First Loves and Second Careers: Giving Back to the Community
Some Retirees Saw a Need and Are Still at Work

By Judith Mbuya
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 12, 2007; HE04

For many people, retirement is a time to start a second career. Some set out to build a lucrative new business. Others seek to develop lifelong hobbies into money-making enterprises. Still others see retirement as an opportunity to give something back to society.

A recent report by the Pew Research Center found that 77 percent of workers expect to work after retirement. And most of those people will work not because they have to but because they want to. Here are the tales of three people who followed their hearts to serve the community.

Wilma Melville

When physical education teacher Wilma Melville retired at 50, she jotted down a list of things she wanted to take up as hobbies. Why not become a magician or proficient at archery? She also had a dream of training a dog for search-and-rescue operations.

In the end, the dog-training dream turned into far more than a hobby.

In the late 1980s, Melville got a German Shepard, named her Topa and began searching for a trainer. She searched for five years for an instructor who could bring Topa up to standard.

Finally she linked up with a nationally renowned canine trainer who urged her to get a new dog because Topa could never be trained properly after the years of bad instruction. So she kept Topa as a pet. Her new dog, a black Labrador named Murphy, was certified by the Federal Emergency Management Agency in 1995 after a year and half of training.

Melville and Murphy then set off on several deployments, such as searching for a lost snowboarder. The turning point for the dog and handler was helping the search and rescue at the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City after it was bombed in 1995.

The next year, they were off again to an advance security operation at the Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta.

It was also in 1996 that Melville founded the National Disaster Search Dog Foundation. After her deployment to Oklahoma City, Melville said she realized there was a dearth of FEMA-certified search-dog teams. At the time, there were 15, eight of them in California, she said.

So she established her foundation to train dogs and their volunteer handlers for rescue and recovery missions.

"I realized I would be of much greater service training others to go to disasters than going myself," said Melville, now 73.

Relying on her years of dog training and her experience as an educator and mother of four grown sons, Melville set out to change the status-quo and create a center that would train canine search teams from across the country.

Her organization has trained 85 FEMA-certified teams. Some have retired from the nation's current roster of 150 volunteer teams. Because of the stringent requirements, most of the teams involve firefighters. Although the numbers have improved greatly in the past decade, the country still needs a minimum of 336 FEMA-certified search teams, according to Melville.

By Sept. 11, 2001, time had caught up with both Melville and Murphy. They did not participate in that search operation because of their ages.

Melville said she is proud to have played a small part in influencing the way canine disaster-search teams are now trained. "Even though it's just a sliver of dogdum, it's an important critical resource at a time of disaster," she said.

Wanjiru Kamau

Wanjiru Kamau knows the difficulties immigrants from Africa face on arrival in the United States. She left her native Kenya three decades ago for graduate studies, and she eventually got a master's degree and PhD at Penn State University and worked for years at the university. Now, Kamau is retired and has a second career that puts her in constant touch with something close to her heart.

At 67, Kamau is founder and executive director of African Immigrant and Refugee Foundation, which helps newly arrived Africans make a smooth transition into American society. In Kamau's view, it's not only the Africans who need to better understand America; it's also Americans who need help understanding Africans.

"I saw a problem and knew I was growing old very quickly -- I didn't have time to wait," she said. "I just had to get out and do what needed to be done."

The District foundation develops after-school and weekend programs to help high schoolers from Africa ease into American culture. It also brings issues of concern among Africans to the broader community.

Kamau's extensive education and long career at the university prepared her for pursuing her passions in retirement. Before coming to the United States in 1977, Kamau was a lecturer in sociology and an assistant dean of students at the University of Nairobi. She got a master's degree and a doctorate in psychological counseling at Penn State. As part of her studies, she did extensive research on multicultural education.

While working on her PhD, Kamau was hired to help Penn State plan and implement its diversity policies. She was chagrined to realize the depth of cultural inequities within the university system. She realized that many of the cultural insensitivities stemmed from a lack of knowledge about Africa.

So she set about teaching faculty, staff and students using African proverbs and lullabies as cultural illustrations. She created training workshops and seminars on cultural differences for deans and school administrators.

"There is a lot of ignorance as far as Africa is concerned," she said. "It hurt me so badly as an educator."

Recognizing that African cultural awareness was needed on a national level, Kamau retired from academia and moved to the District, as she said, "to be near the seat of power." At 59, she set up the African Immigrant and Refugee Foundation in 2000.

The nonprofit organization gets its funding from the local government, private foundations and individuals. The Montgomery County Department of Health and Human Services is a sponsor. The foundation, which has just three part-time staff members, also does its own fundraising.

Kamau, who does not earn a salary from the organization, said she makes ends meet through some consultancy work. In 2002, the University of Maryland appointed her as visiting scholar to develop a curriculum on African culture.

Kamau said, "My goal is to have a full-fledged office with full-time workers. And I believe that would be realized by the end of the year."

"We are really positioned to take off," she said.

Phil Borges

It's not every day that someone gets to switch careers to pursue a passion, much less do it twice. But that's exactly what Phil Borges did.

First, at 45, Borges retired as an orthodontist to became a commercial photographer. Then, more than 10 years later, he founded a nonprofit group to expand the cultural knowledge and worldview of children.

Borges got the photography bug as a dental student living in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district in the turbulent 1960s. He set aside the passion while pursuing his career in orthodontia, but years later, the itch became too strong. To ensure he wouldn't be tempted back to his old life, Borges sold his office and moved to Seattle, where he did not have a license to practice orthodontics.

He struggled for several years, but eventually the commercial work started pouring in: He did corporate annual reports, book and magazine covers, photo spreads for magazines and newspapers.

"My ideal job was to travel and take pictures," Borges said. "But I was doing commercial work that didn't have much meaning to me."

So he used $30,000 of his own money to travel to India and Tibet to create a documentary on China's treatment of Tibetans. The film led to a photography book and gallery showings and more documentaries.

While expanding his film work, he gave cameras to kids and discovered their natural storytelling abilities and the power of their presence on screen. In 2001, Borges created his nonprofit group, Bridges to Understanding, which gets school-aged kids around the world to communicate using digital photography and other multimedia technologies.

"My mission now is to connect young people -- middle school and high school students -- with their peers in the developing world to create empathy and understanding across cultures," said Borges, now 64.

Bridges to Understanding, which has 4,000 participants around the world, trains students to use digital technology for storytelling. The students are paired with their peers from other parts of the world. Using e-mail, podcasting, video-conferencing and at times in-person visits, the students communicate and share stories about their lives and about social issues such as teen pregnancy, climate change, gender discrimination and poverty.

"We want to build leadership and build good global citizens around the world," Borges said.