by Len Lear
T
Wybar visits a mountain village where a terrible mudslide last year killed this woman's daughter, leaving her with five grandchildren to raise. She is 88 and crippled. Barbara took one of the children and put him in her orphans’ program.
The Children of Peace gather at the vocational school every Saturday. They are orphans, many of whose parents have died of AIDS.
hose of us at an advanced age cannot help but hope that our presence and contributions to others have made a significant difference in this world. There is absolutely no doubt that Barbara Birks Wybar, 72, of Chestnut Hill, has done just that. Barbara, 72, grew up in Montreal. She graduated from McGill University with a major in art history and psychology. She never worked in either field, but she insists that she has used some of what she learned in psychology courses in her teaching career. She taught third grade for two years in London, England, but left in 1987 to come to Philadelphia, where her then-husband, Michael, was in the insurance business. They moved to Mt. Airy, where she lived until 1999, and she then moved to Rex Avenue in Chestnut Hill. (Michael left in 1993; the couple had four teenagers at the time.) Barbara was a teaching assistant at Germantown Friends School and
then taught second grade at Chestnut Hill Academy for 10 years. But in 2007, Barbara left her big, comfortable house on Rex Avenue and since then has been living for a part of each year in a village called Bududa in Uganda, East Africa, where she has no electricity, running water or any other 21st century conveniences that the rest of us consider second-nature, not to mention barely enough food to survive. (“I have never seen an obese person there,” she said.) In Bududa Barbara has been the driving force behind the building, staffing and operation of the Bududa Vocational Institute (BVA), a school that now turns out graduates who can earn a living — something that was barely possible before when the village had no school. She also raises funds to feed starving AIDS orphans. Every so often Barbara, who receives no salary in Uganda, returns to Chestnut Hill to visit friends and family and to raise funds for her school and the AIDS orphans. She also tries to (Continued on page 7)