How 300 dresses made in the suburbs will help a recovering community in East Africa
Kasese, Uganda, has felt more than its share of sorrow and tragedy. But some of its youngest residents have a glimmer of hope, courtesy of a group of dressmakers at a Lake County Catholic church and the deacon of an Arlington Heights parish.
Dress A Girl, a ministry based out of St. Mary of Vernon Parish in Indian Creek, creates dresses for girls out of donated materials and provides them at no cost to needy communities in places such as Africa and Guatemala.
When the group was looking for someone to receive 300 dresses, one of its leaders, Arlington Heights resident Sharon Rudy, reached out to Don Grossnickle, senior deacon at Our Lady of the Wayside Catholic Church in Arlington Heights.
Grossnickle has been involved with the Microfinance Alliance Africa Projects Foundation, and organization that works in parts of Africa like Kasese to raise their standard of living and medical care.
Rudy said Grossnickle arrived “like manna from Heaven.” Grossnickle said the timing was perfect.
“The area where I’m working has had a mudslide, and there are 20,000 families that have been displaced,” he said.
Through Grossnickle, the dresses were sent across the ocean to the Kasese Diocese, where they were distributed to siblings of the victims of a massacre by Congolese rebels in June 2023.
The Dress A Girl volunteers take donated materials — the material for one outfit came from a men’s dress shirt — and work in assembly-line fashion to create kits that are transformed into a brand new dress. There is a true division of labor, with some of the volunteers sewing, others cutting fabric and making bracelets.
Each dress comes with a pair of underwear, a beaded bracelet and a patch with a “Dress A Girl” label. For the younger girls, a doll is also included.
In many cases, the girls have never owned anything new before, Rudy said, “So to get a new dress, something that’s cute and fun, means a lot.”
It also is fulfilling for the volunteers.
“Sharon invited me to come to the meeting, and I came to the meeting, and I sewed a dress and thought ‘This is really cool,’” said Nancy McLinden of Wildwood.
For Grossnickle, the dresses illustrate how little things can make a big difference. And they are just the beginning. A $30,000 clinic and a pig farm are being established, providing sustainable support for the Kasese community.
“In the Bible, the parable of the mustard seed teaches us that the smallest of seeds can grow into the largest of trees. This story is no different,” he said.