Balliew

Balliew, Group busy with Haiti challenge©

02/06/04 written by: Mitch Talley – Calhoun Times 10/31/03

A lifetime of helping troubled children won’t come to an end just because he’s retired now as the leader of the Calhoun Winner’s Club.

Deacon Balliew, who retired at the end of 2003 as the director of the club he founded more than 30 years ago, says he’ll always be the organization’s “next-door volunteer.”

But Balliew and a group of his long-time friends are turning their attention to helping other children – not only in Gordon County but also across the ocean in Haiti – through a new organization called The Group.

“I’ve retired twice now, and now I’m fired up again,” said Balliew, who earlier had retired from the juvenile court system. “This time I’ll let the Lord decide when I retire again.”

The Group will turn its attention, among other projects, to helping underprivileged children in Haiti, Balliew said.

They’ve already started a school there and hope to see it grow to an enrollment of 30 children, a total that would include five who are physically handicapped with the ability to retain an education.

“One of the kids down there was born with a cleft palate,” Balliew said, “a precious little fellow … but you can see the depression in his eyes. There’s always a message in their eyes, I learned that on the job a long time ago.”

He and The Group hope to find help for that youngster, along with many other handicapped kids, a relatively rare commodity in Haiti because their parents often have the heartbreaking task of giving the limited amount of food they have to either a normal child who can be productive or a handicapped child who can’t.

“You just don’t see many handicapped or retarded adults down there,” Balliew said. “Kids there are born hungry … and they’re hungry until they die. Diseases kill a lot of them before they are 4 or 5 years old. They exist just to exist.”

Balliew heard about children in Haiti and how desperate they were in 2002. His wife, Michelle, went there in November 2002, “solely to see if we could be effective in helping them,” he said.

“She came back with a lot of positive information, discussed it with a group of people, and they went back with another group of people,” Balliew said. “They returned with enough information that we need to get busy helping those kids.”

Already, efforts have begun to help the Haitian children, and another group of local residents will be going there in April to spend a week figuring out more ways to offer help.

Balliew first thought The Group’s goal would be to get as many children as they could into high school, but the director of their school there told him he should concentrate instead just on teaching them how to read.

“Ivy (the teacher in Haiti) says we’ve got to be patient, patient, patient,” Balliew said. “I asked her why we should be worried about that. She told me, ‘Listen, these people are so depressed. If they can learn to read, they can read the Bible, and all of a sudden, there’s hope, where there is none.’”

Already, in its infancy, The Group is making a difference. For just 6 to 8 cents a day, they’re providing a bowl of beans or rice for one child, “and that can keep a kid from being retarded, malnourished,” Balliew said.

“We’ve got one little pin speck on Haiti,” he admitted, “but if we do what we are capable of doing, we will affect human beings’ lives. That’s the reason I am excited about my new career. I’m in something now that I know the Lord directed me into.”

Balliew says he wants “our community, our Sunday School kids, our schools” to help in Haiti. “I believe the kids in our community can make this school go in Haiti.”

At the same time, Balliew says he wants the community to continue its support of the Winner’s Club.

“First off, we’re no competition whatsoever with the Winner’s Club,” he said of The Group. “The Winner’s Club will continue to function, and the new director will do a fantastic job. It won’t be the same – he’ll have to chart his own course – but I intend to help him all I can because I know the struggles he’s goanna go through having to make decisions.”

As he heads into a new challenge, Balliew looks back on a life that he says “has been so full of good circumstances and successes by the hundreds that the children have accomplished. I’ve been lucky enough to see that.”

Now he hopes he and The Group will be able to see many more success stories. “We’ve just got to be patient,” he said. “We need to find out what we can do and do it the right way. I pray the Lord will continue to show me His miracles ... and that’s all you can call them.”