Academic and Career Accomplishments
Thomas Furrer was born and raised in Ravenna, Ohio, attended Immaculate Conception School from Kindergarten to sth grade and graduated from Ravenna High School in 1968. He married Maryjane Hanson in 1976 and relocated to Connecticut where he started a small construction business. While working full-time and raising three children, Thomas attended a local community college where he received an associate’s degree. He continued his studies at Wesleyan University where he received a B.A. in History in 1982. Later, Thomas attended Yale Divinity School and received a Master of Divinity degree in 1986. In the same year, Thomas was ordained a Deacon and a Priest in the Episcopal Diocese of Connecticut and served as a full-time pastor in two different Connecticut parishes for 30 years.
Since retirement, he has served as a part-time pastor at smaller churches. In 2002, he went on a mission trip hosted by the Anglican Diocese of Kaduna, Nigeria in West Africa. It was his first encounter with a developing country. Thomas was shocked at the living conditions of the rural poor “subsistence farmers” that he met there. As a result of this experience, he began a partnership with the Diocese of Kaduna to build and run a medical clinic to serve the rural poor. In 2003, they built. and began to run one small clinic in a market town named “Kateri”. The clinic serves as the only medical facility for thousands of rural people in scores of small remote villages in the region -an area roughly the size of Portage County. This partnership later became formalized in registered charitable corporation called “Kateri Medical Services”. Since that time, they have expanded the number of clinics to eight clinics in different regions of Nigeria. They are currently building Clinic# 9 and are planning to build Clinic# 1 o in 2025. Their Mission is “To provide simple, decent an□ affordable medical care to the rural and urban poor in Nigeria.” In 2023, the clinics served 28,531 patients with medical care.