MILTON - Ruth Adomunes liked the beaded bracelet she bought on the Caribbean isle of St. Kitts so much that when its silver-plated spacers deteriorated she repaired it and then, on a whim, made another beaded bracelet. With that, Adomunes embarked on a venture that would have her stringing and selling enough bracelets to build a cluster of cement houses in a Haitian village and contribute another $10,000 to help construct a school there.
It started simply enough in August 2006, when a secretary at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, where Adomunes is a nurse, admired a bracelet with green and pink glass beads that Adomunes had designed and offered to buy one. Adomunes set aside the money for the Haitian Health Foundation, the favored cause of a fellow nurse.
"The secretary showed someone else, and it snowballed," Adomunes says. "The recovery room nurses at BI are the real village. We turned it into this enormous goal of how many houses we could build."
For $600 the foundation will replace a banana leaf shanty with a cement-walled, tin-roofed "happy house." By November 2006, Adomunes had sold enough bracelets to build 14 houses in the fishing village of Testasse. Her gift marks the first time a single donation has built a neighborhood. In 2007 she raised $10,000 for the school.
"This is the story of the three little pigs. It's houses of straw and houses of twigs. We put in the cement house the big bad wolf can't blow down," says Marilyn Lowney, the foundation's executive director. "Normally our happy houses are one here and one a mile or two away. This is nice. It's all along the ocean."
The posters Adomunes brings with her to house parties sponsored by friends and colleagues have photographs of the old shanties and new concrete cottages, the latter bearing plaques that say "Happy House: Gift of Friends of Ruth Adomunes." Another placard says, "We made a village. Now we're going for a school." Adomunes points to the children standing in front of one house. "Look at these faces," she says. "These are the kids who will be going to the school."
By her own description, Adomunes, 53, mother of two grown children, is more athlete than artisan. Past projects have tended toward training for a marathon or a triathlon, not creating handiwork. She started making bracelets at the kitchen table of her spacious colonial, but that proved hard on the feet of family members who stepped on the beads she dropped. So she commandeered the corner of the master bedroom. At 548 square feet, the room is about twice the size of the typical happy house.
This is where Adomunes keeps stashes of the colored glass and silver beads and Swarovski pearls that she buys in bulk from the Bead Cache in Mansfield. She strings them onto elastic nylon, displays the finished bracelets on a black velvet jewelry stand and sells them for $22 apiece. Whatever money is left after recouping the cost of supplies, Adomunes gives to the foundation and other causes.
The bulk of what Adomunes has raised comes from the sale of her bracelets, but there have been other contributions, too. The Mt. Washington Bank, for instance, let her sell bracelets for a month in a Dorchester branch and added a $1,000 check to the $540 worth of bracelets she sold there.
Her main goal remains raising more of the $34,000 the foundation still needs to build the school in Haiti, and once it's built she'll visit the Caribbean nation. Meanwhile, Adomunes has added a few other causes to her enterprise. Dove Inc., a domestic violence shelter in Norfolk County, has sold about $2,000 worth of bracelets, and Adomnes has raised another $500 to help the family of a Martha's Vineyard girl who has cancer.
Adomunes enlisted a friend to make tags for the bracelets that say "Designs by Ruth," and late last year she asked a neighbor who likes to sew drapes and quilts to help make bracelets. "One day I made 70," says the neighbor, Jean Graham. Graham's husband is a breast cancer surgeon at New England Medical Center, so now some proceeds go to the Breast Health Center there to help needy patients buy wigs and prostheses.
Next Adomunes plans to set up a website, as she folds the unexpected avocation she's grown to love around her full-time job as a nurse.
"I want to take this as far as it will go. My career is number one. Whatever else I can fit in, I will," she says. "I don't want it to rule me. I don't want it to not be my passion anymore. I'm pacing it the right way, and it's working."
Wherever Adomunes goes, she carries a large tote bag filled with bracelets. "This is my portable store," she says. "If someone says, 'Do you have any bracelets?' 'Yes, I do.' "
