Dan Houk may be best known here for his 43-year career leading Spokane-based Wilbert Precast Inc., from which he retired in June, leaving the concrete-products manufacturer in the hands of his son T.J. Houk, who represents the fifth generation to run the family company.

However, Dan’s business acumen reaches far beyond the Inland Northwest.

He and his wife Lori Houk, a board member at Wilbert Precast, have spent the past roughly 15 years involved in mission work in Sawla, a small town in Ghana, Africa.

Through a nonprofit called International Assistance Program, Dan and Lori have been leading the Sawla project, which initially started as a children’s home, but has since evolved into a Christian private school and business community that they're working to make completely self-sustaining.

“We find a project that needs help—in this case it was orphaned kids in northwestern Ghana,” Dan says.

The Sawla project is likely the last of several projects undertaken by International Assistance Program, which was founded over 30 years ago by Spokane missionary Keith Davis.

“International Assistance Program has had projects in Romania, Ethiopia, Costa Rica,” Dan says. “They’re all mature and have been let go to the people in those countries to run.”

Sawla Children’s Home was established in 2007. About 18 months later, Dan was invited to help out because of his business experience. Lori joined him shortly after.

“They needed to try to figure out a business to ... eventually make it self-sustaining where we don’t need donors,” Dan says. “So many times when donors have donor fatigue and you just get to the end, it just goes away and dies on the vine. Our purpose is to have this as an economic engine of this small community that will go on in perpetuity.”

The children’s home has helped raise over 50 kids since its creation, Lori says.

“Right now, we have 22 kids in universities and training programs,” she says. “A lot of them are doing medical-type things; we have some artists.”

To create self-sustainability for the children’s home, Dan and Lori and their small nonprofit board came up with a business plan.

“From the beginning, we were trying to figure out a way to make this an income to help alleviate the need for donations, and we decided on a hotel,” Dan says. “We started fundraising and designed and built an 18-room hotel.”

The facility, named the Sawla View Lodge, was built in 2015 and is complete with a reception area, restaurant, bar, and swimming pool. The nonprofit created a large garden behind the hotel to provide food for the restaurant and to add an additional revenue stream by selling food at the market.

It’s the only hotel within about three hours, Dan says.

“Ever since the hotel opened, we give the children’s home a stipend every month,” Dan says. “It’s a fixed cost for the hotel.”

Around the same time the hotel was built, the nonprofit also built a fully staffed, standalone bakery that produces hundreds of loaves of bread daily that are sold around the area, adding another source of income.

In 2020, International Assistance Program began converting the children’s home into a private Christian school, named Train a Child International School, because children’s homes in the country are being shut down for various reasons, Dan says.

“It currently goes through third grade,” Dan says. "This September, the third graders will go on to fourth grade and we’ll bring younger kids in at the bottom end. ... We’ve got rooms built for the next couple of years, and then we’ll be building more classrooms.”

Dorms and the pavilion in the children’s home have been repurposed into classrooms. The school eventually will support kids up to ninth grade; high schools in Ghana are grades 10-12.

Dan and Lori Houk
The Sawla View Lodge, in Ghana, Africa, was built in 2015 to generate additional revenue for the Sawla Children's Home and now the Train a Child International School.    

The school started with about 90 kids. It has about 250 attending now, and Dan says he expects there to be about 450 when it is completed.

“The schools in this part of the world have no books, they might have chalk—if they have a chalkboard—they might have pencils but probably no paper,” Dan says. “It’s just a really, really poor area.”

Most of the parents of kids who attend the school learned about it through word-of-mouth.

“Now that we’ve been in business for a few years, the parents in the area are just thrilled with the education their kids are getting, and of course the word gets around,” Dan says.

There are about 50 employees—all locals—between the school, hotel, restaurant, and bakery. Over 20 kids from the children’s home have worked at the hotel, Lori adds.

Dan and Lori typically travel to Sawla twice yearly.

“We’re just mentoring and coaching. Like I did for 43 years at Wilbert, you find a vision and then get others to buy into the vision,” Dan says. “We go and make great headway when we’re there, then we leave and do the same thing from afar.”

The Spokane couple were driven to this work through their faith, they say.

“Lori and I were just praying about what God wants to do with us,” Dan says. “What are we going to do with our income and our talents and resources.”

Lori adds, “We’re not doctors, we’re not nurses, we’re not teachers, so what can we do?”

Dan and Lori hope to have the Sawla project complete and mature enough to hand off within the next 10 years.

“If in six or eight years we are able to just turn it over, and they’ve got it financially—they’re successful, they’re doing things right—we can kind of walk away,” Dan says. “We’ll never totally walk away. ... These kids that we’ve raised, they’re like our own kids.”