Volunteers struggle to keep charity alive

Only about a dozen of the 150 volunteers are active.
WASHINGTON POST
WASHINGTON -- A barn on an abandoned dairy farm behind the St. Benedict Monastery in Bristow, Va., holds 250 mattresses, piled high on the second floor. They are surrounded by boxes of intravenous tubing, syringes, gauze and a small mountain of walkers.
Next door, another contains outdated delivery tables, heart monitors, hospital beds, wheelchairs and more large medical equipment, all cleaned and protected under plastic. Lining the gravel road to the barns are 11 worn trailers holding still more medical supplies, soap, clothing and nonperishable foods.
Medical Missionaries, a Manassas, Va.-based nonprofit organization, has been collecting the supplies, which were donated or thrown out by various medical outfits up and down the Eastern Seaboard, for 10 years. The all-volunteer group also collects various medicines and vaccines from larger nonprofit organizations and redistributes everything to groups serving 33 third-world countries.
But there is a problem: how to keep the organization alive. Of its almost 150 volunteers, only about a dozen are active, and most of them are retired. "I'm not getting any younger. That is one of my big concerns -- what happens beyond the core people," said Gilbert Irwin, 64, of Haymarket, Va., the driving force behind Medical Missionaries. "If we can get more money ... we can grow more and sustain the operation beyond our lifetime."
How it began
Starting in 1997 as a handful of people trying to vaccinate children and provide primitive health care to remote areas on the border of the Dominican Republic and Haiti, the group has grown to offer better care in a larger network.
In January, Medical Missionaries opened a clinic in Haiti. In 2006, it sent 13 shipping containers loaded with medical supplies to various points around the world. It supports a network of about 100 medical teams from across the country who do similar work -- all on an annual budget of about 120,000.
Each dollar spent translates into 500 of value in the field, Irwin said. "Give me 1 percent of what the State Department spends overseas and I'll change the world," said Irwin, an internist in Manassas for 34 years.
The volunteer physicians, dentists, pharmacists, surgeons and nurses of Medical Missionaries have given out more than 500,000 vaccinations, removed teeth from 10,000 patients, handed out millions of bars of soap and treated countless ailments, he said.
Now the clinic in Haiti has regular patients who come to pick out new wheelchairs with each shipment or to show off how much their child has grown, said Carolyn Jeans, 58, Medical Missionaries' head nurse. The group is trying to raise money to provide a permanent Haitian clinic staff.
"We want to get involved and provide continuity. You can only change things if you keep going to the same place over and over again and expand," Irwin said.
But to grow, you need volunteers, especially younger ones.
However, when school is out or it is testing season, younger volunteers are hard to come by, said Susie Cornell, who, at 53, is the group's youngest regular volunteer.