'Pillow talk ideas'

Corrie De Boer is both a doctor of philosophy and a doctor of ministry. Despite her credentials, she often turns the spotlight away from herself and back to her husband, Stewart De Boer, who was president of the Asian Theological Seminary (ATS) in Manila from 1980 to 1986.

He was her professor at ATS, then her boss at Mission Ministries Philippines, a ministry he founded in 1984 out of concern for Manila's urban poor. Fifteen years ago, after his first wife, Helene, died, Stewart and Corrie married, and they have been partners in life and ministry ever since.

From their dual positions at the ATS Center for Urban Transformational Leadership and at Mission Ministries, the De Boers teach pastors a theology of urban leadership and apply it practically in programs that develop church-based preschools for poor children and plant churches in slums.

Corrie De Boer speaks fluently about the students who come from 14 countries, mostly in Southeast Asia, to study at the seminary and about their growing interest in learning how to work with the poor in their own countries. She can readily provide data about the preschool program, which has led to the establishment of more than 450 church-based preschools, mostly in and around Manila, that have graduated more than 100,000 children.

She is proud that research confirms the effectiveness of the preschool program and that parents line up to enroll their children because they see the good results. She is also proud of the reading curriculum that was developed in-house based on research contributed by Christian professors at the University of the Philippines-a curriculum so effective that sales of it contribute about 70 percent of the Mission Ministries income.

Corrie De Boer seems to be most passionate when describing the way all these projects work together and lead to new projects. "My role is to identify new projects and initiate them."

She calls the process "pillow talk ideas," where she and her husband, now 80, dream up new ventures: community pharmacies run by moms, a manpower agency to provide jobs for unemployed high-school graduates, loans of supplies-soap, oil, salt-to help budding entrepreneurs start small community stores, teacher training and seminars and support for staff to get advanced degrees so they can teach and "become communities of influence."

Several years ago one of these pillow talks resulted in the desire to "establish a farm where we could have the homeless, but we never had the opportunity because we were busy." A widow, the wife of a general, gave them a 33-year lease on land located on the fertile side of a mountain: It's now the site of a Mission Ministries agriculture project that emphasizes hydroponics and organics. The De Boers have since acquired permission to cultivate another farm outside Manila.

Much of Mission Ministries' work takes place on or near Payatas, an enormous mountain of trash on the outskirts of Manila. There scavengers labor for long hours picking through garbage to find whatever has value: tin cans, plastic, metal. Eleven hours of labor might yield three dollars. Mission Ministries has established 12 preschools near Payatas and with the help of wealthier congregations has planted churches there. Corrie De Boer says she teaches 200 to 300 seminary students each year: "Payatas is my classroom." In 2000 heavy rains caused a trash slide that buried a slum built on the base of the dump. Thousands died. Since then the government has taken steps to improve safety at Payatas, including relocating families away from the dump. Five hundred of those families have moved to Mission Ministries land.

More pillow talk: "Two years ago, we actually adopted two homeless families. One family had been on the street for 20 years. . . . How do you deal with a family that has lived on the street for 20 years? Their pushcart was one block from us. . . . We invited these two families into our home. They lived in the cellar, and for three weeks we were one big community. . . . They work so hard. They wake up very early. They work their butts off. They make two or three dollars a day. They are survivors."

The family on the street for 20 years had eight children, five still living with the parents. From the time the mother was 12 she begged in the streets. After she met her husband, who was 15, they lived together in a pushcart "and gave birth to eight kids in the street." The parents lost three children in ways hard for Americans to understand. They left one newborn in the hospital because they couldn't pay their bill. When they came back, after earning enough money, the baby was gone. They sold another baby for 1,000 Philippine pesos, about $25. The third child, a 5-year-old, got lost in the market; they're still looking for him.

Although the De Boers gave the husband a job working with the fishpond on one of the farms, he wasn't happy there. He's back scavenging-it's hard to change the habits of 20 years. But at least now his family lives where the children can go to school, suggesting that urban transformation takes vision and patience. Corrie De Boer is not discouraged: "I'm encouraged because there's more interest," she says. "In 1984 it was hard to find partners."

Voting with dementia

In 2001 a federal district court found in Doe v. Roe that if people lack the capacity to vote they do not necessarily have the right to vote. The court established a standard, the Doe voting capacity standard, so that people are considered incompetent to vote if they "lack the capacity to understand the nature and effect of voting such that they cannot make an individual choice."

Sounds sensible-but as Americans get older and the incidence of Alzheimer's (and other forms of dementia) increases, many debate how to apply the Doe standard. A 2005 article in the American Journal of Psychiatry noted that nursing home workers needed "practical guidance as to how to distinguish between residents who are capable and incapable of voting." The journal article went on to report a possible interview tool that could separate those who still had the capacity to vote from those who don't.

But some don't want to distinguish among capacities. University of Pennsylvania professor Jason Karlawish, founder and head of the Dementia Voting Project at Penn's Alzheimer's Disease Center, told Stateline.org, "We should let people vote for any reason they want." Karlawish is particularly concerned about access to voting by people in nursing facilities. As the AARP complains, "Nearly two-thirds of all residents of long-term care facilities have some level of dementia. This November, many of them will not be able to vote."

Karlawish's solution: mobile polling for voters with dementia who live in nursing facilities. Vermont in November will be the first state to try it. The plan: "Two specially trained voting officials-one from each political party-visit nursing facilities and personally assist residents who want to vote by helping them fill out ballots on site." Vermont officials hope that the nation will follow their lead.

Several decades ago the idea of voting rights for those with dementia would have been a non-starter, but Karlawish frames the issue this way: "We need to consider the 'personhood' of someone with cognitive impairment." But shouldn't voting require some level of understanding? Maybe not. Vermont Secretary of State Deborah Markowitz set a pretty low standard: "We shouldn't be holding elders and those with disabilities to a higher standard than we hold others."