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Talk - ever evolving! Starting March 17, Talk's Rendezvous includes taking it to the streets, providing photo coverage of three or four venues of interest to our readers who are active, outgoing leaders and decision makers at their businesses and in their homes! We're interested in what's up and who's where, and happy to consider photo coverage of your business breakfast, lunch or dinner, Chamber happening, Lead Share Group, CEO/management business meeting where choices are being made that impact our community, your fundraiser, gala and party of any kind! Maybe we'll catch up with you at one of Loudoun's shops, wineries, hotels and resorts, restaurants, art galleries, art openings, concerts and performances, historic properties, seasonal events, book signings or somewhere else unique and interesting here in Loudoun.
Be considered! Send an e-mail to info@TalkLoudoun.com and let us know what business-related, unique or fun happening is going on when and where. We'll require permission to shoot and use photographs in Talk's monthly Rendezvous e-zine -- if that's a "go" and your event is chosen, we'll call and arrange to be there! Talk was built with the community in mind, and this new Rendezvous format is just one more extension of that. Check out the March 17 issue of Talk's Rendezvous for a brief piece on Loudoun's wineries, and the first of what we're sure will be many winery round-ups. Thanks for being a valued Talk Loudoun reader -- please spread the word and tell others to subscribe for free, at www.TalkLoudoun.com
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The Wind Beneath Their Wings
By Nancy Croft Baker  The birth of Eleanor Voldish's fourth child defined not only her future as a parent but her future as a professional. Little did she know in1987 that advocating for her son with Down Syndrome would lead to a successful career of advocacy for hundreds of other children with special needs.
Voldish and business partner Cathy Thornton are the principals of Advocacy By Pegasus, LLC, which helps parents navigate the maze of special education regulations, resources and parental rights issues. Although the Leesburg-based firm was launched just last February, Voldish and Thornton combined have more than 50 years of experience in advocacy and special education. Thornton, for example, is a retired special education teacher of 30 years, while Voldish is the former executive director of the Arc of Loudoun, a nonprofit group that provides resources and services for individuals with disabilities to foster equitable participation in all aspects of life.
For Voldish, the journey toward advocacy began as "being just a mom who wanted to find out everything I could to help Gregory be the best he could be." That initial search landed Voldish at Loudoun County's Parent Infant Education program (PIE), which helped her seek county-funded speech pathology, occupational therapy and physical therapy for her six-week-old son.
Two years later, Voldish launched into a search for suitable county-funded special education preschool programs. "The more I researched, the more I was overwhelmed by how complicated the special education system was with all the federal and state regulations," Voldish recalls. "I discovered there were a lot of options out there, but if you don't know to ask for them, you won't get them."
By the time Gregory was ready for kindergarten, Voldish had immersed herself in the concept of inclusion, which provides children with disabilities resources and accommodations to attend class with their non-disabled peers. "The more I read about inclusion, the more I wanted that for my son," she recalls. But inclusion was a new concept, and it was an uphill battle to persuade school administrators to include Gregory in a mainstream classroom. Voldish also faced skeptical and often disgruntled parents of nondisabled children concerned that Gregory would be a distraction.
Year after year, Voldish would gird herself anew for Gregory's individualized education plan (IEP) meetings with county administrators and teachers. And year after year, she won the hearts and minds of school officials through her deep knowledge of the issues and pleasant -- but determined -- demeanor. She also won the acceptance of those disgruntled parents who realized their children also benefited from the special accommodations offered to Gregory. "When parents saw how supportive and empathetic their own children were toward Gregory and that having an aide in the classroom gave the teacher an extra set of hands to help all of the students, more parents started requesting their children be placed in Gregory's class," Voldish says.
Armed with a growing arsenal of experience, Voldish knew she had to share her successful strategies and knowledge with others. She became involved with the Down Syndrome Association of Northern Virginia and the Arc of Loudoun as a volunteer, where she rallied a community of parents to share resources, provide moral and technical support, and attend each other's IEP meetings as an objective third party. "These meetings can become emotionally stressful, because they're talking about your child," Voldish explains. "It helped to take a supportive person along to be your ears when you became too emotional to think rationally." Voldish found herself attending dozens of IEP meetings with other parents and gaining the respect of the special education community.
Meanwhile, Thornton was honing her skills as a special education teacher and classroom advocate in Fairfax County. She had her own experiences with special education advocates, not all of them pleasant. "Some advocates were very adversarial, which makes it difficult to find a solution everyone will be happy with." Upon retirement, Thornton also joined Arc of Loudoun as a volunteer, where she worked closely with Voldish. With complementary skills and the same passion, they left Arc of Loudoun to focus solely on advocacy.
Today, Advocacy by Pegasus serves roughly 90 families and strives to be their motto, "the wind beneath your wings," for their clients. "In advocating, our goal is to teach families to advocate for themselves to get them flying on their own."
 Services range from IEP review and consultation to classroom and home observation to mediation. Voldish and Thornton also help develop 504 plans, the IEP equivalent for individuals with severe food allergies. "There's a lot of problem solving involved in special education, but it's motivating as well," says Thornton, who provides most of the classroom and home observation and helps develop clear and definable IEPs. "You end up forming a whole team of people focused on what it will take to help this one child succeed," she says. "While we may not always agree, we always end meetings on a positive note."
When the school system and the parents are at odds on a particular issue, Voldish calmly guides them to the next step of the process. In many cases, she will advise parents to request an independent education evaluation by a professional outside the public school system, a practice funded by the county but not often advertised.
That was the case for client Karen S. (who requested anonymity), whose son with autism was having great difficulty socializing in a mainstream classroom setting. "The public school randomly selected for my son was not a good fit," she explains. Her son appeared to be regressing, his teachers were frustrated and Karen felt they were not making any progress. She contacted Voldish to help her sort through options available to improve the situation.
Voldish and Thornton spent time observing Karen's son and reviewing his IEP. They noticed many of the IEP's goals and objectives were vague and immeasurable. They recommended rewriting the IEP and seeking additional testing by an independent evaluator. They also recommended a different school placement for Karen's son, something not typically allowed. But through knowledgeable mediation, Karen says Voldish was able to help school officials see that her recommendations were in her son's best interests.
"We never could have accomplished all that without Eleanor," Karen says. "You can get special education advice from many places, but very few people understand what's available by law, the quality you should expect, and the benchmarks you should anticipate unless they have the experience most of us with young children don't have yet." Through Voldish's insight, "our son's teachers in his new school have been able to see what is possible and are equally pleased to find solutions, and our son is doing extremely well now." The Special Education Department of Loudoun County Public Schools also has been extremely accommodating, Voldish adds.
Some of the most important advice Voldish offers parents is to not lower their expectations of their special needs children. "Being in regular classrooms has been essential to Gregory's success today," Voldish says. Gregory is enrolled in his third year of the four-year LIFE Program at George Mason University, where he's studying traditional academics in addition to learning to live independently. "I was told that Gregory would never read and today he is taking a creative writing course, reads all the time and works at the campus library." Voldish reminds other parents that anything is possible with the right resources and support.
And with Advocacy by Pegasus' wind beneath their wings, children with special needs in Loudoun County have nowhere to go but up.
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 Taking Care and Hope South of the Border
By Betsy Allen
There's a part of Dr. Keith Belote that is very locally rooted. He and his family moved from the Eastern Shore area to Loudoun when he was 9. His Catoctin Family Practice has been in the same location on King Street in Leesburg since 1978, and he is committed to treating his patients pretty much like family.
"We treat people from the nursery to the nursing home," he said. "We like to follow them and take care of them. We're treating the second generation now, the people we treated as kids."
But there's another side to Dr. Belote - one that has taken him far afield, to the sweltering heat and dusty streets of Matamoros, Mexico.
Belote had wanted to do some medical work abroad, but had also experienced a few misgivings. "It was something I always wanted to do," he remembered, "but I was hesitant at first to do it." Small doubts crept into his mind. "Am I going to know the medical problems I would treat in South America or Mexico? And am I going to be able to give good advice?"
Eight years ago, an opportunity presented itself - a medical mission trip planned by Leesburg Community Church (formerly Leesburg Baptist Church). "We like to reach out to the community and to the world - to serve people. It opens the door for conversation," explained Lyn Sebesta, missions pastor for the church. "I was part of the initial team that called all our medical professionals in the congregation together."
 The idea, Belote said, was to choose a relatively close location that would help make it an affordable and effective trip. The planners chose Matamoros, which is just over the border from Brownsville, Texas. Trip attendees stayed at a campsite at the Rio Grande River Valley Baptist Mission in Brownsville and crossed the border each day to provide medical care and other services to people in need.
The first Matamoros mission effort was so successful that the team continued, and by the spring of 2008 had completed seven trips. Sebesta explained that each team generally consisted of 10 to 12 people, including two to three doctors, several nurses, translators, children's workers, as well as a minister and other people as needed.
Initially, the team drew just on members of the church congregation, but according to Belote, this quickly extended to others from Loudoun and some from Fairfax County. "We made connections with friends of people we'd worked with," he said, "or who had been on this kind of trip before."
The trips, each lasting about a week, also allowed the team to provide help beyond the medical realm. "One year, we had a gal who washed and cut hair, and the children's workers played ball and games with the kids," Sebesta said. In addition, she said, the team gathered other items - medical samples, donations of personal care items, food and toys - to leave with the people of Matamoros.
Of course, any group effort of this kind takes some fine-tuning, and the travelers learned the ropes as they went. "The first trip was in May," Belote said with a laugh. "It was over 100 degrees in Mexico - it was awful! So the next year, we went in April." Another year, he remembered, "I had a stress test two days before we left on the trip. I still had the radioactive thallium in my body, and it set off the detectors (at the border). They stopped us."
Getting there did take some effort, but once in Matamoros, Belote was confronted with new challenges as he started to treat patients. "What you see down there are the chronic complications of conditions you wouldn't normally see up here - you see people severely debilitated and deformed from arthritis, people with nerve damage and muscle atrophy from diabetes."
Sometimes the complications resulted from the lack of things we take for granted here in the States. Belote saw "people with scar tissue across their corneas - a result of the sun's glare and the drying effects of the climate." He noted that simple pairs of sunglasses would address the problem, but many people couldn't afford them and some went blind. Like any good doc, Belote knew the best treatment was prevention: "We started taking tons of sunglasses down and giving them out to people."
With every trip, Belote touched his patients' lives, and they in turn left lasting impressions with him. He recalled the mission group visiting a small island near Matamoros one year. It was a little different than your average island - you could actually drive to this one by crossing a series of sand bars. About 400 people lived there with no electricity and no public water source. What they had was television, on a nightly basis. Belote was amazed. "They had no electricity. I asked, 'How do you do this?'" Turns out the folks would take the battery out of the only truck on the island, and hook it up to a TV for a communal showing of an hour and a half of programming.
Belote also remembered one small child - a girl, 6 or 7 years old. "I like to tease the kids and play with them. There was one who I tickled on the bottom of her feet. She started hitting me on the arm. Her mom stopped her from doing that." Belote went about his business and after a while, peeked back at her. She came over and gave him another playful hit. Mom stopped her and sat her down. "At the end of the day, in my scrubs, I felt a tug on my pants leg. It was the girl, who lifted up her arms for me to hug her. She never did talk." But somehow, without a word, they spoke volumes to each other.
 Relationships like that endeared the citizens of Matamoros to the mission group, and they were interested in continuing the trips. "When you go back to the same area, they get to know you," Sebesta explained. Unfortunately, the State Department advised against a trip last year, citing the numerous drug wars and violence in the area. Sebesta is uncertain if they will be able to return to Matamoros anytime in the near future.
"We're hoping the borderlands will calm down so we can go back," Sebesta said. She and others at the church also are looking at other viable trips, perhaps to Costa Rica or Haiti. "We are beginning to seek out other countries that can house us. We are in the exploratory stages."
Belote certainly cherished the trips, but while he knew they were doing important work as health care professionals, he saw something bigger in play. "The one thing we realized over the years, as it evolved, was that the most important thing we offered on the trip was not really medical," he said. "We realized that the things we gave them only lasted them a short time, only last three or four months until the next service (effort) helped them out."
But "we wanted to share God's love with them," Belote said. He saw the caring and compassion shared by the mission team with the people of Matamoros as a representation of God's love in action.
Belote said he believed the people were moved by "someone who would travel thousands of miles to see them. It might not be difficult to understand (then) that there was a God above who cared for them - and that lasted longer than the six weeks' worth of stuff we gave them. The lasting thing we gave them was a sense of hope."
(All photos for this article courtesy of Leesburg Community Church Mission Team)
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