Photos by Jeanna Duerscherl | The Roanoke Times

Vanessa Carpenter (center) gets a little help from Christina Jones, a family friend, who holds the microphone for her as she plays Guitar Hero with her children Brittney (left), Ruthanna (front) and Paul (right). Vanessa and her husband, Tom, have fostered more than 160 children in 30 years.

Vanessa and Tom Carpenter hug as they joke around with daughters Brianna (left) and Brittney. On their first date, Vanessa told Tom that she planned to dedicate her life to working with abused and neglected children.

Ruthanna sits on the front porch swing with Sweet Pea, one of the Carpenter family's dogs. Ruthanna says that Sweet Pea is her favorite pet and living at the Carpenters gives her the opportunity to be around animals.

In Haiti, they call her Mama V -- the American lady who helps poor, sick children find medical care.

In Chicago, they knew her as the Baby Whisperer, the foster mom who would take the babies no one else wanted.

But in the shadow of Fort Lewis mountain in a suburban Glenvar two-story, Vanessa Carpenter is simply mom.

Mom with the two-page chore chart on the fridge and the dented, 15-passenger van.

Mom with the embarrassing way of singing karaoke in the house -- even when the teenagers' friends are visiting, OMG!

The friends, by the way, can't get enough of the Carpenters' family of 15, although presently there are -- wait a minute, a head count must be taken -- just nine living in the Roanoke County home. Not counting the occasional Haitian visitor.

The friends say the Carpenters should have their own reality TV show.

The friends can't believe Ronnie lives in the same house with Brianna -- a white boy living with a black girl, along with a biracial brother and a mentally disabled sister, too.

Wal-Mart shoppers may point fingers and whisper about the Carpenter clan, but Vanessa knows exactly how to identify her holy, disparate bunch:

They're her kids, she says, a dimpled smile spreading across her face. "And I'm just a mom."

A baby calling

Vanessa grew up in Somerset, a small central Ohio town. There was one black child in the entire school.

When the first-grade teacher was out sick, Vanessa was the one sent to keep an eye on the kids. She was 11 years old at the time, just a sixth-grader, and the secretary would turn on the intercom and listen in, just to make sure things were OK.

As her husband, Tom, tells the story, they met just out of high school. Vanessa was wearing a sky-blue dress, with circa-1980 Farrah Fawcett-style hair.

They went for pizza on their first date, during which Vanessa announced that she had a medical problem. It would likely prevent her from having children, she explained, but she still planned to dedicate her life to working with abused and neglected kids.

"If that's OK with you, you can stick around," she told him. It wasn't exactly first-date subject matter, but somehow it worked.

A year later they were married and living in Columbus, where Vanessa baby-sat for children during the day. Because they were so young -- not quite 21 -- a fertility doctor they were seeing said their only avenue for adoption was to become foster parents first.

They started out taking all ages: There was a teenager who stole their car, another who cut up their couch. One toddler whacked Vanessa on head with a glass baby bottle -- while she was driving.

"I'm from a family of nine; I was used to a lot of kids," said Tom, 49. "But this all had to grow on me."

Then Vanessa got pregnant -- and, two years later, she got pregnant again. Still, the fostering evolved. The Carpenters took training to care for children with tracheotomies, children in full body casts.

They took a short break from fostering when they moved to Chicago in 1991, a time when crack cocaine was all over the news. Vanessa had a recurring dream of finding a baby in a Dumpster. "We're supposed to do babies," she told Tom.

Their plates were already full enough, Tom said.

But their two children, Scott and Kristin, missed the excitement of having the foster kids around. Tom relented, saying they could take in one or two.

The first was Brittney, a 15-day-old crack baby whose mother had returned to life on the streets. Doctors said she had the most cocaine in her system at birth of any living child they'd seen. She cried 22 out of 24 hours a day.

Then came Brianna, a few months later. She was catatonic, another crack baby -- 9 months old and severely physically abused. "They thought she'd have multiple personalities," Vanessa says.

Vanessa took them to rehab therapy and set them together on a blanket so Brianna could watch the way Brittney moved. Eventually, Brianna learned to crawl and walk, too.

Social workers latched onto Vanessa, calling her the Baby Whisperer. But some people frowned on the white Carpenters fostering -- and, later, adopting -- black and biracial children.

"Some black people said to us, 'They'll lose their identity,' " Tom recalls.

"But nobody else would take these kids."

Omri was 2 weeks old when he arrived Christmas Eve 1995. He was abused and had intestinal issues that required three surgeries.

His birth certificate says he's Caucasian -- a fact that cracks his older sisters up. Brianna and Brittney are now 15 and so healthy that they share the first two legs of a Glenvar Middle School track-team relay.

"He doesn't know what nationality he is!" Brianna jokes of Omri, now 13.

"He just knows he's unbelievably good-looking!" Brittney adds.

Race factors

Kyle Carpenter was 10 when he joined the family in 1996. Brianna's biological brother, he had already been shuffled among 13 foster and group homes.

"I'd been in the foster system so long, I'd kind of gotten used to it," recalls Kyle, now 23 and a movie-store manager in Roanoke. There were 15 living in the house when Kyle arrived, including two other siblings of Carpenter adoptees.

"At first I didn't know how to act, but the way my mom's older [biological] kids accepted me and took me in, that made it the easiest thing," he says of Scott and Kristin, now grown with children of their own.

"The fact that you were adopted was never brought up, except by people who didn't live in our family."

Race may not have been a factor at home, but Kyle says growing up in a multiracial household sometimes made fitting in hard. He dropped out of Marshall University his sophomore year.

"The whites wouldn't draw him in at Marshall, and the blacks wouldn't either because they looked at him as being white," his father says. "I never wanted to take anybody's identity away, but shame on us if we only recognize each other by race."

The children who came to the Carpenters at a younger age have had an easier adjustment, family members say. Three of the seven living at home are there under legal guardianship; four are adopted; and two others, with more severe handicaps, live elsewhere in Virginia in group settings, though Vanessa visits often and keeps regular tabs on their care. In 30 years, the couple has fostered more than 160 children.

Before a recent dinner, they interacted noisily and then everyone held hands for prayer. Vanessa had fixed two versions of her popular potato-sausage casserole -- one with onions and, for the picky eaters, one without.

Adults ate on china on the couch while the kids -- who take turns loading the dishwasher -- ate on Styrofoam plates by choice. The Carpenters don't all fit around the dining-room table.

Thanks to the wonders of bulk shopping, Vanessa spends an average of $1.53 per person per meal.

'A whole country to mother'

Tom calls his wife's obsession with Haiti her "latest frontier in mothering." In 1999, a church friend invited Vanessa to go on a mission trip with her to Haiti.

"What state is Haiti in?" Vanessa asked.

Thus became the germ of Angel Missions Haiti, a nonprofit run entirely on donations from the basement of the Carpenters' home.

Initially set up to coordinate life-saving surgeries for Haitian babies in the United States, the nongovernmental organization now includes three medical clinics in Port-au-Prince and a soon-to-open surgery center.

"Don't ask me how, but somehow this Navy vessel is now under her spell," said Tom, who works out of his home for a New York-based telecommunications company -- and mans the fort while Vanessa, 48, is in Haiti, which is typically a week to 10 days every month.

Just last month, the ship USNS Comfort provided the space and the Navy surgeons to perform 158 surgeries for Angel Missions, from hernia operations to breast biopsies. Mama V -- as she is known in some of the remotest villages as well as in the bustling capital -- arranged them all.

Families are so poor in Haiti that some have to borrow clothes just to make the journey from their villages to her clinics.

"The sailors weren't sure how to work with the Haitians initially, but Mama V got in there and made things happen," said Cmdr. Jim Spotts, a chief military liaison and Coast Guard officer, from his post in Port-au-Prince. "Her energy is almost manic down here. She's like some character out of a movie."

For the children her mission brings to Roanoke for surgery, "She is absolutely vital," said Carilion Clinic neurosurgeon Lisa Apfel, who operated recently on a Haitian infant with hydrocephalus and spina bifida. "She makes all these connections so that people are pulling together to help these children."

All told, Vanessa has a list of three dozen doctors across the country who donate their time to treat Haitian children for conditions including spina bifida and cleft palate. She arranges medical visas and temporary housing for the children while they're in the United States. A dozen Roanoke-area families have hosted such children in the six years.

"I think that she thinks -- and I do, too -- that she is the hand of God just trying to spark all these good things to happen," said Moneta family practice physician Kitty Humphreys, who also volunteers. "I've seen her with children who were so sick that I didn't think would make the trip here, but she gets them here, through these surgeries and now they're fine."

Humphreys is astonished at what Vanessa has accomplished through sheer grit and her vast e-mail network -- through which she regularly solicits money for plane tickets, medical equipment, medicines and surgery. She even breeds Maltese puppies, with tax-deductible proceeds going to the mission.

"She's moving mountains, one stone at a time," Humphreys said. "It's like she's got a whole country to mother."

'Just a mom'

Brianna loves it when new teachers ask to meet her mother. "She's standing right next to me," she tells them, waiting for their jaws to drop.

But Vanessa is as well known in Salem and Glenvar as she is in Haiti, shuffling her children to piano lessons, choir concerts and various sports activities. Most of the children have been to Haiti once; the Carpenters use it as a reward for good grades.

"Every time she goes down there, she wants to adopt another child," Brittney said. "But I hate it when she's gone; I have to e-mail her or talk to her on the phone every day when she's in Haiti, or I go ballistic."

Brianna shows off a dress from her closet. It's a sundress Vanessa pulled an all-nighter sewing last year after Brianna told her about an upcoming choir concert ... two days before she needed a new dress.

On a scale of one to 10 with 10 being awesome, the girls rate their mother. Brianna gives her an eight while Brittney offers a five.

But Brianna coaxes her sister into a higher number after she reminds her: How many black girls do they know whose mothers watched videos to learn how to style their hair?

To them, Vanessa is just a normal mom -- alternately wonderful, annoying, embarrassing and always there for them, even when she's an ocean away.

For more information on Angel Missions Haiti e-mail angelmissions@hotmail.com or call Vanessa Carpenter at 580-9721.