WHAT Cheryl Blackwell thought was a computer scam has turned out to be an Australia Day honour.
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Mrs Blackwell has dedicated decades of her life to helping people in less fortunate situations and has now been recognised for her efforts with an Order of Australia Medal (OAM).
Not only has she made significant contributions to the Bathurst community since moving to town in 1999, Mrs Blackwell has also dedicated 25 years to helping care for and educate people in Rwanda.
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"[I'm] very overwhelmed, I'm pretty humbled about it," she said.
"We're blessed in this country and we're blessed to be a blessing so I do whatever I can do to help out, and being recognised for that ... I feel very privileged and it's a very big honour."
Mrs Blackwell is the senior manager at Hope Care Bathurst, which runs a soup kitchen three days a week, a community pantry one day a week, and provides emergency food relief and other crisis relief assistance.
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Mrs Blackwell and her husband Steve have been the senior pastors at Hope Care for 15 years now and she said they couldn't do it without the help of their staff and volunteers.
"There's a myriad of things that Hope Care does and it takes a great team to make that work," she said.
In 1996, she and her husband began annual trips to Rwanda (where a genocide had occurred in 1994) to help build a better education system.
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Mrs Blackwell said it was a real eye-opener as to how blessed people living in Australia are and she said it's amazing what a good education can do.
"One of our first pre-schoolers, she was only three when she started with us, she's just been given a scholarship to a very prestigious school in London," she said.
"She wants to be an astrophysicist and work at NASA. She's just phenomenal.
"This is a little kid whose dad was killed through the genocide, living in incredible poverty, and just the chance that education can give someone ... it's just phenomenal."
In addition to her involvement with Rwanda and Hope Care, Mrs Blackwell has been a foster carer for 17 years and involved with a number of non-government organisations.