Adopted cause

Deepa Bharath

When Robert Kalatschan set foot in Ho Chi Minh City for the first

time three years ago, he was on a quest.

The 49-year-old Kalatschan, who owns Original Pizza by Newport

Pier, is used to hot ovens and going through half a dozen t-shirts a

day. But when he got off that airplane, the sights, smells and loud

noises of the Third World bamboozled his senses.

The muggy heat sapped his strength. Twenty hours of cattle-class

travel didn’t help either.

But when Kalatschan and his wife, Dorothea, laid their eyes on the

10-month-old girl they were about to adopt, they knew in their hearts

that she was their girl.

And although she was the only child in the Go Vop orphanage in

Danang, Vietnam, who made it back to the Kalatschans’ home in

Huntington Beach, the couple brought back hundreds of other needy

children -- in their hearts.

“We couldn’t forget their faces,” Robert said. “They haunted us.

We felt like we had to go back and help.”

And that’s how little Kristina set off a chain reaction in her

parents’ life.

Tangible aid

Seven years ago in Fountain Valley, the couple adopted 2-week-old

Thomas, a boy born to Vietnamese parents.

“We wanted to find a companion for Thomas,” Dorothea Kalatschan

said. “So we made arrangement through friends, got papers ready and

embarked on this trip to get our baby.”

As they waited for the process to go through in Vietnam, the

couple took side trips to other schools and orphanages. Their stay in

Vietnam was delayed further by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. It was

almost as if they were destined to look around more.

“We saw that this was a fatherless country,” Robert Kalatschan

said. “It’s a country filled with women who work too hard for their

own good and little kids running around on the streets.”

The conditions in the orphanages were pathetic. Children with

clubfeet, maiming congenital defects and debilitating diseases lived

in stoic acceptance. The orphanages had no money -- not even milk for

the young children.

“There were little girls who were going to become child

prostitutes,” he said. “Your heart aches for them.”

So when they returned, the couple started Giving it Back to Kids,

a nonprofit, with a lot of help from a North Carolina-based

organization called Children of Vietnam.

The thing with Kalatschan is that he’s not happy writing a check

or sending help some place where he thinks it might disappear into a

black hole.

He wants tangible, visible evidence that his money or donors’

money has served its purpose, be it surgeries being performed,

bicycles purchased or homes being built.

“I want to see the scars,” he said. “I want to see receipts. I

want to walk inside a home and see for myself. Maybe it’s the way I

grew up or just the way I am. I trust no one. I want accountability.”

Much for little

All the same, in a country like Vietnam, so much can be achieved

for so little. Local surgeons perform corrective orthopedic surgery

for less than $200.

“That’s all it takes a person to walk, to change their life,” he

said. “That’s money we spend on a nice dinner here.”

Heart surgery costs anywhere between $1,500 and $2,500. A house

can be built for $800. It’s $50 extra with a bathroom.

“I said we’ll build the houses with the bathroom,” Kalatschan

said. “But when I go there, I want to see the bathroom too. I know

people are thinking who’s this strange guy walking into our

bathrooms. But if someone paid for it, I want to see it.”

Kalatschan’s work doesn’t stop with funding the surgeries. During

the three trips he has made since his first one in the fall of 2001,

he has helped buy bicycles for school-going children who walk as many

as six or seven miles everyday and sewing machines for women’s

vocational training. He’s also helped purchase and milk, supplements,

antibiotics and school supplies for children in orphanages. The group

has even built kindergartens in the villages.

When in Vietnam, Kalatschan walks everywhere. His feet pound the

winding, dusty, village roads flanked by rice fields. He always wears

a T-shirt and shorts, even if the locals call him Mr. California

Shortpants.

But the sights he sees, however similar, have the same effect on

him every single time.

“My emotions are on my sleeve,” he said. “Here in Newport, I’m a

tough guy. But over there, I’m a mess.”

When he sees a boy on a bed after surgery reaching out and

touching him without saying a word, he melts. Words seem redundant

and the language barriers suddenly seem more surmountable.

Written inspiration

When Kalatschan gets letters written in Vietnamese from people

thanking him, he gets inspired like never before.

He recently got a letter from a woman who wrote saying that she

can sleep on a bed that’s no longer dampened by torrential rain,

thanks to the home Kalatschan’s organization built for her.

A teenage girl, who can now walk thanks to corrective orthopedic

surgery, wrote back thanking him for giving her a chance at life.

“Everyone else in my home is asleep,” she wrote. “It’s late at

night and it’s really hot. But I’m awake, and I’m remembering the

days when I was only wishing that I could walk.”

The letter brought tears to his eyes, Kalatschan said.

“I told that girl when I left, ‘Here’s my e-mail address, invite

me to your wedding,’” he said.

Girls with disabilities are often ostracized and not considered

“marriageable” in that culture, Kalatschan said.

The poverty and distress in that country was too much to take even

for recently retired Newport Beach police officer Bob Stephens, who

spent most of his career patrolling the Balboa Peninsula. He went

with Kalatschan in March.

“The kids in the orphanage are shy at first, but then they are so

starved for attention, they swarm you,” said Stephens, who wasn’t

expecting it. “One of the little boys reached over to me and kissed

me on the cheek.”

The self-proclaimed tough cop was so touched by it that he wore

his sunglasses the rest of the day to mask his tears.

Helping even one

Stephens, who has known Kalatschan for the last 20 years, said his

fishing buddy was the last person he would’ve expected to get on such

a mission.

“It was like a dramatic transformation and it was great,” he said.

“But I can say for sure that he’s a man with a purpose.”

Kalatschan doesn’t hide or curtail his enthusiasm for his

projects. His eyes light up and his lips part in a wide grin when he

talks about the “adorable kids” he thumb-wrestles with. He waves his

hands animatedly and walks around as he explains the plight of the

children.

His eyes well up when he describes how the children simply yearn

for that human touch and how their faces fall when he leaves them

behind.

Kalatschan inadvertently kneels on the floor as he passionately

talks about his future goals.

“We’re not about helping 600 kids at one time,” he said. “I’m not

putting down anyone. But that’s just not the way I like to do it. I

like to have that personal contact, to know the families, the people

and to touch them personally.”

It’s like a folk tale about a kid wanting to get washed-up

starfishes back in the ocean, he said.

“This old man watching the kid says, ‘You stupid kid, you’re

wasting your time. There are too many starfish. You can’t make a

difference with all of them.”

“But the young man defiantly picks up a starfish and throws it

back in the ocean. He turns around to the old man and says: ‘There, I

made a difference to that one.’”

* DEEPA BHARATH is the enterprise and general assignment reporter.

She may be reached at (949) 574-4226 or by e-mail at

deepa.bharath@latimes.com.