that.''
Langeland, 47, is taking on a mission of her own. This summer she plans to establish an orphanage for 36 children in Tanzania.
Langeland, who now lives near Irvine, Calif., with her husband, David, the pastor of a nondenominational church, returns often to the Tampa Bay area to see her parents and other family members, who live in Palm Harbor.
In a recent phone interview from California, she said her interest in Tanzania began in 2003 through an organization she founded called Hidden With Christ Ministries, which produced a Christian radio program broadcast in various parts of the world.
"People began to write to me from Africa'' asking for Bibles and advice, she said. One letter writer was a bishop, who asked her to travel to Tanzania to put on a seminar for his pastors. That was the beginning of regular trips to the African nation.
"I honestly fell in love with those people the first time I went,'' she said.
In the city of Moshi, she met an American woman who was struggling to run an orphanage that had been opened by Tanzanians. There were only two bedrooms for 40 children. Langeland began to send donations.
"When I visited that first time, they had blocks of foam for mattresses and no sheets,'' she said. With members of her husband's church, she traveled to the country to offer medical, material and spiritual assistance. She made sure the orphans had sheets.
The poverty was overwhelming, said Langeland, a graduate of St. Petersburg Catholic School and Florida State University, where she majored in psychology, and a mother of one son.
Tanzania has about 1-million children orphaned by AIDS and 1.5-million orphaned by other causes, she said, referring to UNICEF figures. Many children live on the streets, surviving by begging, she said.
The orphanage, Treasures of Africa Children's Home, will open on Oct. 1. Three friends, two from her husband's church, will run it.
One has experience operating an orphanage for children affected by AIDS, she said. Another is a teacher and hopes to start a school. The third woman is a nurse. They also will hire Tanzanian workers.
There's plenty of work to be done before the orphanage opens, she said. The group has leased a 15-bedroom building from the Lutheran Church of Tanzania for three years, she said.
"They were using it as a boardinghouse. It needs some work,'' she said. "We're refurbishing the building and raising money to buy bunk beds. It needs new flooring, and we want to start a vegetable garden.''
The orphanage also will raise its own chickens.
"For food alone, feeding the children and the staff, if we only spend $2 a day, feeding them well, with protein, it's $3,000 a month,'' she said.
Rent, money to send the children to public school, which is not free in Tanzania, and salaries are additional expenses.
"We ran all the figures and this is without capital expenses, no vehicles. It will cost $98,000 the first year,'' the former St. Petersburg resident said.
"One of the main things we're raising money for right now is two four-wheel-drive vehicles for the orphanage," she said. "You have to have four-way drive. The roads are so bad.''
She said this is a dream come true for her and the other American women.
"I always dreamed of starting a children's home, but I never dreamed it would be in Africa ... this has always been in my heart after I saw that first orphanage,'' she said.
"Here is just poverty beyond all imagination. I just felt that like we could do something.''
