Remember the Poor

About Remember the Poor

In the early to mid-1970's, Rose Ann Yoder (Howell), the director of Remember the Poor, lived in Kenya, East Africa for about four years as a teen and young adult. Between 1976 and 1977 she spent five months living with the Kenyans in their mud huts, observing their subsistence living of having only two garments, burning corn cobs when they ran out of firewood for fuel for their three-rock cook-stoves, eating their daily rations of hard-cooked maize with a handful of beans and no salt, and scraping their drinking water from mud holes shared with livestock. Returning to the states and for 30 years thereafter she would lie in bed at night remembering those people and brooding over the poverty she had seen there, and the helplessness and distress she felt over her inability to alleviate that poverty: she didn't know full names or addresses, they had no telephones, no bank accounts...Finally, in 2007 she had the opportunity to return to Kenya. Her ecstasy knew no bounds when her church sent her with almost $10,000 to help the poor! Indigenous pastors and women's groups conducted her to the poor in their communities where she was able to hand-deliver both a care package of staples and $100 to each needy family or widow. From there the vision was born to do benevolence work among the working poor, which she did in five subsequent visits to Kenya. As the work grew and expanded, Mrs. Howell became aware that a nonprofit would be an honorable and respectable resource for people interested in investing in benevolence work. Thus, with the very kind and generous assistance of a lawyer and senior accountant, Remember the Poor came to be.

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