T-R PHOTO BY ROBERT MAHARRY Sarah Bryce, left, a Class of 1999 MHS alum who is the founder/CEO of Lead With Love and the author of the new children’s book “The God Box,” is pictured with her mother Cindy Soderberg, right, in Marshalltown last Friday.

When Sarah (Soderberg) Bryce graduated from Marshalltown High School in 1999, she started her postsecondary education with two years at Marshalltown Community College before moving on to William Jewell College in Liberty, Mo. to study nursing, meeting her husband Joel, a native of Canada, in the process. At that time, she had no idea their journey would end up taking them all the way to South Africa, where she and Joel would end up living for over a decade and start their family before recently returning to the United States.

“I went into nursing because of a growing conviction that I wanted a skillset that I could use anywhere in the world to help care for others and, specifically, women and children. Maternal and children’s health was always what I was really passionate about, so I worked at a hospital in Kansas City for a number of years as an obstetric nurse, and then we moved to Boston in 2009,” she said.

The move to the east coast came as Joel successfully applied to Harvard Business School after working at the Federal Reserve Bank in Kansas City, and while he was pursuing his MBA, he completed an internship with a nonprofit organization doing consulting work with small and medium-sized businesses in the east African nation of Malawi.

Sarah went with him, and as they didn’t have kids at the time (they now have two), she volunteered and did health care work.

“It was our first time on the continent, and a really profound, incredible experience, and we did visit South Africa during those three months,” she said.. “Those three months, I think, were pretty pivotal in setting us on the course of moving our lives to South Africa, which only actually happened a number of years later. But we visited South Africa, really fell in love with it, and we both had a deep desire for the work of our hands to be unto the benefit of others. I think all of us as humans want that, but we specifically were feeling that in terms of poverty alleviation on the continent of Africa.”

After Joel finished his MBA, he was working for a consulting firm in the Boston area in a social impact service line, and a lot of his clients were doing work in Africa, requiring him to travel back and forth frequently. Eventually, the firm asked if the family would be interested in moving to South Africa, and they quickly agreed.

In December of 2014, the couple moved to the nation on the southern tip of Africa after Sarah, who was six months pregnant with their eldest daughter, finished graduate school (a dual master’s degree program in Nursing and Public Health). Initially, it was a two-year contract, but those two years ended up turning into 11. Joel spent about a year and a half with the firm that sent him there before shifting his work, but it was always focused in the agricultural investment space — primarily, investing in subsistence and small-scale farmers.

Without a work visa or a nursing license she could use in South Africa, Sarah said she was forced to shift her paradigm on what life and living there would look like, but she appreciated the time she got with her young daughters. But it also provided an opportunity for the creation of the business she ended up launching, Lead With Love, and the children’s book she recently published, “The God Box.”

Witnessing extreme poverty like she saw in Malawi (Sarah volunteered at an abandoned baby shelter where starving infants were left daily on the doorstep because the families had no money to raise them, as well as with a mobile health clinic which provided basic health services to Malawians living in extremely poor, rural communities) profoundly changed her perspective on the world, and one of the things she noticed upon returning to the U.S. then was that in America, pets were often living more comfortable lives than many humans in Africa.

“We should want all of those things for our pets…they’re our babies! But I also saw this opportunity to kind of marry the love and care and spending on pets with the love and care of our human neighbors in the world who need access to these very same things,” she said.

After moving to South Africa — they were always in the Gauteng Province, which includes the cities of Johannesburg and Pretoria — she “finally got brave enough” to launch her social enterprise small business, which provides jobs to unemployed South African women in desperate need of work to make premium dog leashes, collars and accessories. Lead With Love has continued to grow under Sarah’s leadership and allows shoppers to customize their products.

“You can pick from 47 different color options and literally create leashes and collars that fit your personality, your dog’s personality, and feel good about it because it’s creating meaningful, dignifying work for women in South Africa who desperately need it,” she said.

Although the Bryce family has returned to the U.S. within the last month, resettling in the Boston area, Sarah remains deeply involved in Lead With Love as the founder and CEO, and her co-founder and COO is now managing all on the ground operations. She already has plans to return to South Africa in February.

“It’s still my baby, and I care about it deeply and I will be back as much as is needed, likely quarterly,” Sarah said.

Joel is embarking on a new investment fund with a friend from business school focused on American businesses in the northeast, and the couple’s daughters, now 10 and eight and both born in South Africa, are adjusting to their new life in the States.

“It’s been a really big shift for our family to come back to the U.S. but also feels really sweet in light of my book because the book was also birthed in South Africa,” Sarah said.

She explained that “The God Box,” which is illustrated by Jake Waldron, arose out of the questions that children ask in hopes of making sense of the world and faith and how she wanted to present those ideas to her children as a mother.

“What I wanted them to know more than anything is that anytime we think we have completely figured God out or what it looks like to follow God, we’ve missed it, and we’re limiting the fullness of who God is and the mysterious journey that we’re invited into in faith,” Sarah said. “And so ‘The God Box’ is all about this little girl who’s being told she needs to follow the rules and play the part and stick to the script by her Gran, and she finally gets brave enough to open this box in her Gran’s house. And what she finds is a kaleidoscope of color and wonder and adventure. And it’s God. It’s the idea of God being trapped in this box and being made smaller than what God is.”

As it turns out, the grandparent is sad that she’s missed out on a whole faith journey that could have invited her into so much more joy and wonder than she allowed it to. The book was just published and is currently available in paperback on Amazon, but hardcover and Kindle versions will be released on Feb. 15.

Despite the fact that the Bryces no longer reside in South Africa, they will always consider it the “home of their hearts,” and Sarah is especially optimistic that both her business and her book will continue to make an impact there for years to come.

“South Africa is amazing. It’s still a country early in its democracy — healing, still, from lots of deep pains and hurts. The ripple effect of Apartheid doesn’t end quickly, and so you see that…you see that all throughout the country. It’s a country that is so resilient, and so young in its democratic state and so, like any country, it’s figuring things out, but it is full of more beauty than you could ever imagine – so much cultural diversity, language diversity, so much beauty and vibrancy, so much natural beauty. The country itself is just gloriously beautiful,” she said. “And I think my little family of four will forever live with a limp in our hearts not being there because it literally wove its way into our hearts and beings in such a profound way.”

Sarah is the daughter of Cindy and Larry Soderberg of Marshalltown. To learn more about Lead With Love and order products, visitwww.leadwithlove.africa, and the link to purchase the book is https://www.amazon.ca/God-Box-Sarah-Bryce/dp/1968693211.

——

Contact Robert Maharry

at 641-753-6611 ext. 255 or

rmaharry@timesrepublican.com.