• Social Work grads use skills to help countrymen back in Thailand, Liberia

    Walai Jantawiboon with a Thai womanWalai Jantawiboon, a first-generation Chinese born in Thailand, saw firsthand the devastation brought by the tsunami that struck Thailand in 2004. Gracie Brownell suffered in her home country, too, often going hungry and enduring homelessness as a child in Liberia during her native land’s civil war.

    In time, the tragedies led both Walai (pictured) and Brownell to Baylor’s School of Social Work, from which each graduated this spring with a master’s degree. Both aim to use their degrees to help their countrymen back home.

    Walai hopes to use the skills she learned at Baylor to develop a community for those who were orphaned or abandoned after the tsunami. Brownell hopes to return to Liberia one day to help ex-combatants transition back to normal life. Until it’s safe to return, however, she will continue her studies on how former fighters — many of whom were just children when forced into rebel armies — can be helped and share those studies with groups like the United Nations who can organize the necessary programs.

    Sic ’em, Baylor School of Social Work graduates!