WARM MINERAL SPRINGS — After 20 years of helping orphans in Poland, Armenia and Ukraine, Elizabeth Nazarian has loads of photos, thank-you letters and other small tokens of appreciation from children without parents.

Nazarian, 71, a longtime Warm Mineral Springs resident, created her nonprofit Direct Help to Eastern Europe after wanting to help some of the neediest people in her birth country—Poland. She contacted orphanages asking what the children needed.