Helping Those Who Help Others

Tom in El Salvador, Phil in Guatemala and Eva in Mexico want someone to adopt them.

Their pictures will be on display at Concern America’s open house in Santa Ana next month, but prospective sponsors won’t be seeing any big-eyed waifs.

Tom, Phil and Eva are grown up, college-educated professionals, born in the U.S. They work as unpaid volunteers for an international development and refugee aid organization that has taken the standard “sponsor a child” fund-raising campaign one step further.

Instead of sponsoring one child living in poverty, donors “adopt” a specialist--perhaps a physician or a water-resources engineer--who spends at least two years training local villagers to help themselves. When the volunteer specialist leaves, the trained workers remain. Concern America likes to think of it as a ripple effect.

“We don’t want to just give people charity. We want to train them to help themselves,” said Marianne Loewe, executive director.

In 27 years, the organization has sent 180 volunteers--doctors, nurses, engineers, educators, agriculturists and community organizers--into a dozen countries in Latin America and Africa. The results have given indigenous peoples access to clean water, medical attention, income-generating projects and education.

But not everybody “gives by going.”

The adopt-a-volunteer program makes giving very personal, said Chris Siegfried of the open house committee. “If you want to adopt Dr. John, for example, you see his picture and read his profile and you get quarterly reports from him about what he’s doing.”

The funds pay for the volunteer’s room and board, transportation to, from and within the country, health insurance and a small stipend.

Depending on the country, it costs $7,000-$8,000 a year per volunteer, according to Denis Garvey, director of development. Partial sponsorships are available and groups can be sponsors.

With an annual budget of about $1 million, Concern America gets most of its funding from foundations, including foreign groups such as War on Want Northern Ireland, and through private gifts from a loyal donor base. Former volunteers often support the volunteer who replaced them once they return to the U.S. and get good-paying jobs, Garvey said.

Though area churches are used as forums, the group is nondenominational and eschews federal funds, Loewe said, “because it complicates things abroad.”

Locally, Concern America makes its presence known with an annual Walk Out of Poverty to raise funds and call attention to the plight of people who struggle daily with unsafe water, not enough food, limited health care, no education, no jobs and no say in decision-making.

This year’s walk, held April 15 in Fountain Valley, raised $15,000. Supporters hope the May 20 open house (3 to 6 p.m. at 2015 N. Broadway) will create awareness of the organization and drum up sponsors for as many as 12 of the 30 volunteers, as well as show off the group’s new rent-free headquarters.

Actor Mike Farrell (“Providence,” “MASH”) is the group’s national spokesman and is scheduled to attend the open house.

Cindy Heifner, who coordinated this year’s walk and served as a volunteer in Bangladesh in 1982, plans to be there too, along with other volunteers.

Heifner, who has a degree in health education, worked in Concern-run schools training teachers to incorporate health education into their curriculum. She also worked in “nutrition rehab,” which she calls a “nice term” for helping starving children--specifically, starving girls.

“It’s very hard to accept and work within, but in their tradition, men and boys eat first and whatever’s left goes to the women and girls,” she said. “Mothers would come in with a fat baby boy in their arms and a starving 3-year-old girl.”

Heifner worked with young mothers to help them make the most of what they had, such as adding spinach, which grew wild and was considered a weed, to oatmeal and rice to combat vitamin A deficiency. She also worked to train village residents in community health and sanitation.

Today, Concern America is focusing on places such as Guatemala, where the aftermath of a civil war presents opportunities to rebuild both buildings and relationships, Loewe said.

The training program there, which lasts four years, teaches practical medicine, such as how to suture machete cuts, deliver breech births and deal with infectious diseases.

Despite contracting hepatitis, which made the final months of her stay in Bangladesh difficult, Heifner would do it all again.

“Most volunteers I talk to are like myself. No matter how good we feel about what we may have taught people there, we learned an awful lot about the world,” she said, adding that Americans especially need more exposure to the rest of the world.

* Concern America, (714) 953-8575; Web site, https://www.concernamerica.org.