HEBRON – She has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for an orphanage with five buildings, a medical clinic and 14 workers and teachers.

Now, Janet Littlefield wants to do more.

“There’s children everywhere and there’s no one to help them,” said Littlefield, a former teacher who is now a mountain biking and softball coach at Hebron Academy.

She was inspired 10 years ago as a Peace Corps worker in the southeast African country of Malawi to assist its homeless children.

“I was always moved by the overwhelming number of kids and lack of adults,” said Littlefield of the 1 million orphans in Malawi, where 45 percent of the population is under 5 years old and education is hard to come by.

A young man, Shaibu Kaliati, came to her one day and asked if he could work for her to pay his school fees. “He said, ‘I really want to learn. I’ll work hard,'” Littlefield said. She hired the man, who was a year younger than she, and paid for him to go to college.

“(Kaliati) walked 12 miles to school. He told me 20 homeless orphans lived in his town. Some lived under bridges. I wired $1,000 to build a hut,” she said. Kaliati became her first sponsorship in Malawi.

The orphanage in Chigamba Village began in 2003 as a small building that housed 20 homeless children. Shelter and education were given top priorities in her desire to help the children, Littlefield said.

“Students had to pay to go to school at any level,” Littlefield said. “That eliminated a lot of people.”

Kaliati later became her Malawian director of the Little Field Home. It was he who suggested the name for the orphanage. “Shaibu Kaliati named the house Little Field Home after me as a thank-you. It was spelled incorrectly in two words, but the house is indeed in a little field and we liked the play on words and have kept the name since.”

In 2006, the nonprofit organization Friends of Little Field Home was incorporated. As much as $100,000 is raised annually to assist the cause.

“We want to do more. There’s so many. There’s children everywhere and there’s no one to help them,” Littlefield said. This year, in addition to soliciting donations from companies and individuals, she is selling Christmas cards with which people can make donations to the project.

“We’re trying to give them a hand up so they can become self-sufficient,” she said. “First, ‘Here’s a blanket, here’s a book. Go to school.’ That’s helping but not solving anything. We need to think of ways that work for Malawi. How can they really be able to take care of themselves?”