Newport woman is off to France to help refugee children
Helen Timpe was standing on her Newport Beach home’s cork wood floor in front of her television on Oct. 11 when she watched a broadcast that would change her life.
“PBS NewsHour” aired a segment about Greece. Parents there were pushing back against efforts to provide education to children living in a refugee camp. The parents cited concerns that the refugees, many from Syria and Afghanistan, carried infectious diseases and would present cultural problems for the native Greek children.
This struck a nerve with Timpe, a former schoolteacher, as did a haunting image released months before of Omran Daqneesh, a 5-year-old Syrian boy pulled from the rubble of crumbling Aleppo. In the picture, which has become emblematic of the Syrian conflict, a stunned Omran quietly sits alone in the back of an ambulance, his body covered in dust and an open wound on his forehead.
After hearing about children being denied an education, Timpe had heard enough. She decided to do something.
In the months that followed, the 77-year-old founded a nonprofit, Global Schools Without Walls, and crafted the immediate goal of moving to northern France for the next three to five years to educate 150 orphaned refugee children.
The children, ages 3 to 13, are in La Liniere, a refugee camp in Grande-Synthe, a community near Dunkirk and France’s border with Belgium.
Timpe has put her home — a waterfront, seventh-story condominium at 601 Lido Park Drive — on the market and gifted or stored her possessions. She has received a lot of feedback from her friends and family, many of whom were eager to help.
“I love it,” Timpe said of her condo during a recent interview there. “But there is nothing I can’t live without for a few years.”
Timpe left Friday for San Francisco, where she’s staying with relatives for a few days before hopping on a plane to France. She doesn’t have a permanent place to live there yet and will stay in a bed and breakfast at first. Timpe hopes to soon lease a farmhouse property that she can live in and use as a base for her nonprofit’s volunteers.
The whole endeavor has been serendipitous, she said, with pieces falling together happenstance.
“It’s such a huge project,” she said.
This isn’t the first time Timpe decided to drop everything and move to another country to help. In 1963, she and her husband, Conrad, agreed to move to Malawi through a Catholic lay missionary program.
From 1964 through 1967, Timpe taught chemistry and biology in the African country. Conrad, a rocket scientist whom she met while both attended Iowa State University, taught math.
Moving to Malawi was no easy feat for the young couple — she was 25 and he 29. They had a child and owned a home. Both had jobs. But they didn’t let that stop them.
Conrad now lives in an assisted-living complex in Costa Mesa. But he is supportive of Timpe’s move to France, she said.
“You go, girl,” Timpe recalled Conrad saying. “You’re the woman for the job.”
Though the mother of three started out as a teacher, she later became a financial advisor and portfolio manager.
On Thursday, Timpe hosted a retirement party where friends, relatives and clients gathered at the Balboa Bay Resort to send her off.
She requested donations for Global Schools Without Walls, which is sponsored by the Edward Charles Foundation.
“We have the first five donors, but you could be No. 6 through 100,” she joked to the crowd.
The Rev. Canon Cindy Evans Voorhees of St. James the Great Episcopal Church in Newport Beach was among the first people Timpe spoke to about her plans. Timpe has been a member of the St. James congregation, and Voorhees attended her party.
Voorhees, who runs a nonprofit that gives aid in Africa, could relate to Timpe’s dream to help abroad. She initially told Timpe that to make the project work, she needed to “plot her course” and get her research in order.
Timpe visited France late last year and met with camp directors at La Liniere. She began making the necessary connections for Global Schools Without Walls.
Voorhees said she has no doubt Timpe will succeed.
“She is a force of nature,” Voorhees said.
Twitter: @BradleyZint
