Students raise money for missionaries

Students in English classes at Maryville High School are saving their spare change in an effort to help out a group of former local residents now working as missionaries in Thailand more than 8,000 miles away from the bottomland fields of Nodaway County.

For about a decade, MHS English teacher Janet Jelavich has led students in what she calls "service learning" projects — efforts that encourage teens to get involved in various charitable and community service initiatives.

Past service learning efforts have involved everything from raising money to aid hurricane victims to supporting local National Guardsmen serving in Afghanistan to helping out a local grade-school student suffering from the aftermath of a stroke.

This year, Jelavich and fellow MHS faculty member Nicole Williams have helped students organize a "coin drive" to raise money for Under the Son Ministries, a Christian outreach in the Southeast Asian nation undertaken by Steve and Donella Sherry.

Long active at Countryside Christian Church in Maryville, the Sherrys felt called three years ago to move permanently to northern Thailand, where they have been working to improve the lot of orphaned and abandoned children.

Last year, in addition to their daughter Bobbi, the Sherrys were joined at their mission near the city of Chiang Mai by former MHS teacher Cathy George, who, like Donella Sherry, now supports herself by teaching at a private school and working with Under the Son children during her hours off.

Both Donella Sherry and George are math teachers, and Donella taught math and science for the South Nodaway R-IV School District for 10 years before choosing to replant her life with her husband in a foreign mission field.

By way of contrast, George, who now instructs advanced-placement physics at the Chiang Mai International School, left a promising career as a teacher with the Maryville R-II District only a year after graduating from Northwest Missouri State University.

Jelavich and Williams both teach six classes a day at MHS, and students in each of them will collect spare change over the next two weeks, money that will ultimately be sent to the Sherrys to help them with their work.

The classes are competing against each other, with the group of students collecting the largest percentage sum to receive either extra credit or a "free day" complete with refreshments.

In the past, Jelavich said, similar coin drives have raise between $600 and $1,200 for various causes.

Once the money reaches Thailand, Jelavich said, Under the Son will use it either to purchase lumber with which to make furniture for an orphanage or to buy English-language textbooks.

Most of the destitute children in the region come from various tribes that speak their own dialect rather than Thai or English, which is a mandatory subject in schools.

George, herself a Maryville High School grad, recently wrote Jelavich about her life and work. She said many of the children she works with have lost both their mother and father, but that a large number have parents who are addicted to opium or other narcotics.

She described one boy who "looks like he is one year old but is actually three" and whose parents "were heavily addicted to opium and were using when he was born."