Photography by Steve Buchanan
Elfie Eberle acquires generous donations from hospitals: hundreds of wheelchairs, beds, crutches, walkers, and portable commodes. And from one company, she secured 3,000 medical stents. All of this for her organization, the Orphan Grain Train. The national nonprofit distributes these items and other medical supplies to communities in need throughout the United States and 69 other countries.
The big donations don’t stop Eberle, a Severna Park resident, from persistently looking for other smaller items, even in unusual places—such as scavenging discarded aluminum crutches from neighborhood disposal sites.
“They are like brand new,” she says with a laugh. “When I see them, I grab them. I have done it for as long as I have been with Orphan Grain Train.”
That demonstrates how devoted Eberle has been for 28 years as a volunteer for the Orphan Grain Train, which has 28 branches nationwide. Eberle even founded two new branches herself: one in New York in 1994 and one in Maryland in 2003. She’s volunteered for 19 years “full-time” as the Maryland branch manager at its state-wide office, located in Millersville, and eight years at the western New York location. And she’s assisted 71 international shipments: plus, nine domestically.
“A lot of joy,” says Eberle, when asked about the motivation behind all her years of volunteering. “It’s a passion of mine. They got my heart and soul. My life is so complete because Orphan Grain Train is a blessing to people here.”
“We have great programs to help thousands of people internationally,” she adds. “People who can’t help themselves. We have what they need, and we have it in surplus.”
Eberle stepped down from her position two years ago at age 83 to care for her husband William, a late pastor. For more than 20 years, he volunteered alongside Elfie, who has three children, for the Orphan Grain Train. They took missionary trips for 12 consecutive years to Nicaragua, visiting churches, hospitals, prisons, and orphanages to see what supplies were needed. “We went because Orphan Grain Train had a connection to Nicaragua,” Eberle says. “It came out of that.”
She remains active with Orphan Grain Train as an ambassador. She helped with the local chapter’s campaign of buying and gathering UCI solar lights to be shipped to Ukraine. “My goal is a million lights,” Eberle says. “Our national chapter is even getting involved.”
A container of 2,000 lights was sent to the war-torn country in December through a church in Washington, D.C. And for the past five years, the local organization has sent about 10,000 lights to South Sudan, Cameroon, and Liberia. Eberle was involved in that project, too.
“She is absolutely a dynamo,” Millersville Assistant Branch Manager Ron Phipps says. “She has incredible energy. She is hard-working, intelligent, and very driven for Orphan Grain Train. She loves her god, and she shows it by helping others around the world.”
Eberle’s biggest achievement was getting a 3,600-square-foot warehouse erected in 2014 on 1.3 acres of land to store supplies for the local branch. Elfie approached a neighbor about donating part of a family farm for the facility. She then had great foresight and convinced her skeptical board members to accept the idea. It took some convincing because they were concerned about the significant funding to pull it off.
“We were shipping only two containers per year,” Eberle explains. “At a board meeting in my house, I said, ‘We have to get a warehouse. We can’t go on like this. It truncates everything we are doing. We can only do so much.’ They looked at me like I grew three heads. It was tedious.”
Today, the warehouse has increased the pace of shipments to once a month. “The production went up a couple of levels,” Phipps explains. And that’s all thanks to Eberle.
To learn more about Orphan Grain Train’s Maryland Chapter, visit ogt.org/branches/md.
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