News Release
July 2003
(Bethlehem, Pennsylvania)—Clothes and school supplies
from the Moravian College community are on their way to a children’s
hospital in Iraq, thanks to Marge Beahm, assistant women’s basketball
coach, and her husband, Staff Sgt. Mike Beahm of the Bethlehem-based
744th Military Police Battalion.
Mike Beahm 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 his wife. “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
Beahm said, ranging 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,” she said.
Mike Beahm, the wildlife conservation officer of Lehigh County, has
been a member of the U.S. Army Reserve for 12 years. He transferred
to the 744th MPs last year, just as the unit came back from Kosovo.
In January it was deployed to the Gulf. He is considering a transfer
to the active-duty Army, his wife said.
