Making a Difference: Willie Dell has 'stood up for right all her life'

She's 81, but Willie Jones Dell prefers to push her age ahead slightly.

"I like to claim 82 so God will give me that next year," she said.

That's because Dell still has much on her to-do list. Next month, with open-heart surgery behind her, she'll head back to Haiti to resume the mission work she started 26 years ago.

Dell has been a college educator, a social worker and an advocate for senior citizens. She was the first black woman to serve on the Richmond City Council and was part of the council's first black majority.

But something she had wanted to do all her life eluded her until much later in her career.

"I always wanted to be a missionary," she said.

She thought she would just wait and join the Peace Corps after she retired, she said, as former President Jimmy Carter's mother, Lillian, did when she was 68.

"You don't have to wait," she recalls her husband, Nathan, a Presbyterian minister, telling her. "You can do what you can do now."

Since then, she has gone sometimes twice yearly to Haiti to do just that.

Normally, she goes at the beginning of January and stays three months. She's not sure why, but last January she made reservations to leave a bit later, on Jan. 21. Then the earthquake struck Jan. 12.

"I could have been there," she said. "I should have been there."

Heart trouble she didn't know she had kept her away the rest of the year, but she's eager to return next month to check on the people whose faces she came to know as she ventured out on her rounds.

"I've got to walk that same trail to see if my same people are still there," she said.

Dell, the retired executive director for the Richmond Community Senior Center, was honored in October by the Virginia Center for Inclusive Communities with the Jeffrey B. Spence Award for Interfaith Understanding.

In addition to volunteer activities at home, she was cited for her mission work in an outpatient clinic, a critical-care unit for babies and the hospice unit in Port-au-Prince.

"She's a very caring person," said longtime friend Allix James, the retired president of Virginia Union University. "It's part of her basic nature."

He said Dell was an important member of the City Council, taking the side of people who needed an advocate.

"She's just stood up for right all her life," he said.

Dell has "a wonderful story to tell about Richmond and the progress it's made," said Audrey Brown Burton, who has known her since the mid-1970s.

"She makes a statement when it comes to building character," she said. "I believe she's led a life that is enviable."

They serve together on the board of the Institute for Missions, which has raised funds for Haiti, as well as on a women's leadership roundtable, where Dell is the senior member, Burton said.

"She passes on wisdom," she said. "Willie is so good at sharing wisdom … and bringing a spiritual perspective to the group."

She describes Dell as "a quiet warrior" for Richmond who has played many roles, from serving on the board of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts to helping with voter registration and community outreach.

"I see her as being among this great cloud of witnesses that's doing great things here in Richmond and the rest of the world," she said.

* * * * *

Dell was a professor in Virginia Commonwealth University's graduate social work program when she was appointed to the council in 1973. She went on to win election and served for nine years.

Her appointment to the council came as the result of the resignation of a member who was her pastor — who gave up his seat to become a missionary.

When Dell answered her call to mission work, she encountered some skeptics, including the head of a home for boys in Haiti who tried to discourage her from coming by recounting all the discomforts she would face.

"He said it was not like the Holiday Inn," she said.

But she finally convinced him and stays in the home's guesthouse during her trips.

She speaks neither Creole nor French, she said, but finds that is not a problem.

Caring for babies "doesn't require a language skill — it just requires human contact," she said. "I can understand baby talk."

Adults "respond in kind," she said, "if you treat them like another equal, like another human being, like somebody God created just as he did you."

A woman at her church recently told her she would be afraid to do such mission work. Dell said she doesn't see it as something to fear.

"The God I serve has got a passport, and wherever I am, God is. And there's nothing to be afraid of," she said. "If you don't move out of your comfort zone, if you continue to sit where you are, you see what you see."

In Haiti, every Saturday she would put water, a sandwich and a piece of fruit in her backpack and set out, she said.

"My thing was to go out and get lost, because if you get lost, you've got to find your way back home."