Charly’s Hair Design Studio

851 Richmond Rd.

Ottawa

(613) 798-2228

A full-service hair salon, specializing in hair loss, and thinning hair.  More than 20 years’ experience, and thousands of happy customers. Hair loss treatments featured in the Ottawa Citizen, June, 2002.

All profits from appointments on the first Tuesday of each month go toward the Mark Thuva Hair Salon Fund.

The Ottawa Citizen July 31, 2001

 Stuemers inspire e-mail fan to action

Ottawa hairdresser helps African boys in need

By Bev Wake

Karen Sharp has never met the Stuemer family – and was living hundreds of kilometers away in Texas when they sailed out of Ottawa on a four-year-trip around the world in 1997 – but she’s considering delaying a camping vacation to welcome them home later this month.

And the Stuemers, who only know Ms. Sharp through e-mail, can hardly wait to meet her when they get home.

They’ve become friends over the past year, through Diane Stuemer’s weekly columns in the Citizen, committed to helping two impoverished families the Stuemers befriended in Kenya.

Ms. Sharp, a hairdresser who moved to Ottawa in 1998, said she was moved to tears by Mrs. Stuemer’s columns about Boniface and Hamisi, teenage boys the family met on a Kenyan beach. After visiting each of the boy’s homes, and seeing how they lived, the Stuemers decided they had to help them improve their lives – buying a milk cow for Hamisi, paying for Boniface’s schooling and setting up a scholarship fund for his family.

When Mrs. Stuemer wrote that Boniface’s father needed life-saving prostate surgery, which carried a price tag of more than $1,000, Ms. Sharp was one of two readers to send cheques to cover the cost. Other readers spontaneously sent money, to help with the scholarship fund, bringing the total raised to more than $7,000 to date.

Earlier in the Stuemers’ voyage, readers were also inspired enough to provide books, supplies and a teacher for a remote island in the South Pacific and contribute money to help the endangered primates of Borneo.

“What good people to do this – and to trust us with this,” Mrs. Stuemer said last week. “The individual humans this trip has brought us to is unbelievable. This is the story of our trip.”

The first recipient of the scholarship fund (which must be paid back with interest to ensure it continues) will be Boniface’s 21-year-old brother, Mark – who put together an impressive proposal outlining his plans for a hairdressing salon to earn the money, touching Ms. Sharp’s heart. Starting in August, she plans to donate profits from her Richmond Road hairdressing salon, Charly’s, on the first Tuesday of each month, to Mark.

“I knew if Mark could be successful doing hair that he could really help his entire family,” said Ms. Sharp, reluctant to discuss how much money she plans to donate because she believes giving should be done without recognition. “I invite any other hairstylists in Ottawa to participate.”

Ms. Sharp believes fate brought her to Mark, another hairdresser who needed a helping hand. She met her Ottawa-based husband, Jacques, through the Internet in 1996, learned about the Stuemers through clippings he sent her from the Citizen while they were enduring a long-distance relationship for two years – and had been looking for another child to support. She has helped a 14-year-old girl in Senegal for the last six years through the Christian Children’s Fund.

“I was always interested in helping other people and when the story came out about Boniface and Hamisi I was touched,” she said. “I had supported my daughter and my parents as a hairdresser, and I thought it was really fate that I had wanted to be involved with these people.”

Mrs. Stuemer described Ms. Sharp’s actions as wonderful and heroic. “We can hardly wait to meet her and have her cut our hair,” she said.