Save the Children

Boxed in: Marge Beahm and 13-month-old Maddison with a stack of boxes filled with clothes, toys, and school supplies going to children in Nazariya, Iraq.

Clothes and school supplies from the College community are on their way to a children’s hospital in Iraq, thanks to Marge Beahm, assistant women’s basketball coach, and her MP husband.

Staff Sergeant Mike Beahm of the 744th Military Police Battalion is stationed at Camp Tallil, a prison camp south of Baghdad. In May, he was making supervisory visits to facilities run by his battalion when he dropped by a children’s hospital and an orphanage in Nazariya.

“He was seeing a lot of poor children walking around with just rags on,” said Marge. “They had no school supplies, not even crayons. And being a father and head of a family, he thought: ‘We’re always throwing stuff out.’ ”

So he put in a request to his wife, whose sister works for Binney & Smith in Easton. That took care of the crayons, and an all-campus e-mail brought in clothing and supplies.

“There’s a lot of clothes,” Marge said. They range in size from newborn to teenager. There are stuffed animals for the children in the hospital, and several boxes of school supplies.

The donations were taken to the Bethlehem Reserve Center, which will ship them to Iraq.

“It was supposed to be this little minuscule project, and it just got bigger and bigger,” Marge said.

Mike, wildlife conservation officer of Lehigh County, has been a member of the U.S. Army Reserve for 12 years. He transferred to the Bethlehem-based 744th MPs last year, just as the unit came back from Kosovo. In January, it was deployed to the Gulf, then to Iraq. Mike is considering a transfer to the active-duty Army.

While Mike is in Iraq, Marge is in charge of the family, which includes Bryce, 3, and Maddison, 13 months. She is expecting their third child in November, whose arrival she announced to Mike in an e-mail.