When Susan and John Chalkias moved into their house in Cherry Ridge Estates, a subdivision outside Mission, British Columbia, they found many of their neighbors busy getting gardens planted, pictures hung, and boxes unpacked.
“It was easy to get to know people,” Susan remembers. “Everyone was new.” Soon the three Chalkias children were out riding their bikes, and Susan was looking into swimming and piano lessons for her kids.
Then one day in 1995, her neighbor Faith Black came over to share a letter she’d just received from her friend Avis Rideout, a missionary who lived in Thailand. Avis described a visit to an overcrowded Thai orphanage for children born with AIDS.
The place was extremely understaffed and the children in desperate need of care. Avis was particularly taken with a little girl she called Nikki. The infant was so sick doctors said she wouldn’t last six months. “Let me take her home with me,” Avis pleaded, and she eventually adopted the child.
Embraced by Avis’s family, Nikki thrived. “Seeing what’s happened to Nikki, I have made a promise to God and to myself,” Avis wrote in her letter to Faith. “I am going to open an orphanage here for other babies with AIDS.”
“How much would something like that cost?” Susan asked her neighbor.
“Avis says she could start one for $17,000,” Faith replied.
Susan knew next to nothing about AIDS, orphanages or Thailand, but she didn’t hesitate one moment. “Let’s help!” she exclaimed.
People always raise money for basketball teams and school bands, Susan figured. Why couldn’t she and her neighbors build an orphanage in Thailand?
And so they went to work. Their first project was a bottle drive. Susan and Faith went door-to-door in Cherry Ridge Estates with their children, collecting soda bottles and cans. Other families joined the effort and soon the Chalkias garage was filled.
But all the aluminum and plastic didn’t add up to many dollars and cents.
“After we turned everything in, we only netted $70,” Susan recalls.
Next she called the local Save-On and they gave her permission to sell hot dogs in front of the drugstore. That event brought in a bit more money. Then someone suggested baking homemade apple pies and selling them, so one day the neighbors took over the Chalkias kitchen.
Susan had forgotten to mention the pie bake to her husband before he left for his job operating a forklift at the Neptune Foods warehouse in Vancouver.
“When John came home he found huge piles of apple peels in the garbage, flour dusting the kitchen floor and seven women baking,” Susan remembers. “He just sat down and started peeling!”
With a new commuter train station opening in the area, the neighbors saw another fund-raising opportunity. On the weekend that the West Coast Express was launched, they set up a food stand at the station.
“We called it the deal of the day,” says Susan. “For only $4.50, people could buy a hamburger, a slice of pie and a pop.” At day’s end, the neighbors had grossed a total of $2,000 toward their cause. “I thought to myself, ‘We’re over a 10th of the way there!'”
By then the neighbors had named themselves Nikki’s Seed Society and registered as a charitable organization. When a Thai jewelry company heard of what Nikki’s Seed Society was doing, they donated $15,000 worth of jewelry—beautiful, hand-painted pins and enameled bracelets and earrings.
“We mounted them on velvet and carried them in tackle boxes to sell,” Susan says. “We had jewelry parties like Tupperware parties. They were a great success.”
A year from the date they started, the group had raised $24,629—far surpassing their goal. Avis Rideout was able to start her orphanage, Agape Home. Soon she was sending photos of the children to Susan. “I pored over those pictures every day,” Susan says, “praying for the children and wishing I could meet them.”
Finally in 1997 Susan and John went to Thailand with their kids, Brydan, Karalee and P.J., to work at Agape Home. They returned again a year later to act as interim directors for six months. And that’s when they adopted Prem, an 18-month-old boy.
The work of Nikki’s Seed Society continues under Susan’s leadership. The days of bottle drives, hot dog sales and pie bakes are gone. Today Susan sends out hundreds of brochures, seeking people to sponsor the children.
Her can-do spirit infuses the organization, whether it’s supporting Agape Home or starting a new orphanage in Zambia, Africa, where AIDS affects tens of thousands of babies. “I think it, I dream it, I talk it, I work at it,” she says. “It’s a part of me.”
It all started when Susan thought, We raise money for basketball teams and school bands. Why not for a missionary who wants to start an orphanage in Thailand? Why not?
