When Patricia Doerr signed up for a college work-study program in the early 1970s, she thought she was simply stepping outside her comfort zone. What she didn’t realize was that one small decision would shape the rest of her life — inspiring a heart for Latin America, a lifelong commitment to service, and a role in launching School the World’s first student service trip.
In 1972, Pat was a college student still grieving the loss of her father when she came across an opportunity to join a service trip organized through the Catholic Church on her college campus. “I thought, you have to stop feeling sorry for yourself” she recalled. “You have to do something that’s totally out of your character.”
That decision took her to the Yucatán Penoninsula in Mexico. It was a journey full of firsts — traveling with strangers, navigating new languages, and living simply. “It was rustic,” she said with a laugh. “We had to arrange our own transportation to the Yucatán Peninsula… we stayed with families, and we had to sleep in hammocks attached from one side of the wall to the other because we had an occasional scorpion or tarantula in our rooms.”
Her assignment was at an orphanage for girls. “They could only keep the girls until they were 12 because they had to make room for new arrivals,” she remembered. “In the morning the nuns would go and open the doors and there might be a baby or a toddler outside the door that was dropped off.”
Among those children was one who captured her heart: “There was one little girl, she was five, and her name was Margarita, and I just fell in love with her.”
When she returned home, she begged her mother to adopt the little girl — “and she looked at me like you are crazy,” Pat said — but the experience planted a seed. “I made a promise to myself to do something in honor of these little girls who made me realize that ,yes, I had lost my father, but I still had a mother, siblings, and grandparents.
Years later, Pat fulfilled that promise. “When my husband and I got married, I said I don’t want to give birth to our own children. I said I want to adopt our kids. Because I know there are kids out there that desperately need homes,” she recalled.
After having two biological sons and enduring years of paperwork and delays, they adopted a baby girl from Paraguay. The experience was anything but simple — “I was there on the one-year anniversary of the military coup,” she said. “When I woke up in the morning and looked out our hotel window, there was a soldier on every street corner with a machine gun.” But she stayed, waited, and finally brought her daughter home.
Decades later, her daughter would return to Paraguay as an adult to find her birth family, and Pat went with her. “It was just meant to be,” she said, recounting how they even met the Paraguayan ambassador to the United States. “My daughter did find her grandparents and aunts and uncles… she found her birth mother and several siblings. We’re all friends on Facebook, all of us.”
Pat’s varied career included 18 years as a Spanish teacher at Lauralton Hall, the alma mater of School the World’s founder, Kate Curran. Her passion for connecting language, culture, and compassion made her a natural fit when Lauralton’s principal introduced her to Kate in 2013.
“She said, I have somebody I want you to meet,” Pat remembered. “And that’s where School the World started. She introduced me to Kate and we were the first school group that went with School the World. And it was just… I right away felt comfortable with Kate. I figured this woman was an attorney. She has to be very precise and thorough. And I just had confidence in her from day one.”
As the first high school chaperone to travel with School the World, Pat helped shape many of the practices that now define the organization’s student trips. “We worked together because I was the first high school group to go,” she said. “I had to find a place for the girls to get their health injections… as far as packing, Kate and I worked together on that. She was really good.”
Kate’s approach to safety and preparation stood out. “Even when we were in the country she said, if there’s anything at any time that you’re not comfortable with, let me know,” Pat recalled. “Everything flowed really well. We stayed in places that were safe, they were clean. We had drivers… she always assured me, she said these men are very good, they do this all the time.”
Compared to her first service trip decades earlier, she laughed, “This was like the Ritz.”
For Pat, the most powerful moments of each trip came during evening reflections with students. “We did the highs and lows in the evening,” she said. “There were generally hardly any lows. But the highs were unbelievable.”
Many of her students came from comfortable families, but what they experienced changed them. “They would say things like, you know, I used to think I needed a lot of things to be happy, but I see people here that don’t have a lot of things and they’re happy. So maybe I don’t need as many things.”
“The great part about being a chaperone,” she added, “is seeing this reaction.”
Even years later, she continues to share those lessons — now with her grandchildren. “I tell them, you should do this one day. You need to get out of your comfort zone and experience a different culture.”
Looking back, Pat sees a clear thread running through her life — from that first trip to Mexico to every act of service since. “You just don’t know how it’s going to affect your life,” she said. “That one little trip… it snowballed. It’s still affecting me.”
Learn more about School the World’s Service Learning Program and how you can help inspire the next generation of global citizens.