Local photographer launches nonprofit to send international women to school

Three decisions, five years ago, changed the life of Corvallis’ Cheryl Hatch — and also ended up changing the life of a woman a world away.

Now, Hatch is determined to build on those decisions and help change the lives of many more women across the globe.

Decision No. 1: In 2003, Hatch, a freelance war photographer, had a visa for Kuwait and a plane ticket to the Philippines. Hatch (a former staff member at the Gazette-Times) heard the drumbeat leading up to the second Gulf War. She had covered the first Gulf War, and returning to Kuwait would have given her the chance to once again document how war affects the lives of women and children and how it scars the environment.

But her gut said “don’t go.”

“I was trying to make the break from war photography,” she said. “How many (more) moms do I want to watch crying over the graves of their babies? Just for my psychological and emotional well-being, it was time for me to travel another path.”

Hence the ticket to the Philippines, where Hatch vacationed and completed her scuba-diving certification. A few days into the vacation, she was tooling around the jungle on an all-terrain vehicle, when she whipped around a corner and came face-to-face with decision No. 2: “I had a choice,” Hatch recalled, “between a wall, a cliff and a pedestrian. So I chose the wall.”

The ATV went up and over the wall. Her helmet flew off and she was pinned beneath the ATV. Her left wrist was shattered.

The next day, back at the diving school where she was staying, staff members suggested that she might want to have a professional look at the wrist. As it turned out, the guests at the scuba school included a doctor from a hospital on another Filipino island. He escorted Hatch to his hospital, where arrangements were made for surgery.

So Hatch found herself in a hospital thousands of miles from home, scared and alone. That’s when the owner of the diving school arranged for one of his waitresses, a Filipino woman named Leah Mamhot, to stay with Hatch at the hospital while she recuperated.

During her four-day hospital stay, Hatch learned that Mamhot, then 31, always had wanted to be a teacher. But she had put that dream on hold and took the waitressing job to earn money to help her widowed mother.

Hatch came to a third decision: “I decided I would like to send Leah to college.”

And so it began, the project that Hatch called “Leah’s Dream.” Working with a financial consultant, Louise Barker of OSU Federal Credit Union, Hatch ironed out the financial details of transferring money to the Philippines. (Hatch’s first donation was $500 in U.S. cash sent through the mail; the money actually made it to Mamhot, who was “a little freaked out by that,” Hatch said.)

Four years later, in October 2007, Mamhot graduated with honors from La Salle University in the Philippines, and Hatch returned to witness the graduation. Mamhot’s college education cost about $2,500. She’s now teaching at a Montessori school in Ozamiz City, also spelled Ozamis City, on the island of Mindanao.

And Hatch has made another decision: “Leah’s Dream” shouldn-’t end with Leah Mamhot.

So she’s launching, on a deliberately small scale, a nonprofit organization, the Isis Initiative. The goal of Isis is to identify other women across the world who need help paying for an education so that they can then, in turn, give back to their communities. Isis will be looking for women who want to become, for example, teachers, nurses, doctors.

Mamhot will serve as Isis’ liaison in the Philippines, and that’s where the organization will focus its initial efforts, but Hatch hopes some day to expand to other countries as well.

First things first, though: Hatch has assembled a small board of directors, and the board is working through ideas to raise money and has set some goals for the next year. “Anything more than $5,000 would make us really happy,” she said, and noted that amount would pay for at least one college education in the Philippines.

“It’s a simple start,” Hatch said, but she added: “I have big, big, big dreams, obviously. Kind of like Leah.”

Learn more

To find out more about the Isis Initiative, you can e-mail Cheryl Hatch at isisphotos@yahoo.com. An account for the Isis Initiative has been established at OSU Federal Credit Union. For more information about the account, contact Louise Barker at OSU Federal at 714-4000.