Mark and Shirley Kirchen are longstanding volunteers at Nine Star. Mark is a retired business executive and Shirley is a psychiatric nurse. They have been retired for 7 years. Like George Stewart, they have donated time and energy to international concerns. They are very effective in their work with people from other countries and they are here today to share some of their stories with us. They discussed their experiences at orphanages in Thailand and Costa Rica and the key volunteer lessons learned - all accompanied by a diverse selection of photos:
Mark and Shirley volunteered two times for 3 months at an orphanage in Bangkok started by Father Joe Maier. Father Maier heads the Mercy Center and a complex set of projects including an orphanage that houses 200 orphans, an AIDS hospice with about 100 people and 45 kindergartens with thousands of students. For more info see http://www.mercycentre.org/.
Most of the children at the orphanage had been in the sex trade themselves or their mothers had been. Neither the orphanage nor the Thai culture encourages adoption and the government discourages international adoptions based on fears of exploitation, so the kids stay until they are 18, and some end up back in the sex trade. Mark and Shirley taught English in classrooms of around forty kids and taught building bird houses, among other projects.
One of their assignments was to work with a 12-year-old girl, Sao, teaching her English so she could go to an English school and then go for an international baccalaureate as arranged by a benefactor. As it turned out, Sao was unhappy about the English school (a place with mostly non-Thais who spoke English already), so Mark and Shirley interviewed other schools, wrote up a report, talked to Father Maier, toured campuses with Sao, and ended up finding a school that worked for everyone involved. After she was done with the local program, Sao couldn't go to the international school as planned because she didn't have any official papers (like many of the children at the orphanage). She had to spend 2 years at a state orphanage to get her papers. She is now back at Mercy, studying in vocational college.
One of the projects Shirley got involved in as a psychiatric nurse was contacting the University of Bankok to get free psychiatric evaluations, which she couldn't do herself because of the language barrier. It was a project they weren't asked to do but found on their own, partly inspired by a student named Tammy who showed severe anger issues even at seven years old. She is doing much better now.
Another project they tried to initiate was the establishment of a transition manager position to help the kids transition to jobs in the community. Despite the availability of funds, the idea wasn't accepted due to the number of other things going on.
Overall, Mark and Shirley found the interaction with the orphans and staff to be mutually beneficial.
These experiences also illustrated for them the importance of being flexible and diplomatic in their volunteer positions, and they learned that unexpected initiative and intervention, if finessed, can make a difference.
As part of their travel conditions in Thailand, Mark and Shirley had to leave every 30 days. These hiatuses took them to Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, and on to Costa Rica at one point. There they worked with another orphanage, Albergue de La Garita, a state institution for teenage boys, most of whom had been street kids and were placed there by the courts. They were essentially caged in, confined with no programs except to play computer games, but they did have some athletic facilities. Mark and Shirley were able to find and fund someone to work 10 hours a week as an athletic director setting up games and activities. They were there for 6 weeks overall and found that for the same price of their trip they could hire someone for a year and establish a college scholarship.
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