ABOUT US
Tom and Diane Palmeri first met at a remote hospital in the mountains of South Vietnam in 1968. Tom was the administrator when Diane Gronstal came to work there as a nurse. They were married in 1969 and lived near Philadelphia for the next few years where they were foster parents for teenagers. During that period some friends founded a small organization to help malnourished children in Vietnam. And so, in September of 1973, Tom and Diane left for Saigon to open and operate a live-in-center for malnourished children. Within one year they had added a four-story apartment building and were caring for one hundred children . And when a year and a half had passed, they found themselves leaving for the Philippines on one of the last commercial flights out of Saigon. Within a month the communists took control and the organization that had sent them there no longer existed.
When Tom and Diane left Saigon, they went to Cagayan de Oro City where Tom had arranged to teach Philosophy at Xavier University. Tom had known from an earlier stay in the Philippines that the needs there were endless and that an enormous amount of good could be done with comparatively few U.S. dollars. They found that malnutrition in the Philippines was even worse than it had been in Vietnam though there was far less infant abandonment. They rented a small house and began feeding some of the children in the neighborhood. Then they took in an abandoned baby for foster care. And on it went.
Today, thirty three years later, they have had sixty-seven children in foster care. On Camiguin Island, where Tom and Diane now live, they provide school sponsorship to nine hundred children in thirty one public elementary schools and are attempting to identify, diagnose, and assist every child with a physical handicap. Hundreds have already been helped. In their largest project so far, they have opened an elementary level boarding school and farm on ten acres of land in the hills for children who are truly destitute. The six grades, a complete elementary in the Philippines, consist of over one hundred youngsters, ranging in age from nine to twenty-five years. None were attending school when they came. Many had never completed Grade I and many are missing one or both parents.
Deaf youngsters, for whom nothing special was being done elsewhere, are also accepted into the school. They are taught the regular curriculum in sign language.
Deaf students signing "I Love You"
Tom and Diane have seven children of their own, five of whom are adopted. Diane gave birth to the oldest, Paul, two years before they went to Saigon and to Erlinda in 1979. The two oldest of the adopted children are Chris and Marie, both Vietnamese. Next are Jay, Monica, and Edmund, all Filipino. Many things have changed over the past thirty-five years. The seven children have all grown up and gone to the states. And the work that was once just a dream still goes on. But not everything changes. When Marie was just an infant and they first decided to adopt her in Saigon, someone in the States wrote that he was not surprised after having seen the loving way Tom held her in a picture. Tom’s reply was that it must be hard for people at a distance to realize but that was the way he and Diane held all the babies.
Board of Directors:
Carol A. Gronstal, Treasurer and Advisory Board Member
Thomas S. Palmeri, Chairman of the Board & Secretary
Diane E. Palmeri, R.N., President and Board Member
Erlinda J. Palmeri, R.N., Board Member
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Contributions should be payable to "Family to Family, Inc." and mailed to:
Family to Family, Inc.
c/o Carroll County State Bank
126 W 6th
Carroll IA 51401-2341
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