She worked with the Lutheran Service Association to bring children out of refugee camps and into foster homes in the United States. At one point in the early 1980s, she went to a refugee camp on the Thailand-Cambodia border to search for a missing orphan whose sister lived near Boston. When a Thai colonel would not let her into the camp, she dropped to her knees and begged; he relented. She found the boy and reunited him with his sister; he later earned a full scholarship to Brandeis University.