‘I had to come back and do something’: How Arlington Heights deacon made it his mission to help mothers and babies in Africa

Don Grossnickle remembers the harrowing experience of his third child’s birth and how doctors and nurses at Northwest Community Hospital in Arlington Heights worked to save his child’s life and that of his wife.

He was thinking of that, when, on a trip to rural Uganda, he visited an impoverished village’s clinic and witnessed six mothers and six babies — all hooked up to IVs, all dying of malaria.

“It was a horrible sight. And I suppose what was going through my mind in Africa during that visit was, look at the contrast. It was so motivating to me. I had to come back and do something,” said Grossnickle, a deacon for the last 38 years at Our Lady of the Wayside Catholic Church in Arlington Heights and a retired public school educator.

Grossnickle, affectionately known in the community as “Deacon Don,” made that first trip to Africa to see the ordination of a priest who spent time at Wayside while in the seminary. But Grossnickle has returned to the continent over the past 13 years and worked in small villages to create a sustainable agribusiness farming model that supports struggling clinics that help mothers and babies.

Grossnickle’s Arlington Heights-based Microfinance Alliance Africa Projects Foundation is marking Mother’s Day weekend by celebrating its 50th agricultural project — all in Uganda except one in Tanzania — with another 10 in the pipeline this year.

“We’ve been celebrating mothers for 13 years,” Grossnickle told supporters and benefactors during an event Saturday morning at Metropolis Ballroom in downtown Arlington Heights. “There’s no mistake that we’re here today, the day before Mother’s Day. Mothers are our focus. Mothers’ health is our focus.”

The foundation — which started as a Facebook group in 2013 but officially registered as a 501(c) (3) nonprofit in 2018 — provides seed grants of about $5,000 for local villagers to start a small farm. It’s often a pigsty or chicken coop, but in the past has also involved cows, fish, coffee beans and corn.

Grossnickle and fellow MAAP Foundation board members have a two-member team on the ground in Uganda — a business manager and an agricultural expert — to vet the sites, provide training and establish a business plan. Once up and running, proceeds from the farms — such as selling eggs — are used to support medical clinics on the verge of closing, pay for medicine, and provide free care to those who can’t afford it.

“Just imagine hundreds of thousands of midwives in Africa — no money, no medicine — shutting the door on mothers who come to have their baby there,” Grossnickle said. “We’re making sure the door doesn’t get closed anymore on these women.”

Grossnickle — a gregarious, longtime presence at Our Lady of the Wayside — has a way of bringing on others to support charitable causes near and dear to him.

Among those at the Saturday brunch were Kasia Janus, who was 4 years old and in preschool at Wayside in 1982 when her father, uncle and aunt died after taking cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules. Grossnickle was the Janus family’s backyard neighbor at the time of the tragedy that made international headlines.

Janus and Grossnickle reconnected in recent years, and she is now on the foundation’s board and was primary organizer of Saturday’s event.

“One of the things I love about this organization is its transparency,” Janus said. “You do not just give and wonder where your support goes. You actually see the projects: the farms and the clinics and the lives being changed. … These are not simply numbers. They are stories of mothers helped, children healed and families given a future.”

Another major supporter is Wayne Messmer, the singer known for his national anthem renditions before Cubs and Wolves games. But on Saturday, Messmer performed “Smile,” a standard popularized by Nat King Cole in the 1950s that originally was from Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 film “Modern Times.”

“As I look around at these photos … what attracts me is when you see the mothers smile,” Messmer said. “We can give them medicine, buildings, clinics, doctors, cows, whatever it might be. But a great gift that I think we should give them is when we help them to smile.”