Photo by Danny Fulgencio

WOW equals MOM upside down. Thirteen neighborhood moms inspired 13 daughters at the age of 13 to participate in WOW, which stands for Women for Orphans Worldwide.

The group of moms led their seventh-grade daughters on a mission trip to Guatemala then created a volunteer-led group for Orphan Outreach, which serves in eight countries, including Guatemala, Honduras and Russia. Since then, the daughters, who attended Parish Episcopal School and the Shelton School, have graduated college and taken jobs, but the group remains a force. 

Tiffany Wines started out evangelizing for the group and approached busy moms, who said, “I’ll send you a donation.” She then convinced them to go to Guatemala. “Y’all are going with us,” she said.

The group now solicits donations and crafts. Volunteers who make the trip to Guatemala say they hang out, get to know children and “give them love.”

“It was a love language,” Wines says. “You don’t really need to speak Spanish. You just want to interact and play. You don’t need words to build a connection with people.”

She remembers her then 13-year-old daughter meeting girls who were pregnant and having children at the same age. A young woman named Yasmin influenced them. She was a girl whose mother worked in a Guatemalan dump, looking for recyclables and other valuable items. Yasmin is now thriving.

The local organization WOW, now led by Margo Isbell, recruits empty-nesters with an inspiring mission. “We have this whole generation of women who are now empty-nesters,” she says. “At work, we jokingly call it a girls’ trip with a mission. We’re building stoves, we’re painting, we’re putting together furniture, we hold babies for four hours. Who doesn’t want to do that?”

The Women for Orphans Worldwide (WOW) is an auxiliary to Orphan Outreach. Since December of 2009, the WOW Dallas chapter has raised money to help orphans and vulnerable children in Guatemala. Contact womenfororphansworldwide.org.

Women for Orphans Worldwide – WOW 10 Years! from Orphan Outreach on Vimeo.