Faculty Accolade

Little feet hesitantly step to the edge of the doorway. Despite the noise in the room, Marlene Tyrrell senses a child has come to join the group and she turns to welcome him. "Hi. What's your name?" she asks warmly, as she leads him toward a computer. "Do you want to play a game?"
The computer center is one of two at Hope House, a transitional homeless shelter operated by Waco's Compassion Ministries, and the child is one of many who lives there during a given year. Tyrrell, a computer science lecturer since 1992, serves as Baylor's link to Computers for Compassion, a weekly service project she started more than three years ago to help children of homeless adults develop computer skills.
"They will be so far behind their peers in school if they have no access to computers," she says. "This program helps address that."
The facility houses women, children and families who are allowed to stay for up to six months, Tyrrell says. As is common in such shelters, many of Compassion's occupants have been displaced from their homes because of medical bills, abandonment or loss of employment.
"You begin to realize how easy it would be for any of us to become homeless," she says. "It gives me a different perspective about the problems I think I'm having."
Every Thursday evening during the semester, Tyrrell and her group of students visit Hope House. On this particular evening, they are in the process of loading educational software on new Dell computers, purchased through a U.S. Housing and Urban Development grant Compassion Ministries received. Many of the student volunteers are computer science majors from one of Tyrrell's classes. Others simply want to spend time with children in need of extra attention.
Accompanying the Baylor students to the shelter allows Tyrrell to see a different side of them from what she sees in the classroom. "Being there every week is such a time commitment, and I think it's pretty exceptional that they do it," she says of the students. "It's not something that I would have done at their age."
Even with a full teaching load and many responsibilities at her church, Tyrrell never misses her weekly visit to Compassion.
"The thing that I enjoy most is getting to know the children. They get so attached to us, and we get so attached to them," Tyrrell says. "There are lots of children who I've fallen in love with."