New Brighton woman makes it her mission to help 'poorest of the poor'

After losing everything she held dear, Sue Kolljeski said she was called to work with "the least, the last and the lost of the world."

Her missionary work has taken her to the Andes Mountains, the steppes in Central Asia, Russia, the low jungle of the Amazon and the tropical area of Ghana.

She left Pittsburgh on Feb. 2 for a four-year stay at an orphanage in Lawra, in the Upper West Region of northwestern Ghana, where she will be working with 20 children who lost their parents to HIV/AIDS.

"This area has the highest poverty, illiteracy and HIV/AIDS rate in the country," Kolljeski wrote in an e-mail. "Most people are farmers. ... The (harsh) climate makes it difficult for the farmers to be able to harvest enough to both feed their family and provide extra income. Malaria and the lack of safe drinking water are also major issues."

Some 21,000 adults and children in Ghana died last year of AIDS, according to the CIA World Factbook. Average income in Lawra can be as little as $10 a month.

Kolljeski, 57, of New Brighton has joined the staff of an orphanage operated by The United Methodist Church in Lawra. She is one of more than 200 missionaries in 38 countries recruited by the Mission Society of Norcross, Ga., which has trained and deployed 214 missionaries to countries in Africa, Central America and Europe since being founded in 1984.

The district where she is living includes 87,000 people in 153 settlements. Only eight locales have populations of more than 1,000 people. Water in the district is provided through 404 boreholes fitted with handpumps.

"She's in the poorest of the poor areas. ... The people from Ghana don't even go there," said the Rev. Brad Neel, pastor of Concord United Methodist Church in New Brighton, where Kolljeski is a member.

She began missionary work after she and her husband, a pastor, divorced. It was a rough time, those who know her have said.

"It caused her to question the church, its pastors," said the Rev. John Smith, the former pastor at Concord who has known Kolljeski for 20 years. "But she was determined to turn a negative into a positive."

Growing up, all she ever wanted was to be a teacher, wife and mother.

She earned a bachelor's degree in elementary education and married her "knight in shining armor." Eighteen years later, she was divorced, childless, her mother had died, and her father had not spoken to her in six years.

"Everything that I held dear was taken away from me. I had entered into a state of depression that I could not shake," she said. "God led me to Concord ... where I began a process of healing from those emotional wounds."

She went on a mission trip to Russia headed by Smith to work in a summer camp.

"In giving herself to the children, she found herself," Smith said.

Kolljeski said she planned to go to Russia to work in the camp and just do her job. She would remain detached; she wasn't going to get involved.

Then, the children started to arrive.

"My eyes met the eyes of an 8-year-old girl, Raya. She looked how I felt and I thought I had dealt with all those issues, both real and perceived -- rejection, mistrust, broken dreams, abandonment," she said.

They became inseparable.

After that first trip, Kolljeski knew she had found her life's work, Smith said.

"I think I'm going to spend the rest of my life tucking children into bed who don't have anyone to tuck them in," Smith said she told him.

She first went to Ghana in 2007 and visited the Upper West Region a year later.

"She just loves those kids," Neel said.