Austin360 blogs > Out & About > Archives > 2010 > July > 02
Friday, July 2, 2010
The Miracle in Orissa for Caroline Boudreaux
Unlike St. Paul, Caroline Boudreuax’s conversion came, not on a road, but in the dormitory of an Indian orphanage.
In May 2000, the backpacking Austinite landed in Mumbai, India. It was hot, 110 degrees.
“A horrible time to visit India,” says the former TV advertising representative, who had quit a lucrative job with the local Fox channel to travel the world.
When they discovered it would take $750 each to reach Orissa, Monheim-Poyner suggested: “Let’s just send the money to him.”
“No way,” Boudreaux, now 40, remembers saying. “You dragged me here and we are meeting this child.”
When they arrived at Manus’ village, the women received the “National Geographic welcome.” Men lined the streets; women took them among the mud huts. Drums played. Women ululated. A woman washed their feet and dried them with her dress.
Then there was Manus.
“There he was: this little boy,” Boudreaux says. “He took us into his mud hut, which was surprisingly cool. There were two rooms for six people, no bathroom or kitchen. We thought we had met the poorest people in the world. We were wrong.”
The Americans lingered in Orissa, doing volunteer work, making rope swings, reading English to the children, playing with them. On May 14, 2000 — Mother’s Day — Boudreaux called her mom back in the States, then attended dinner at the home of Christian Children’s Fund’s director.
The Americans were not prepared for what they found there.
“There were 110 bald, filthy, empty-looking orphan children,” she says. “They ate rice. We were given chicken.”
They sat through their children’s Hindu prayers. A girl, Sheebani, put her head on Boudreaux’s knee. “They are so desperate for affection, they push their bodies into you,” she says.
The girl fell asleep in her arms and urinated. Boudreaux went to put her to bed. “The place smelled like Hell,” she says of the dormitory without a trace of comforts. “As I set her down, I heard her bones hitting the wood of the bed. I thought ‘This just isn’t right.’ I had to do something.”
The dormitory shock continued to bother her. “I just couldn’t get right,” she says. She sought out an Internet cafe and wrote down the experience: “It was cathartic. And I was able to capture the moment while it was fresh in my mind.”
“This was my first introduction to real need,” Boudreaux says. It would lead to the creation of her Austin-based Miracle Foundation, which now operates four orphanages in India, two in Orissa and two in Jharkhand.
Some elements of Boudreaux’s upbringing foreshadowed this conversion from the business sphere to charity. She was raised a devout Catholic among six brothers and sisters in Lake Charles, La. Her mother was a social worker, her father a pharmacist, working the family store, Boudreaux’s New Drug Store.
She attended Catholic schools, then studied at Louisiana Tech University before transferring to Louisiana State University-Shreveport with a degree in psychology. Her aim: To become a therapist.
After applying to graduate school at the University of Texas, she moved to Austin in 1992. Then came the unexpected rejection letter. “I was devastated,” she says.
Other options awaited the cool brunette with crystal eyes. The self-described “quintessential Cajun girl” and “big hugger” radiates attentive calm, at the same time, seems coiled for action. That served her well during nine years as a sales representative, as she built long-term relationships and picked up professional polish, business skills and crucial contacts among CEOs and entrepreneurs.
In business, she learned: “The harder you work, the more money you make. I outworked them. I put in some hours there,” she says, but ultimately: “Money isn’t satisfying.”
She turned into a scrupulous saver, though, so she set off with Monheim-Poyner to visit Hawaii, South Africa, Egypt, Israel, India, Nepal, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Australia. After the convulsion of India, she separated from her companion to hike and meditate in Nepal.
Boudreaux couldn’t stop thinking about Sheebani and the other Orissa orphans: “I was going to do something if it was the last thing I ever did. If I didn’t help them, nobody would.”’
The Miracle Foundation, created as soon she returned to Austin, was first aimed at international adoptions. “I spent 2000-2003 working in that area before realizing it is sometimes corrupt and it is the children that don’t get adopted that need us most,” she says.
Out of money and patience after three years, she consulted with Alan Graham, founder of Mobile Loaves and Fishes.
“Graham said, ‘Who do you think we help?’ I said the homeless. He he said no, ‘Mobile Loaves and Fishes enables 9,000 people to give. Everybody wins. Your job is to be the bridge between the people who want to make a difference and the people who need a difference. Let the spiritually starving feed the nutritionally starving.”
Soon after that — in what some would call a miracle — Boudreaux discussed her plight in prayer group of Catholic women. One handed her a check for $10,000, on the condition she didn’t send it to India. It was for her to regroup. That helped her to reconfigure the foundation’s goals around orphanage mangement and to raised $75,000 at its first donor event.
To live in Austin without savings, she paid herself $35,000 a year. “It’s a far cry from the corporate world,” she laughed.
Besides the orphanages — one on the coast opened after the 2004 tsunami had turned independent — Miracle Foundation recently opened first children’s home: One house mother and 10 children.
The amazing thing to many potential donors: It costs only $100 a month to sponsor a child for a year. And one can still help by giving much less.
“And we have an ambassador program that enables people to come to India to see our work first hand,” Boudreaux says. “This is what I would love any Austinite to do with me.”
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Sarah Lisle: Healed and At Home
Six weeks after the incident, Sarah Lisle remembers nothing about the fashion runway. Or the collapse that left a full house gasping and sobbing. Or the attempts to revive her with a defibrillator. Or the ambulance racing to the University Medical Center at Brackenridge, or the transfer to the intensive care unit at Seton Medical Center Austin a few miles away.
She had suffered a cardiac arrest, mid-runway, in front of hundreds of onlookers. Now, for the first time, Lisle’s willing to talk about it publicly.
Early in the evening of May 22, the two-time cancer survivor wandered around the Bob Bullock Texas History Museum, showing off her hand-made art bra. One cup formed the shape of a book, created from cards of support after her second diagnosis.
“I had been taking chemo every week at a low dosage. But the side effects — fatigue, aches, pains, vulnerability to infection — are cumulative. That night, I didn’t feel any more fatigued than usual.”
Lisle, 31, can visualize being backstage, nervously practicing her walk. Nothing after that.
Here’s what your columnist recorded, first on live tweets, then in a blog and print column: “Early in the show, one of the models, still young, absent hair, stepped out to cheers. Not far down the runway, she turned, as if to exhibit her elaborate apparel. She kept turning. And turning. Then collapsed. The museum went silent. A dozen people surrounded the fallen model. Everyone else gaped in bewilderment.”
Lisle, left unnamed in press reports, was surrounded by medical professionals at this Breast Cancer Resource Center donor party. Her oncologist, Dr. Debra Patt, assisted, along with that cancer specialist’s husband, a cardiologist, Dr. Hanoch Patt. So, too, did her plastic surgeon, Dr. David Mosier, and her mother, a nurse practitioner visiting from Montana. Lisle’s husband, father and aunt — her mother’s twin, and like both, a breast cancer survivor — remained nearby, and the ambulance arrived quickly.
When she woke up at the second hospital, Lisle remained dazed. “I thought I had just passed out and fell down, but they kept asking me questions,” she says. “It wasn’t until I looked back on the Facebook comments that I realized I had been in ‘critical but stable condition.’”
So why did Lisle go into cardiac arrest? Nobody has determined for sure, but turns out the emergency personnel recorded ventricular fibrillation, an irregular heartbeat that can lead to various medical crises.
The Chicago native who grew up in the suburbs of Atlanta, Ga., had led a quiet, beauty-flecked life up to the point of her first diagnosis. She studied art education at the University of Georgia, and historic preservation during graduate school at the University of Oregon.
She made friends with her future husband, Matt Lisle, an instructional designer, in Athens, Ga. They had attended the same high school.
“We gravitated toward each other in a big place,” she says. “Being friends evolved into being a couple.” They married in 2006 and moved to Austin in 2007. She now works as an exhibit planner for the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department.
Lisle was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 2004 at age 25. The lump and lymph nodes removed. She endured chemotherapy, bilateral masectomy, reconstructive surgery and hormone blocking therapy.
In 2009, she discovered a lump on top of the breast reconstruction. “I could feel it sticking out. I thought it was part of the implant,” she says. “I was shocked. I thought it was behind me.”
The implant was removed; she underwent more chemo and radiation. Happily, she was already a member of Team Survivor, which provides exercise programs, and Pink Ribbon Cowgirls, a group of younger breast cancer survivors.
“I didn’t know if I needed a support group so far from my initial diagnosis, but I liked the women,” she says. “Then I was thankful I had a community when I was re-diagnosed.”
She had never attended one of the center’s art-bra galas, but an e-mail from Runi Limary invited her to whip one up and to act as a model. At the ball, a patron bid $160 for her book concept, which gratifies her. She might model again next year, if she recovers from serial nervousness.
“I feel back to normal,” she says “I am anxious about my heart. It’s just another thing I have to live with, but have no control over. I’m grateful for all the people — friends, doctors, family and strangers — that helped that evening and beyond.”
Meanwhile, the incident at the fashion show just amplifies her philosophical mindset. “Yes, your cancer could come back,” she says. “You could also drop dead at any moment. So live in the moment.”
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