For one local family, losing their toddler daughter was devastating. Half way across the world, her memory lives on forever.

The sirens were deafening. But the other noises were maddening– the shouts from her husband and the car horn she blared as she tore up and down the street looking for help.

Suddenly, just the sound of ambulances and chaos coming from her yard. She raced to another neighbor who was a nurse. Connie barely knew her, but it didn't matter.  Her daughter’s lung were filled with water—she just needed help. “Please can you help us?” was all that Connie could cry when she found the woman at home. She drove back to her house with the nurse and found a crowd of neighbors and medics encircling her 14months old Victoria.

Only moments ago, Connie’s house had been buzzing with commotion of a much different sort. Her whole family had gathered to celebrate her brother’s birthday. When Connie stepped outside to call everyone in, she glanced over her three—year old daughter, Cherylin and her cousins and noticed the little group was missing a figure. “Where is Victoria?” She called out. The same sickening thought crashed into Connie and her husband at the same moment, and they both sprinted to the pond at the edge of their yard.

Neither of them will ever forget what they found, they remembered exactly how they found Victoria, floating on the surface of their pond. “I remembered crying out to God in the hospital thinking, who is ever going to remember  Victoria?” Connie says years later, “She’s only  months old, how’s anyone going to remember her?” Connie’s question was the beginning of something that kept Victoria’s memory alive, even if it’s halfway across the world.

 

 

At Victoria’s funeral, there some donations to the Church. With some of the funds, they decorated the church’s nursery in Victoria’s memory, but had no idea how to use the rest. Victoria’s memorial account sat undisturbed until Connie received a call from her pastor, Bob Dyer, who had recently left his church for missionary work in Ghana. In a village called Ho, Dyer had met Mary Kpeglar, a spit fiery woman in her 60’s who, after a life of working as nurse in the Ghana army and raising two boys on her own, had started a preschool to help working mothers in her city.

Kpeglar had driven four posts into the ground on a plot of land, laid a piece of tin across it for a roof, and rounded up three children for the grand opening of the Faith Crèche.

When Dyer returned to the US, he contacted Connie and asked if she wanted to donate Victoria’s memorial fund to Kpeglar’s school. After thinking about it for a day or two, the Ercols wrote Kpeglar a letter with cheque offering the remainder of the memorial account. Neither of them thought they would hear of Ghana ever again Kpeglar shocked them with a swift reply and told them how she will build a bigger school about its new name the Victoria Memorial Preschool. What came of it was the Victoria Ercol Memorial Fund, a small committee of Connie’s friends just spent the fifteen years to expand Kpeglar’s school through fund raisers and child sponsorship programs.

Kpeglar flew to the US three times to attend some of Connie’s benefit and now almost approaching 80, is going to retire and pass leadership to her son Edem. The benefit raised money almost enough to complete construction on the second floor of the primary school. Kpeglar says her son has big plans for the future of the schools and is better equipped to train teachers, an improvement that should make the schools attractive to more parents in Ho. Although this benefit was Connie’s last , she says she will always be involved in the schools some way.  “ It’s become a part of who I am”, She says. “I can’t say anything about my life without it.

 

Edem P. Koku

Director of Schools