Her curtain call: Reclaiming lives
Dot native assists girls in Zambia
How does a woman who grew up on Jones Hill in Dorchester and spent 10 years chasing her Broadway dream in New York wind up co-founding Vision of Hope, a sanctuary for young girls living on the streets of Zambia?
Simple. Meg O’Brien inherited both her wanderlust and her fearlessness from her mother, Maggie, who joined the Peace Corps as a nurse during Camelot and by 1968 found herself in the thick of the Vietnam War.
Her experience in a place call Chau Doc was memorialized in the Medal of Honor citation awarded to Special Forces Sgt. Drew W. Dix. It’s no surprise that Dix of Pueblo, Colo., and Maggie O’Brien remain close friends.
“From the time Meg was little,” Maggie recalled, glancing at her raven-haired daughter, “I told her she could be whatever she wanted. And what did you say?”
“I told my mother I wanted to be a blond cheerleader,” Meg replied, “but it didn’t work out.”
No, but she was encouraged to sing and dance in choruses and across stages from Boston to the Berkshires.
From her grandfather, who was a union activist, and her dad, a social worker, came a passion for politics that was distinctly left of center. There were stints on youth commissions under the tenures of Mayors Ray Flynn and Tom Menino.
“We weren’t exactly your typical Dot family,” Meg said. “We did drive to Disney World once, but my father stayed out in the car reading The New York Times. He did things for people in the neighborhood without them ever knowing, because that’s how he believed it should be.”
Not long after Meg O’Brien fell short of winning a lead role in “Hairspray,” she decided it was time to come home and go back to school. A scholarship took her to the Berklee College of Music. After graduation it was a chance encounter that pointed her toward Zambia, in the middle of Africa.
“Up at Castle Island, I met a friend from high school who was a pediatrician,” Meg said, “and she told me about a project in Zambia that needed volunteers. The next thing I knew I was on my way to a country I’d barely heard of, having no idea what to expect.”
That was a little more than 10 years and several lifetimes ago. Meg would meet Chitalu Chishimba and together they founded Vision of Hope, dedicated to reclaiming the lives of young girls abandoned to the streets and left to the mercy of pimps and predators.
The Dorchester girl who once hoped to star on Broadway has become an expert in grant writing, networking and raising whatever money she can from friends she’s met all over the world.
Still, the funds Meg O’Brien treasures the most come from the proceeds of crafts made and sold by her mother, Maggie, and godmother, Kathy.
“In Zambia,” Meg said, “my Mom is known as ‘Grandma Maggie.’ ”