Jackson Middle School librarian helps launch nonprofit factory

Tini Maier’s dress is covered in bright blues, greens, oranges and pinks, with an elaborate display of shapes and symbols running from her shoulders to her knees. In Ghanaian Ashanti culture, the pattern is about unity, she says: “The tree that stands alone is knocked down by the wind.”

The message is one of many that the Jackson Middle School media specialist brought back in August from a yearlong leave of absence in Kumasi, Ghana, where she and her husband, Jeff, helped start a factory to feed malnourished children.

“Those people mean so much to me,” Maier says of the Ghanaians she met. “We went through so much together.”

During that year, she served as the factory’s director of quality control, and Jeff was the director of operations. Together they oversaw about 17 employees for Project Peanut Butter, a nonprofit group that produces Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food (RUTF). The energy-dense paste can be fed to children at home, rather than in a hospital, and includes roasted ground peanuts, powdered milk, vegetable oil, sugar and vitamins and minerals.

According to Project Peanut Butter, severely malnourished children who receive home-based RUTF treatment have a 75-95 percent recovery rate.

In some regions of Ghana, four out of 10 children under the age of 5 are stunted or chronically malnourished, according to the World Food Programme, the United Nations’ food assistance branch. The factory where Maier volunteered is now producing up to 52 boxes of RUTF each day, she says, with each box providing six weeks of therapy for a malnourished child.

In the next few years, the factory could produce enough to serve 50,000 malnourished children each year. Taking the leap to Ghana

Since their early days as a couple, Maier and her husband had talked about doing service work abroad.

“We were always going to go someday,” says Maier, who has been Jackson’s media specialist since 2013. In the back of her mind, she still envisioned that the “someday” trip was several years away.

Meanwhile, her husband — who was born to missionaries in Kumasi and lived there until he was 6 years old — was itching to go, since he became a Registered Nurse in 2007 in part to be able to help people in Africa.

Then a few years ago, Jeff heard from a friend that Project Peanut Butter was looking for someone to start a factory in Ghana. He and Maier volunteered, and after a year and a half of preparations — arranging leaves of absences from workplaces, sorting out insurance, obtaining loan deferments, updating their will, renting out their house and donating many of their belongings and packing the rest into their basement — they were on their way.

Kumasi was hot, Maier says; she never once donned a jacket or lightweight hoodie, and the humidity hovered around 80-90 percent most of the year.

The apartment she shared with her husband reminded her of a dorm room. With a bed, refrigerator, stove, microwave, shower, ceiling fans, four walls and a ceiling, it was simple by American standards and luxurious compared to other homes in the area. Many of the locals could be found squatting in unfinished, open-air structures, she says.

They worked five or six days a week at the factory, where Maier trained the staff on safe food handling practices and Jeff continuously fixed machinery and other factory assets.

Maier says she and her staff were thrilled to pass their factory inspection near the end of her time in Kumasi, clearing the factory to begin producing and selling RUTF to organizations such as UNICEF, Doctors Without Borders and USAID, which in turn provide the treatment to children free of cost.

But getting there took time and effort, she says. She recalled long nights spent listening to dogs bark in the street and smelling the foul odor of waste in roadside ditches. Broken appliances regularly called for trips to the market. Once, Maier says, she broke down and ordered pens when she was unable to find them in any of the local stores.

By the time she and Jeff left Kumasi, “I was really, really, really ready to come home,” she says. “At the same time, it was really painful to leave,” because of the friendships she’d formed with her staff members and the people in her community.

In the weeks before they left, Maier says she found herself in a rush to have clothing made from the colorful fabric she’d purchased at the open-air market. She also brought home 87 pounds of fabric, some with patterns that carried kind or sentimental stories, others symbolizing blunt or humorous messages.

“They are so bold and brave with the designs,” she says. “I just fell in love with their cloth, the story.”

Since Maier and her husband returned home in August, she’s realized she wants to visit Kumasi again one day, to reconnect with the community and the culture.

“As hard as everything is there, it is simple,” she says.

And after spending a year in that environment, “I feel like I can be in the moment way better,” she says. “I don’t judge my days by what I get done anymore.”