By Heidi Smith
If you’ve seen the reality show Shark Tank, you’re probably familiar with local entrepreneurs known as the Ice Chip Grannies. You may know that they started their highly successful business Ice Chips Candy in a Yelm garage, that their product created a bidding war among the sharks, or that their nickname came about due to their 41 grandchildren. What you might not know, however, is that the grannies, also known as Charlotte Clary and Bev Vines-Haines, have a personal connection to Sierra Leone. This year, they’ve made feeding widows and orphans who have survived the Ebola virus a priority.
The devastating epidemic has swept through communities in West Africa, including Freetown, Sierra Leone where their friend of twenty-five years Sammy Koroma is a pastor. “When you get a lot, you want to give back,” says Vines-Haines. “So we settled upon a pretty substantial amount of money that we’ve been releasing to them in segments over the year.” They know that those funds are going directly to feeding Ebola survivors.
Koroma runs a school and ministry in Freetown and even before the virus, his community faced challenges. “Widows are a big problem over there, because prior to Ebola, there was AIDS,” explains Vines-Haines. “A lot of women had to grow old taking care of children plus their husbands with AIDS.” Now, entire families have been wiped out, leaving children and widows with no resources and no way to feed themselves. “We knew how horrible conditions were,” she says. “There are maybe as many as 25% of Ebola victims that survive and unfortunately a lot of them are children. They typically lose almost everyone in their family.” That knowledge inspired the duo to contribute.
Knowing someone directly involved also made it easier for them to take action. The pair had stayed in connection with Koroma for decades, including throughout Sierra Leone’s brutal civil war. “Even when I couldn’t get letters through to him, he would try to get to where there was a phone,” says Vines-Haines. Because of that connection, they knew he would use their donation wisely. “We trust him implicitly to do the right thing,” says Clary. Vines-Haines adds, “It’s awesome to have somebody that you trust and know that’s right there in the trenches that can do what you would do if you could be there.” Koroma sends regular updates and photos of their donations in action.
How they met Koroma is a tale in itself. While attending a ‘Reaching the World’ conference in San Jose, California, they learned about the idea of walking around your neighborhood and praying for the people in all of the houses, including those who were dealing with issues like addiction and violence. “We would just walk around the neighborhood quietly praying for every house. We did that for years,” says Vines-Haines. But then, she looked at an atlas program on her computer and thought, “I could pray for the whole world.”
So, in the time before social media, she started writing letters to the post masters of towns all across the globe. “They would hang the letters up in the post office, and people from all over the community would read them and respond,” she explains. Thousands of them, in fact. Koroma was one of them. Eventually, she says, it became too traumatic to continue. “I got a letter from Russia that said, ‘Just pray that I will have one more time to get warm before I die.’ He wanted a piece of wood to light on fire. Finally I just started praying over the letters unopened.”
That type of emphasis on personal care and connection is evident throughout their company, Ice Chips Candy. “We set out with a goal to have employees that wanted to come to work,” says Vines-Haines. “We hired single mothers, single fathers, seniors and college students. If they have a sick child, they are free to leave. They have to clock out, but they’re never in danger of losing their jobs.”
Recently, they’ve begun working with Rising Star Learning Center, an organization that helps disabled children and adults develop life skills. “We have a young man now that’s been here for five weeks and he’s so excited to be able to work,” says Clary. “He’s never been able to work before. It’s so exciting to see him so excited.”
Ice Chips Candy has continued to expand rapidly and the company will be moving its production facility from Yelm to Tumwater in the coming year. As they grow they intend to keep the spirit of connection alive. “We have many employees now that we knew when they were two-year-olds, so we had a very strong family deal,” says Vines-Haines. “We really want to keep that.”
Meanwhile, in Sierra Leone their contributions continue to make a difference for those who have lost everything, including their families. “What I love about Sammy is that we can see the results of what we’ve done and see him feeding people,” says Vines-Haines. She pauses. “There’s so much that needs to be done.”
All photos courtesy Ice Chips Candy.