Ivory Coast Mothers and Children is an organization founded in 2013 by AWIU member Patsy Mertz. It is also a four-time AWIU grant recipient, with partnership dating back to 2018! Read more about its history and its present (and future!) projects with AWIU below.
About ICMC’s Founder & AWIU Member Patricia Mertz
It was the year 2000. Y2K had been averted. Gladiator was topping the box office. Everyone was dancing to Bye Bye Bye by NSYNC. And Patsy was working as a successful event planner for Goldman Sachs Investment Bankers in Chicago, when she saw an advertisement for “The Toughest Job You’ll Ever Love.”
The slogan was for Peace Corps. Patsy jotted down the number and called them later that day. She’d been caring for her father, who had recently died. Her mother had died several years prior. Her two sons were in their 20s, college graduates taking on the world, and she’d divorced her husband twenty years prior. Her friends were starting to file home from nights out as early as 10 pm. Patsy longed for the late nights of yore, biting into life and drinking its nectar. She was only 56 — there was so much to see, learn, and do.
The Peace Corps staff she spoke with suggested she wait a year, to make sure she was really committed. She kept in close touch with the office. Her friends thought she was mad, but her sons cheered her on, 100 percent behind her. She told Peace Corps that she wanted a French-speaking posting, harkening back to her undergrad major. They offered her Morocco, and she said that Morocco was on her list to visit; she wanted a Peace Corps location that wasn’t already on her list. They offered her Côte d’Ivoire, and she pulled out her atlas to see where that was.She landed in Abidjan and got to work.
Patsy was posted as an educator in Braffoueby. Peace Corps assigned her seven neighboring villages and gave her a bike, but she quickly learned you’d have to be suicidal to bike on the rough rodes. She’d walk from village to village, school to school, building relationships with the children and helping them found clubs.
As a project, she started designing an animal husbandry initiative, but when she finally got around to asking permission from the village chief — she’d been putting it off — he said no.
“No?” she said.
“No.”
The chief instead told her a story about his daughter. His daughter had been extremely pregnant and something had gone wrong. She’d come to her father in the middle of the night and he’d loaded her into a wheelbarrow and bounced her on those rough roads, unfit for bikes, swerving in the dark to reach midwives miles away. His daughter almost died. His grandchild did die.
Patsy was heartbroken for him. She was also unsure what his story had to do with animal husbandry. And before she could figure it out, Côte d’Ivoire experienced a failed coup that sparked a civil war and the cohort of Peace Corps volunteers were evacuated.
Patsy spent some time in Ghana, and then Kenya. She kicked around Europe for a while. Back in the States, she was having tea with her young niece, when somehow, the story of healthcare in Braffoueby, and the dire needs, and the chief’s daughter and grandbaby, came up.
“Well, Aunt Patsy,” her niece asked, “what are you going to do about it?”
So Patsy looked into her own funds. She reached out to her friends. And she raised money to build a clinic. She remembered a young man she’d known in Braffoueby, Oscar Max Élysée, who’d had polio when he was six. He was paralyzed except for his hands, which still had movement. He’d been a bookworm, committed to schoolwork, and in the years since she’d known him, he’d gotten himself to university for two years. She admired him and trusted him completely, and hired him to lead the clinic, Ivory Coast Mothers and Children.
The first baby born in ICMC was a little girl, who safely entered the world in 2013. Thousands have followed.
Patsy joined AWIU as a member in 2018. Past president Carole Lewis was her sponsor, and she wrote that she “unhesitatingly” recommended Patsy as an incredibly “valuable addition” to our organization. Patsy finally did get to Morocco, joining the AWIU delegation there in 2019. “AWIU women are just fascinating,” she says, which perhaps explains why she fits in so well. One of her proudest recent AWIU moments was working with Barbara Rubio to mentor a high school student with the Passports program. Patsy values the friendships she’s made and the work that she and her AWIU sisters accomplish.
AWIU’s Partnership History with ICMC
Ivory Coast Mothers and Children is an organization founded in 2013 by AWIU member Patsy Mertz. It is also a four-time AWIU grant recipient, with partnership dating back to 2018!
In 2018, the organization received its first award of $3,000. Those funds paid for 600 vaccinations at three different Ivory Coast villages, given to 7-to-10-year-olds. “We worked with the Ministry of Health to do this,” continued Mertz. “The children received vaccinations for typhoid fever, meningitis and tetanus.”
In 2021, the organization received a grant of $1,700. These funds covered the purchase of medicine and medical equipment for the clinic pharmacy, including medications for anemia and malaria, antibiotics, and ultrasound and laboratory materials.
In 2022, the organization received $3,000 for plastering and painting a vaccination room and food for 150 children for five months. The vaccination center is now fully equipped to provide a safe and clean environment for babies and children to receive vaccines.
In 2023, the organization was granted $1,000 for a nutrition program for children and $2,100 for hospital upgrades. The organization transformed the labor and delivery room of the hospital into an area that ensures care and comfort for expectant mothers and their newborns. The newly upgraded recovery areas, which now have tiling and fans, have already garnered positive feedback from patients and their families. Patients now have access to an environment that is conducive to healing and welcoming little ones with confidence and joy. The children at the the primary school in Braffoueby also received nutritious meals during their first semester.
To read more about the AWIU Global Micro-Grants Program, check out the links below:
- Learn more about the AWIU Global Micro-Grants program here.
- Read more about the 2024 grantees here, and historic grant recipients here.
