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| Philanthropy |
Foreign Policies
Matthew Schuerman
06/01/2004
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The urge to give money far from their own shores hit Marcia Barinaga and her
husband, Corey Goodman, five years ago while they were sitting in a family-run
noodle shop in Pakbeng, Laos, a Mekong River village. “The daughter, who was
about 10 or 11 years old, was waiting on tables,” Barinaga recalls. “She was
adding up the bills in her head and playing tricks on the customers while
wearing this impish smile on her face.” It seemed a tragedy to the Oakland,
Calif., couple that a girl with such a facility for numbers—she would pretend to
give out wrong change and watch to see if the customers noticed, or calculate
the total for a table of eight and feign confusion when she had not made a
mistake—would probably spend the rest of her life slinging noodles. According to
UNICEF, girls there are much less likely than boys to make it through school, or
to go in the first place.
 “That led us to start thinking, if we had a lot of
money, we would want to take her to the U.S. and give her a good education,”
says Barinaga. They were not in the philanthropic league (Barinaga is a writer
for Science magazine and Goodman is a professor at the University of California,
Berkeley) until 2000, when Goodman took his biotech company, Exelis, public. The
IPO yielded them “millions, but not tens of millions,” according to Barinaga.
Nevertheless, it was more than enough to foster the education of peasant girls
in Southeast Asia. The problem was how to actually get money into the hands of
the families.
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