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Going the distance for the children of Croatia More than 60 times in the last six years, Jim Geren of Sewickley has traveled a grueling 9,000 miles to help the children of Croatia, his wife's beloved homeland Sunday, February 06, 2000 By Bill Steigerwald, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
ZAGREB, Croatia -- You'd think Jim Geren would be miserable, or at least a little cranky.
He's 4,550 air miles from his home in Sewickley. He has had two, maybe three hours of sleep since he left Pittsburgh 40 hours before. He hasn't had breakfast or lunch. But the US Airways pilot is having so much fun, he's starting to sweat.
Geren is in a hallway in the cancer wing of Children's Hospital of Zagreb. It's crowded with 10 people and about a dozen fat cardboard boxes covered in Santa Claus paper. He's digging through about 300 Millennium Barbies, Mustang Mach III racing cars, basketballs, "Star Wars" games and stuffed animals, pulling them out of boxes and piling them up inside steel baby cribs. Girls' toys here. Boys' toys over there.
Geren, who bought the toys in Pittsburgh and had the boxes shipped to Zagreb a month earlier, is the man in charge. But he has plenty of help. Head nurse Milko Valpotic is helping him choose the right toys. Nurses are ready to push the two hospital carts loaded with presents into a room where five boys and girls with shaved heads and IV bottles dripping into their arms are smiling with anticipation.
Geren's wife and co-Santa Claus, Marlena, is buzzing around, being her irrepressible, upbeat, smiling, God-thanking, always helpful self. She's sorting through the unwrapped toys and speaking in her native Croatian to the local journalists covering the heartwarming event.
Marlena is explaining the history of Children's Rescue Relief, the nonprofit international relief organization Jim Geren founded and devotes most of his time to when he's not captaining MD-80 airliners up and down East Coast America.
She tells how her husband has spent hundreds of thousands of his own dollars since 1994 to help the people of Croatia, one of the most Westernized of the breakaway pieces of the former Yugoslavia.
She is also telling them how Jim has taken more than 60 airplane rides from Pittsburgh to Frankfurt to Zagreb and back since 1994. And that he's made many of those body-punishing, three-day round-trips to hand-deliver medicine, chemotherapy drugs, surgical sutures and hospital sheets to Children's Hospital, as well as other supplies to two state orphanages in Split, the historic tourist town on the Adriatic Sea.
There's one important detail Marlena, 34, is leaving out, however.
She's not saying anything about the crucial role she plays in the success of CRR. A flight attendant with US Airways , she modestly credits everyone from the bosses of her company to God Almighty for the good her husband's start-up relief agency has been able to do. But anyone observing her and Jim in action for more than 20 minutes can see the obvious: Marlena is not only Jim's press agent, translator and bargain shopper, she's CRR's secret weapon.
As Marlena talks, she is also always doing her No. 1 job - keeping a close eye on Jim in case he needs something. "No, no, not balls, Jim," she warns him gently as he places a Sunoco soccer ball on a cart. "Some of them don't have a leg."
Before the afternoon is out, Jim and Marlena and their little train of toys will visit every wing in the crowded 250-bed hospital. "Schlepping Toys R Us again," jokes Marlena. She is so pleased when she realizes they have more than enough for every child, she emits one of the many cheery little prayers she unselfconsciously delivers throughout the day. "Thank you God, thank you so much Father. Amen."
Children's Hospital of Zagreb, the country's only children's hospital, is a public hospital that operates on a shoestring budget of about $12 million a year (96 million kuna) and has a staff of 800. It looks just like an American hospital, except that it is tucked unobtrusively into the middle of a solid block of apartment buildings on one of downtown Zagreb's beautiful old streets.
Croatia, a country of about 5 million still trying to come to its senses after a bloody civil war and 45 years of state socialism, is, according to New Republic magazine, "an economic basket case." The unemployment rate is 25 percent, living standards are lower than they were in 1990 and the political system, still mostly controlled by former communists, is bureaucratic and corrupt.
The hospital, though always scrambling for more government funding, is stocked with modern beeping and blinking medical equipment. Yet it is chronically in need of low-priority but important items that Jim and CRR can provide - bed sheets and surgical gowns. Jim also has occasionally supplied some of the hospital's most basic needs - paper napkins and toilet tissue.
Children's, like any hospital anywhere, is filled with tragedies and miracles. In the burn ward, two brothers wrapped up like mummies lie next to each other. The 13-year-old, Ivan, has a tube in his mouth and is covered by an air-filled blanket that protects his newly grafted skin from infection. He clings to life 50 days after the propane explosion that blew up their home and killed their mother.
In a small room in the cancer ward, four toddlers lie in their cribs, each with a parent at their side. Marlena visits each child, smiling, talking, cooing in her native Croatian one minute and talking to Jim in English the next. After studying a 10-month-old boy who needs a bone-marrow transplant, Marlena turns away, looks heavenward and says, "May God heal them all."
How CRR was formed
Children's Rescue Relief wouldn't exist without Marlena, a true child of the Global Age who speaks Croatian, English and German fluently, plus a little Italian. Jim met her when he was a passenger and she was an attendant on a flight to California in April 1994, when they were both living in Pittsburgh and working for US Airways.
Like most Americans then and especially now, Jim couldn't find Croatia on a map. A Roman Catholic country with a civilization that dates back to the Romans, it had split off from the former communist Yugoslavia in 1991 and declared its independence.
In 1994, Croatia had secured its autonomy but was still fighting to expel ethnic Serb forces from inside its newly redrawn borders. Armies were on the march, territory was being won and lost, atrocities were being traded. Major cities like Zagreb and Split were being shelled by artillery. And the countryside was awash with refugees of every ethnic and religious hue.
Jim listened to Marlena's emotionally charged stories of what war was doing to her homeland and saw how worried she was about her family and friends who still lived there. Not long afterward, smitten by Marlena's many obvious charms, Jim paid her a surprise visit in Split, where he knew she had flown to visit her hospitalized grandmother.
As Jim and Marlena fell in love with each other, and as Marlena's friends and family fell in love with him, Jim's life was changed forever by the chaos and human suffering he saw firsthand. One of the casualties of war he met was a refugee woman who had no home, three barefoot children and a recently killed husband.
He discreetly slipped her all the money he had in his wallet and vowed to do whatever he could to help people like her, whatever their politics or religion or ethnicity. In the past six years, Jim has learned a great deal about Croatia's bloody history and its complicated ethnic and political discord. He has made dozens of Croatian friends. But he still doesn't pretend to know the "truth" or know which side did the most right or wrong.
Back in the United States, Jim asked relief organizations if they could guarantee that the money he gave them would go to help the refugees he saw in Croatia. When they told him no, he decided to become his own one-man relief agency.
Croatian Rescue Relief - since renamed Children's Rescue Relief to reflect Jim and Marlena's hope to bring their emergency delivery service someday to other countries - was born. Marlena says it was all Jim's idea, but she was all for it and ready to help. As she quips, "God made me a servant. Amen."
Back home, Jim learned the international relief business on the fly. He and Marlena bought clothes at Gabriel's and TJ Maxx. He contacted then-US Airways CEO Seth Schofield, who gave his full support and made sure Jim's boxes could ride free on the company's flights to Frankfurt.
On his initial trips to Croatia, he traveled alone. He would rent the biggest car he could and go to stores and buy as much food as he could carry. He'd deliver everything to refugee camps himself, often wearing a bulletproof vest to protect himself against Serbian snipers hiding in the woods.
One black night inside Bosnia's borders, while driving a borrowed car on a winding mountain road in a fierce rainstorm, he crashed into the back of a truck full of UN soldiers. No one was hurt, but that was enough for him. The experience aged him 20 years. He didn't want to die at age 50 going over a cliff with a car-load of orange juice. From then on, he decided, he would concentrate on helping children.
Expressing love of God
Children's Rescue Relief will hold its annual auction Oct. 21. It can be reached at 412-741-6066 or by fax at 412-741-7044.
Marlena Culic was born in communist Yugoslavia, but she was probably destined to become an American citizen. She was named after Marilyn Monroe by her American culture-crazed father while her younger brother, Marlon, was named after Marlon Brando.
Marlena was born in Split on Croatia's Dalmatian Coast, where the scenery is spectacular and ancient Roman and medieval ruins haunt every major town. But her parents soon moved to West Germany to become "guest-workers" and little Marlena and Marlon were brought up in Split by their grandmother.
When Marlena was 7, she and Marlon joined their parents in West Berlin, where she went to high school and became Americanized by watching shows like "Little House on the Prairie" after school. Marlon, 31, who is visiting Pittsburgh, still lives in Berlin. He says when Marlena was younger, she was a tomboy who fought with the boys and was very smart and outspoken, which makes perfect sense.
Marlena was raised Catholic but now calls herself a Christian and often listens to Bible tapes at home. She doesn't preach or proselytize to innocent bystanders, but she's not shy about expressing her love of God.
No matter where she is or who she is with, she's likely to address God, either by throwing off little side comments to him, thanking him or calling him "awesome" for some blessing she feels he has bestowed. It's hard for her to offend anyone when she enthusiastically blurts out things like, "God is the ultimate hipster. You have to be deaf, dumb and blind to not see how he's made things happen and helped my husband."
Jim was born in Dallas long enough ago to remember segregation. He was studying to be an architect at Texas Tech when the flying bug got him. His father was a top pilot at Braniff, and that's where he ended up for 14 years. By 1983, he was working at US Airways.
Jim, who says he can't wait to retire so he can devote all his time to CRR, was raised a Methodist. He says he isn't doing his good works for religious or political reasons. Marlena says he does it "because God says so." But he says "it's a payback" for having a good life - though he suspects God has devised the game plan and is probably sending in some plays.
CRR's growth has been slow and steady. Jim doesn't know what's in store for it, except that he wants to apply his "emergency lifeguard" model of international relief to other places someday, probably Africa. One thing he knows for sure is that CRR would never have grown, prospered or been born in the first place without Marlena, the catalyst of his late-blooming social conscience.
"I fell in love with a beautiful woman, and she taught me to love other people. She took the self-centered part of me away and showed me how to put other people ahead of yourself."
Jim, 56, has been married twice before. One of his two sons, Todd, 25, was killed in California on Dec. 12, 1997, when the underground gasoline tank he was inspecting exploded. Jim has decided to honor that date each year with the "Todd Geren Christmas Run" to give away toys in Croatia. This year, however, he and Marlena couldn't go until Jan. 10, because he had to take training classes to learn how to fly Airbuses, the new planes US Airways is buying for its fleet.
Toys, the best medicine
Jim has been playing Santa Claus in Croatia since 1998, and he loves doing it. This is his heart's best reward - seeing smiles on the faces of sick kids. It's the only paycheck he gives himself for another year of helping children.
The first time Jim dispensed toys, when he gave out more than 1,000 presents, he was very uncomfortable. He was afraid he was imposing himself on the kids in the hospital and orphanages. He didn't feel right taking pictures of sick and dying children, even though he knew he was bringing them some joy.
Since then, however, several Croatian doctors have set him straight. They told him not to worry. The presents are the best medicine he can give the children.
"That gets you going more and more," says Jim, who is as quiet and laid-back as Marlena is bubbly and animated. "Then my wife comes by, and she brightens them up. It makes you feel good, and it keeps you charging."
Charging around is something that comes naturally to Jim and Marlena, who both seem to spend most of their nonworking hours thinking of ways to help people. Jim, who averages about $170,000 a year as an airline captain, estimates that in the past six years he has spent $300,000 of his income on Children's Rescue Relief.
With that money, and Marlena's knack for finding people and places that need their help, the Gerens have put together a nimble mom & pop international relief agency. Its specialty is doing what big relief agencies can not do - quickly delivering small shipments of things like medical supplies and being able to guarantee that they go directly to the people who need them.
As Jim says, CRR is not in competition with Brother's Brother or Global Links, Pittsburgh-based relief organizations that ship supplies by the boat load. "We don't care about tonnage. We want to do what they can't - hand-deliver medicine and be an instrument to save a child's life in 24 hours."
It's only possible for CRR to do this because Jim and Marlena do most of the grunt work themselves. And because he and Marlena, who works about 90 hours a month as a flight attendant on the Frankfurt-Pittsburgh run, take full advantage of the free- or low-cost travel perks that come with their airline jobs.
In 1998, his top year, he made 23 trips to Zagreb. While Marlena keeps in almost daily touch with Croatian contacts, Jim serves as an unpaid super-courier, does all the administrative work and searches for supplies. He has found steady sources of free surplus supplies by writing letters to the heads of companies like Standard Textile of Cincinnati and Schein Pharmaceutical, a maker of generic drugs in New Jersey.
His networking has been paying off. Out of the blue, CRR recently was given 11,000 surplus hospital uniforms - an 18-wheeler's worth. They came from one of Standard Textile's customers in Indiana after Textile's owner, Paul Heiman, told them about CRR. Jim will take as many uniforms as he can to Children's Hospital of Zagreb and another Croatian hospital and give the rest to Global Links, which will send them to South America.
When Jim makes his deliveries from Pittsburgh to Zagreb, he spends about 11 hours in the air each way. He usually goes straight through Frankfurt to Zagreb, then flies back to Frankfurt as fast as possible. He sleeps overnight in the Gerens' apartment near Frankfurt and returns to Pittsburgh the next morning.
Jim flies free to and from Frankfurt on US Airways, and the Frankfurt-Zagreb round-trip is about $120. He could sit in the cockpit on the way to Germany if he wanted, but he usually spends $150 to upgrade his coach seat to cushy Envoy class, where he has a better chance of catching some sleep. A few times he's crossed the Atlantic perched on a jump seat, one of the fold-down seats in the back of the plane that flight attendants use.
Jim usually takes just two 70-pound boxes per trip, which is what any passenger is entitled to check on a flight. But his bosses at US Airways have made sure that on special occasions, as long as extra cargo space is available, CRR can have what it needs on Pittsburgh-Frankfurt flights. When Jim set his single-plane "record" of 28 boxes of Christmas presents in 1998, he was prepared to pay $2,000 in excess baggage charges, but it turned out he didn't have to.
Another big advantage a tiny operation like CRR has is that Jim is a familiar, trusted and respected figure at customs at Zagreb's cozy airport. He and his "luggage" usually clear customs with a friendly wave, which averts import duties and other onerous taxes that could make what he's doing prohibitively expensive.
In America, where things are not so informal, Jim and Marlena have done all their paperwork. They are registered with the IRS as a 501(c) nonprofit corporation. And, so that CRR can handle drugs, Jim has a license from the state Department of Health to operate as a wholesale prescription drug distributor.
Most of CRR's relief work is done in Croatia. Jim has made several contacts there, and his wife has recruited a volunteer network of helpful friends , including Snjezana "Snazzy" Lozancic and her younger brother Zeljko, 29.
Snazzy, Marlena's childhood playmate, works for the American drug company Merck. A priceless contact in Zagreb, she does everything from meeting Jim at the Zagreb airport to translating the legal papers needed for Croatian nonprofit status. Asked why he and his sister Snazzy spend so much time helping Jim and Marlena, Zeljko (Jay-co) just smiles and says sheepishly, "It's normal."
The Gerens use their own money for most of what they have to buy for CRR. Jim rents out a house he owns in Tahoe, Calif., so they have more money to spend on CRR, and Jim and Marlena don't give each other Christmas presents for the same reason. But with Jim about three years shy of retirement, they know they have to start finding new sources of revenue.
Last fall, they held their first benefit auction at the Flaugherty House in Moon. The $9,000 raised didn't go far. But it helped to buy supplies and Christmas presents for kids in Croatia and kids at two local institutions the Gerens have gotten interested in, Holy Family Institute of Pittsburgh and the Mel Blount Children's Home in Washington County.
Marlena would attribute it to the work of God. And Jim would call it one of the little miracles that have made CRR grow. But the pair discovered Mel Blount and his 20-kid youth home in the kind of serendipitous, heart-to-heart way they seem to find all of their beneficiaries: Jim met Mel Blount's wife, Tiandra, who is a US Airways flight attendant, when he was piloting one of her flights.
A fateful dinner
Most of the time, Jim's solo jaunts to Zagreb are speedy. He usually gets off the Croatia Airlines or Lufthansa plane from Frankfurt, hands over his boxes to someone from the hospital and is winging back to Germany an hour later.
But on this trip, he and Marlena are - by their peripatetic standards, anyway - lounging around town for 2 1/2 days. It's the longest time Jim has spent in six years of coming to Zagreb, a historic, handsome European city of more than 1 million. They are sticking around so that on Tuesday night they can have dinner with Dr. Ivan Fattorini, the head of the hospital, whom they've been meaning to meet for several years.
But first there is CRR work to do. Early Tuesday morning, Jim and Marlena visit with officials at another hospital, Salate Hospital, where there are children dying of bone cancer. CRR will send them hospital uniforms and sheets and give away toys there next Christmas.
Then Jim and Marlena go to the bus station to send two large boxes of toys and a new Nikon N60 camera on to the orphanages in Split. Zeljko Lozancic drives, helps Jim lug the boxes, spends a day away from his job and expects nothing in return. The toys will be picked up in Split by Marlena's father, who will deliver them.
On Tuesday night, Jim and Marlena have their long-awaited dinner with Dr. Fattorini at a fancy Zagreb restaurant. Fattorini, a colorful character and an accomplished surgeon, has traveled the world (including a stop in Pittsburgh in the late 1980s) with the Croatian national basketball team.
He looks a little like Rod Steiger, only taller and stouter. He thinks Croatia's newly elected parliament is still tilted too far to the left, but he is hopeful that his young country, born during war and still not as politically and economically free as a Western European country should be, "will learn how to be a democracy."
An important man about Zagreb, Fattorini brings along two doctors from the hospital and Lynne Montgomery, the wife of U.S. Ambassador to Croatia William Montgomery of Bradford, Pa. Head nurse Milko Valpotic, Jim's principal contact at the hospital over the years, is also there, as is Snazzy.
During the dinner, Marlena goes out for a fateful cigarette break with Goga Buljan-Flander, a professor of psychology who works at Children's Hospital with sexually and physically abused children. When Marlena hears Flander's horror stories about her work at a woman's shelter and learns that she needs more books and dolls for her work with abused children, she promises to help.
Jim and Marlena leave Zagreb for Frankfurt and Pittsburgh early the next morning, Jan. 12. Four days later, when Jim gets time off from his Airbus training in Charlotte, N.C., he flies off again to Zagreb to hand-deliver 14 books to Buljan-Flander that Marlena bought at Barnes & Noble. Staying home in Pittsburgh, Marlena contacts Rosie O'Donnell's office to see if Buljan-Flander could be booked on a show about child abuse.
Two weeks later, Buljan-Flander flies from San Diego via London and Charlotte to attend the annual conference on child abuse sponsored by the American professional Society on the Abuse of Children. Jim and Marlena arrange her itinerary, pay all of her travel expenses and even jet out to meet her in California to make sure everything goes smoothly.
Meanwhile, Jim is finishing his Airbus training, working on the best way to send hospital uniforms to Zagreb and trying to think globally and locally at the same time. New connections inevitably are about to be made. Little miracles are going to be performed. Children's Rescue Relief is still taking baby steps to - as its proud, permanently jet-lagged parents Jim and Marlena Geren would say - only God knows where.
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