As much as any other American in El Salvador, Pamela Allie-Morrill knows about the brutal needs facing the people of this small Central American nation. When her husband, Ken, who serves in the U.S. Navy, was assigned to the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador two years ago, she set out to know the country like her home state of New York. “They call me a professional volunteer at the embassy. I get in the community a lot,” she says.
“The Lord has blessed us and I have the time and resources. I love seeing the happy faces and getting the warm feelings.”
In El Salvador, “Coach Pam,” as she is often called, helps in many places, from an orphanage to a town hit hard by a recent earthquake; from a home for pregnant girls to a facility serving meals to the homeless. When she read about The Fuller Center Blitz Build on a flier at the embassy, she started making calls to get more volunteers, to assist with transportation and translation between the Salvadoran masons and families and the North American volunteers.
“I like that this is homes for the poor with no interest and there is sweat equity. There is ownership,” she says. “El Salvador is a poor Third World country. There is a big discrepancy between those who have and those who don’t. I have visited homes with dirt floors and made of mud sticks.”
Pam says she tries to help without taking away the dignity of the Salvadoran people. Her biggest reward, she says, is building new relationships and making new friends. And now she’s thrilled for her new friends who are starting life anew in a Fuller Center house and who, she says, are most deserving of this new start.
“As poor as they are, they will give you whatever they have to be friendly and they will go without themselves. It proves material things do not make you happy,” she says.
Pam says she plans to do all she can to help the new Fuller Center homeowners and their neighbors. “The smiles make it all worthwhile,” she says.
–David Westerfield, Community Renewal International, reporting for FCH.
