Constable: Wheaton College grad has made fighting poverty his life's work

There is a perception that if a college graduate can't find a “real” job, he always can go work for some nonprofit do-gooder charity, especially one with a religious bent.

“No, I had to compete for a job, dude,” says David Larson, 53, a Wheaton College graduate who recently started his own charity along those lines. He still remembers how his quest to find his first of those jobs took him to Mozambique in the fall of 1989.

Having worked for financial institutions in Palatine and Wheaton, Larson was in South Africa as part of a Rotary Club business program. Eager to put his economic experience to work helping actual poor people, Larson bought an airline ticket to Mozambique.

A former colony of Portugal on the southeast coast of Africa, the Republic of Mozambique had plenty of poverty in 1989. The nation also was struggling from a civil war that had been raging for more than a decade.

Larson had taught himself Portuguese when he was a Minnesota high school kid taking part in a Rotary Club foreign enterprise student program in Brazil. So he knew how to speak the official language of Mozambique.

Showing up in person also gave him a leg up on his competition.

“The combination of those two things and being a little crazy helped,” Larson says. “I got three job offers the first day.”

He accepted a position with Food for the Hungry, a Christian organization. For the next three years, Larson managed the charity's efforts to improve agriculture, water cleanliness and sanitation, and other projects.

In 1992, he took another job in Mozambique with CARE International, a global confederation of organizations that also wrestled with the problems caused by poverty. He was part of a team of five.

“By the end of the first month, the four others were gone,” Larson says, noting a catastrophic drought only added to the obstacles they faced. But by working together, charities prevented a disaster.

“It was one of the biggest success stories in the history of an emergency response,” Larson says.

Returning to the United States in 1993, Larson continued to work with poor people in Mozambique, as well as those in Liberia, Kosovo and Rwanda.

He just did most of it from the headquarters of World Relief in Carol Stream, where he lived with his wife and three kids.

After a decade of work there and a divorce, Larson left to work for similar organizations — one on the West Coast and one of the East Coast. But those weren't perfect fits.

“I greatly prefer being overseas,” Larson says. “It's more exciting to be on the front lines working to make people's lives better.”

Fate played a role in making that happen again. Larson married an accountant he met in Chicago. His new wife, Rena, was a native of the Philippines.

So when the couple had twin boys, Micah and Malachi, the family journeyed to the island nation in Southeast Asia.

“Remember 'Gilligan's Island,' where it was supposed to be a three-hour tour? Well, that happened to us,” Larson says.

The twins started having seizures and couldn't fly. The seizures now are gone, but the family — which added a third son, named Mandela after the late South African leader — has built a life in the Philippines. Larson's new charity aims to improve the lives of their neighbors.

“The idea is to give kids a boost,” Larson says.

His boostinternational.orgBoost International

Studies show that the children of literate parents have twice the life expectancy of those who aren't schooled.

#8220;We are failing our children in poor communities,#8221; Pinky Aquino-Abellada, sister of Philippine President Benigno Aquino Jr., says in a message on the BOOST website. #8220;They do not get preschool education and are not nurtured at home through parental reading and other input. They then enter Grade One ill-prepared socially, emotionally, and academically. As a result, they fail at the very start. Their parents give up on them. They put their dropout kids back in the rice fields, or begging or selling things on the street, all for a few cents per day.#8221;

Larson's new charity also works with the issues of hygiene, clean water and sanitation.

#8220;Dave is a very passionate guy. He'll make this work,#8221; says Ken Koskela, a Naperville man who has worked in 60 countries and now serves as vice president of international business development for Chicago-based Opportunity International.

Koskela, who also worked with World Relief, met Larson a couple of decades ago during a microfinance conference in Washington, D.C.

During a recent trip to the United States, Larson shows how a $40 water filter can protect families spending 75 cents a day to buy clean water.

Sell them a water filter on credit, and the lifesaving device will pay for itself in 52 days, Larson says.

#8220;We sometimes underestimate what the poor can do. If we can help people with a hand up instead of a handout, we can help a lot more people,#8221; Larson says.

Larson says Boost incorporates a lot of ideas to take on a variety of issues. But they all have the same purpose.

#8220;So much of fighting poverty is interrelated,#8221; he notes. #8220;We need to break that cycle,#8221;

The task touches finance, parenting, health concerns, hygiene, education, sanitation and so many aspects of society that it is hard to fit the work into a category.

#8220;I usually call it fighting poverty,#8221; says Larson, who has been doing just that for nearly three decades.

#8220;He's really made it his life's work,#8221; Koskela says of Larson.

#8220;I don't see him doing anything else.#8221;