O.C. Pair Strives to Rescue Indian Orphans

Louise Williams has her heart in a faraway place. It’s a place in Asia where children, she said, are in dire need of help.

“I’m really a resident of India,” said the 62-year-old former advertising and public relations consultant who, when not on that distant continent, can usually be found in Orange sharing a home with her daughter. “I went to India to change its heart,” she said, “and it ended up changing mine.”

The change came in the form of a dream: providing homes with loving parents for the country’s millions of abused and abandoned children. To make it happen, Williams teamed up with Ketan N. Parekh, a 42-year-old Bombay, India-born software developer who now calls Tustin his home. Together they formed a nonprofit corporation, Love Humanity. And as soon as they can raise the last of needed start-up funds, Williams said -- probably by late November -- she’ll be climbing aboard a plane.

“I’ve always been interested in children’s issues,” she said, “and this is my chance to help.”

Indeed, Williams’ interest in the welfare of children may have been sparked, in part, by her negative experiences growing up in Portland, Ore. She won’t go into detail about her “abusive childhood.”

What she will talk about in depth, however, is how it inspired her desire for change.

“The only way to stop child abuse is to educate anyone who cares for [children] to do so in a loving and teaching manner,” Williams said. “I know it for a fact because when I got pregnant, a teacher taught me how to do that. If she hadn’t, my own daughter might have been abused.”

It was that daughter -- now 30 -- who in 1989 accompanied Williams on her first trip to India as a “personal missionary” to one of the country’s teeming orphanages.

“I always wanted to serve God,” said Williams, who is not affiliated with a church. She was appalled by what she saw. “I thought my childhood was bad,” she recalled, “but these street kids had lives that were horrific.”

Among other things, she said, they were sick, malnourished, subject to physical and sexual abuse, and forced to beg on the streets. And those lucky enough to be in orphanages, Williams said, often lived in barracks on rice and lentils while the caregivers and their own children lived lavishly in homes nearby.

“They needed care,” she said of the young ones she came to adore.

Williams finally got her chance to help, she said, four years ago after running into Parekh, a entrepreneur whose wealthy Indian family had known the late Mother Teresa.

“I have a video of my children pulling on her nose,” he said of the nun whose work with Indian orphans made her famous worldwide. The video, Parekh says, was taken during a visit with Mother Teresa at her orphanage in Bombay. “When you met her,” Parekh recalled, “you really felt a sense of her aura.”

Chatting with Williams at a business dinner in Orange County, Parekh made her a promise: If she would go to India to create houses for orphans, he would help raise the money to pay for them.

The plan, Williams said, is to create several homes -- preferably contributed to and supported by donors -- staffed by trained professional “parents” and housing as many as six children each.

Married couples chosen for the job, she said, will be carefully screened and tested graduates of a six-week training program under development that stresses nonabusive “common sense” parenting.

“We’ve already spoken to the orphanages,” Williams said, “and they can give us as many children as we want.”

The pair estimates that each home can be run for the equivalent of about $6,000 a year -- a fraction of what a similar program would cost in the U.S. The whole project -- including office staff, training materials, advertising and supplies -- will operate, they predict, on an annual budget of about $100,000 for its first three years.

“We need about $20,000 to start,” Williams said.

A banquet at an Orange County Indian restaurant last year netted about $5,000. Other contributions have brought in $7,000. And an Indian flute concert scheduled at Chapman University on Nov. 14, Williams said, should put them over the top.

“We’re looking for an angel right now,” Williams said. “Once we get our start-up capital, we won’t have any trouble getting more.”

Added Parekh: “We truly believe this model will work. Even if we help just a handful of kids, I believe we have done our part.”