Project reBUILD, more commonly billed in the past as Project BUILD, is the joint project of Terry and Jim Hathaway. On Oct. 13 from 5:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. at Calvary Church the Hathaways will be hosting a dinner and auction with live music provided by the Perfect Match, with tickets set at $15 a person.
All of this is to help fund the Hathaway’s immediate and long-term aid work, something they have been doing together as a couple for years. Jim has been a mission worker since the late 80s and after working with the Indonesian community; he felt a calling to become more directly involved in a meaningful way.
Terry, meanwhile, is a long-time resident of Williams Lake and recently retired from a teaching job. Her first visit to Indonesia was in 2011 with Jim to spend time at a children’s home they’d been sponsoring for a few years.
“My plan was to always move to Indonesia but it just never worked out. I wanted her to see what the culture was like, but I didn’t want to plant any ideas about moving in her mind,” Jim said, adding that after two weeks he asked. “So what do you think? She said ‘I think we need to move here and we need to start an ESL training centre.”
Read More: Couple builds school in Indonesia
Since that declaration, the two have fundraised for the Lombok Children’s Home to help expand and improve their facilities, from Terry’s English as a Second Language Training Centre to dormitories for the students and building their own home on site. The ESL Centre is an important focus of their efforts both locally and big picture, as they offer free lessons to both the children at the home and from the surrounding community while training other aid workers who pass through on how to deliver this important service.
“The plan is to, hopefully, train other aid workers that would like to come work with us and as they get the training we’d like to put them in different children’s homes around the world, starting with one of our homes in the Philippines,” Jim said.
Lombok is the island right beside the famous Bali and Terry said that is has been devastated by seismic activity and tsunamis recently. While not hit directly by the recent tsunami that has left over 1,700 dead, Terry said the island is still suffering.
Read More: Over 800 dead in Indonesia quake and tsunami; toll may rise
That’s why they have rebranded to Project reBUILD, he said. In the past, the funds raised from the upcoming dinner and auction would have gone towards building new facilities for the kids, however, with all the recent earthquakes the children are forced to sleep outside due to safety concerns about the structural integrity of the buildings.
“It’s not flattened like a lot of other places where people lost their homes completely, but the thing I am just so excited about, working with these people, is the integrity the directors of the children’s home. They’re like ‘Yes we’ve been affected, but there are others in worse condition than us’ and they rally together to get water, food and whatever supplies they could to areas that were most devastated on the island,” Terry said. “We would like to fundraise to help the repairs at the children’s home.”
She also hopes to be able to bring some joy and simple things when they visit next, as they spend six months of the year in Indonesia, and be able to help the children’s families as well. The home cares for children whose families, due to circumstance, cannot provide for them and many of these families were also affect by the recent disaster.
“I don’t know how they’ve proved it, but I’ve read that the whole island of Lombok has been raised out of the water by 12 inches,” Jim added.
This is the second dinner auction the Hathaways have held, something Jim hopes to make an annual event. Terry handles the logistics of the event and said there will be both a silent and a live auction in addition to “other games and fun.”
Jim and Terry will both be sharing stories from Lombok to help better illustrate what they do there to the Williams Lake community.
“We have kind of this opportunity where if people just want to make a financial donation, $25 buys 500 bricks in Lombok so that’s always fun to announce. The donation is also tax deductible because it goes through the Youth with a Mission organization we work with,” Terry said.
Already, many businesses in town have supported Project reBUILD something Terry and Jim are very grateful for. Their capacity for the event is 100 people with tickets purchasable through Terry at 250-398-9180.
patrick.davies@wltribune.com
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