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Helping the people of Haiti is a family tradition for Nancy Krafft Moyer. When the country, one of the poorest, was rocked by a major earthquake on Jan. 12, the Mechanicsville woman knew exactly where to direct support: Our Little Brothers and Sisters.

OLBS is a U.S. charity her parents, Frank J. and Polly Krafft, created in 1969 to support the orphanages and outreach programs of Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos (NPH), which means Our Little Brothers and Sisters in Mexico, Honduras, Haiti, Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Bolivia and Peru.

“This is all I want to do,” Nancy said, “is to help other people. When we are blessed with good fortune, we can look out for those who are less fortunate than ourselves.”

The year was 1968 when her parents first met Father William Wasson and the children of Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos. The 14-year-old orphanage housed 600 children then.

With an annual budget of $250,000, Nancy said the older children were living in Cuernavaca and the younger ones at Hacienda Acolman, which is north of Mexico City. The office was in Mexico City.

Today, the organization has an annual budget of more than $20 million and serves more than 3,000 children in nine countries in Central and South America, as well as the Caribbean. Operating offices are located in Mexico and the United States.

Nancy proudly talks about her parents’ role, saying “they played a part in this phenomenal growth of NPH” during that period.

“My father’s cousin was a priest and he was stationed in Mexico at a monastery and my parents had helped out with one of the buildings there.” They had traveled to Mexico for a dedication and were staying with a woman, a nurse, who worked for NHP. She told them “You have to come see it, it’s unbelievable.”

“When they came home,” Nancy recalled, “they were so touched. They said ‘We have to do something’.”

“They felt they needed to do something at the time.” One of nine children, Nancy said they ranged in age from 4 to 17 in 1968. She said her parents “figured the best way they could help was to raise money.”

The Krafft family started direct mailings from their home in Alexandria. “For a number of reasons,” Nancy said, “it was a complete disaster.” Roadblocks to making it a success included issues with the Mexican government. “It was really crazy and it was an abysmal failure.”

Nancy said her parents then “regrouped and learned from that experience and turned around and did it again.” This time, the direct mailing proved successful. That led to the formation of Our Little Brothers and Sisters.

After all these years, her father – working as a volunteer—“has never taken a penny.”

“We’ve supported all the countries,” she said of their work with NPH. The family continues to raise money and support NPH, having helped with “brakes on a bus, dental equipment.

Whatever they needed we would help them with.”

“Dad came home for dinner every night – 6 o’clock was dinner. After dinner he would go into the office and work on the orphanage. He was a plasterer and drywall contractor by profession.

“My dad is amazing,” Nancy continued. “He gets up at 6 (a.m.) and goes to bed at midnight.”

Four years ago, her mother passed away and her father moved to Dumfries. He was in Haiti in May repairing a roof on the hospital. “Although he’s not supposed to climb ladders,” Nancy said.

Keeping with the family tradition, Nancy said she and all her siblings take on a project “in different ways.” Her brother Steve, who lives in California, serves on the Board of Directors, while her sister Jean, also a California resident, works with an endowment for the orphanage.

In 1983, Nancy’s father and Father Wasson went to Europe “to start raising money because they knew they needed more.” Their first stop was Austria, where Frank would seek the help of attorneys, do research, find someone to run the office. “They started direct mail appeals over there, and it was very successful.”

As they traveled through Europe, they found support in Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, France and Spain. Since that time, fundraising organizations now operate in Italy, Ireland and Sweden.

“I don’t know how they were able to do what they did,” Nancy said of her parents. “My mom was an orphan of sorts. Her mother died when she was 3 or 4 and her dad sent her to live with an aunt, so she really knew what it was to be parentless.”

NPH becomes home for the children in the orphanages who are not adopted. “That is their home and that is one promise that we make to them: that they will never have to leave. It’s their security, their home.”

“The goal is really to try to break the cycle of poverty in this country and rear these children in their own culture and provide them with an education, job skills so that they can go out and be self-sustaining and make a difference in their own country.”

In addition to the orphanages and outreach programs, Nancy said there is usually a clinic that serves the children and the community.

“Haiti, because of abject poverty, just inspired Father Rick Frechette to do so much more,” Nancy said of the priest who has been with NPH for more than 25 years. He is responsible for the programs in Haiti and helped in buying a 100-bed hotel that was converted into a pediatric hospital. “We have medical clinics as well,” she added. “The need is just so great in Haiti. We found ourselves doing more and more to help the community—to help the people adults and children alike.”

In the last few months, Nancy said her father decided he had to resume his fundraising efforts, “so my dad sort of came out of retirement.” With that, she said they are resurrecting Our Little Brothers and Sisters.

When it was time for Nancy to head to college, she said her father encouraged her to pursue a degree in accounting. She did just that and became a certified public accountant.

She volunteered to help him with the organization’s books, which became more complicated with the addition of the European countries. “At one time we were dealing with 16 different currencies.”

For about 10 years, Nancy volunteered for her father “and then the workload became too great. I couldn’t juggle my job and the orphanage, so I quit my job and went to work for the orphanage in 1995.” She worked there until 2003 when she became ill.

This time, she said they are upgrading as a volunteer organization. “The way people give, I think, has changed.” They won’t be doing any direct mailing, “just trying to reach out and make personal appeals and ask people to donate.”

Haiti, Nancy said, “was a really hard place to live anyway” before the quake struck. “When you go down, you have to bring your own food and shelter, and what’s been remarkable is so many former volunteers have come back.” She said those affiliated with the organizations “tend to stay connected. There is just no way that you can stay untouched.”

The devastation and loss of human life after the quake, Nancy said, “it’s really hard to grasp.” As she works to gather needed items, she said there is a goal of helping to preserve the sanctity of human life.

She did say that the quake has “raised the awareness of the world to extreme poverty and the terrible circumstances under which people live. I don’t think the average person has any idea how wealthy we are in this country – all the things that we have and there’s so much of the world that live on $1 a day.

“I mean, the average wage is $1 a day. Before the earthquake, people were so poor that they were feeding their children dirt cakes, literally cakes from dirt, oil and cooked up. And they served those to their kids and their families so they’d fill their bellies.”

“They just need so many things,” Nancy said. “This is going to be years and years, generations to rebuild.”

For more information on OLSB, visit http://www.olbs911.org and http://www.olbs911.com. To donate, call Nancy at 723-2468.

Those wanting to donate housing items, hygiene products, medical supplies, kitchenware, portable generators and tools are asked to drop them off at Misti Belle’s Hair and Beauty, 7038 Mechanicsville Turnpike, Mechanicsville, 730-4047, and American Family Fitness, 6337 Mechanicsville Turnpike, Mechanicsville.

Among those items needed are tents, cots, pillows, sheets, blankets, sleeping bags, soap, mosquito nets, rope, bungee elastic cords, personal hygiene kits, shower bags, toothbrushes, toothpaste, towels, antibiotics, anesthetics, pain medication, crutches, walkers, cold packs, mess kits (plate, bowl, fork, spoon), kitchen items (pots, bowls, utensils), saws, shovels, sledge hammers, picks, tool kits, heavy duty work gloves and flashlights with batteries.