The following is a transcription of The Art of Volunteering Episode S2E8: Anne Forcine, Internal Controls Auditor for SIL.
Stormy Bell (00:00): Welcome back to The Art of Volunteering. Our guest today is one of my dear friends, Anne Forcine. Anne has worked in the field of accounting for over 50 years in pharma, construction and advertising. She retired from full-time work about a year ago to give her the opportunity to do more traveling and volunteer work. Most of her weekends, you’ll find her spending time with friends, family, attending church, getting outside for a hike, kayak[ing], or skiing. Welcome, Anne.
Anne Forcine (00:32): Hi.
Stormy Bell (00:34): Anne, let’s start. Last spring, you went on an amazing journey to Africa as a volunteer to perform a financial controls audit for the Summer Institute of Linguistics, or SIL. I think you were an internal controls auditor, is that correct? Can you share a little bit about who or what SIL is and how you started your journey with them?
Anne Forcine (00:57): Sure. About 10 years ago, I was put in touch with SIL or Wycliffe. I didn’t know that there were any kind of mission trips, or we call them mission trips, that would enable me to use accounting. I found out that they have probably 25 to 30 trips a year all around the world that they need people to go in and just make sure their audit, their financial controls are in place. As a nonprofit, it’s really important to have that accountability for the money that is being poured into their agency. So that’s how I got connected with them. I was just blown away by the different countries and continents that you could go to and that God was using my gifts in that way. I didn’t have to go into a teaching environment or a construction environment to help with missions, but I could be in an office helping them stay on track with their budget.
Stormy Bell (01:59): Why Africa?
Anne Forcine (02:05): I’ve loved Africa. I’ve always loved Africa. It’s been on my bucket list since I was really little. I wanted to go to Kenya. I feel like every time I wanna go somewhere, God provides a way for me to go. Africa, it’s like that continent that is still really unknown a lot. I mean, people are starting to go there more often, but the idea of being able to meet people that I probably would never have an opportunity to meet and the animals were just, I just wanted to see the animals in their natural habitat. It was a dream come true to be able to do it.
Stormy Bell (02:45): Awesome. Did you go alone?
Anne Forcine (02:47): I did. When I requested the trip, they said there was another young woman who just graduated from college and she had never been on a trip, and I had been on one 10 years prior. We ended up meeting in Nairobi about two in the morning at our guest house. So I did travel alone. I have really never been fearful of that because I just love airports. I love them. I love the idea that you could walk up to any counter in an airport, put down your credit card and go anywhere in the world and follow people that were going anywhere in the world. It just fascinated me. I was not worried. I feel like when you’re on your own that is when you depend on God the most and he comes through. I just knew that at the end I had to meet somebody to pick me up from the airport at one in the morning in Nairobi. So I met up with somebody else. I like working as a team with somebody else.
Stormy Bell (03:54): That’s awesome. Now, how many days did the internal control audit take?
Anne Forcine (04:00): It takes two weeks, and there were two of us. I had gone 10 years prior, and that was a three week audit. It can be one week too. But this particular week we audited all of Africa’s internal controls, all their offices. We were given a script on Word to follow along so that there’s consistency among all of the audits. We didn’t have to invent what we were gonna ask. The questions were all there, and they had all been through the audit before so it’s fairly comprehensive, but it was easy to jump in.
Stormy Bell (04:49): Gotcha. What did you do in your downtime?
Anne Forcine (04:54): Well, there wasn’t a whole lot of downtime. When we woke up in the morning, we went to breakfast, and then we worked until about five, [then] we had dinner. Now in Nairobi, you can’t really walk around on your own. We had to have a guide, not a guide, but more of a I don’t know what you would call him, but he would take us if we wanted. Now they are near the equator, so it was pretty much six to six. Six in the morning, the sun would come up and six at night it would go down. Even in early May.
We would take walks and at night we would just hang out and read. Now on the weekends, we had free time and there was a local safari park we went to. There was a local market that one of the women took us to. A Maasai market. The Maasai are the largest tribe in Kenya. Everybody who worked in the office belonged to a tribe, their family. When you would meet them, they would say, I’m from the so-and-so tribe. They were all very educated. They all had MBAs. They were all very smart and they were all super friendly. So friendly. We went to church with them on the weekends, and we were invited into their homes on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights. Basically we just got to spend a lot of time talking to Kenyan people, which was what I had wanted to do.
Stormy Bell (06:33): Was there a language barrier?
Anne Forcine (06:34): No. They speak English and then Swahili. I think English is their main language. Most of them know English and Swahili is like their second language, or maybe the other way around. But no, they wanted to know so much about America. They wanted to get our ideas on issues in America. They were so inquisitive. A couple pastors had been in other careers before, one had started as a doctor, became a CPA, worked for the World Health Organization as a consultant, and then started his own business. He just had all these careers. He was so inquisitive and wanted to know our take on so many different issues.
Stormy Bell (07:35): That’s very cool. Now, when your work was done, your two weeks there, did you get to go on vacation or did you come straight back to the States?
Anne Forcine (07:46): Absolutely. I joined and my friend who worked with me, she joined a different safari because she was 21 and wanted to be with the young people. I wanted to be on a tour that was a little more geared towards, I guess, people that wanted a tour guide. So we went on a safari. I was a week in Kenya. I am all about the tour now. I used to be highly independent, wanted to do my own thing, but they had everything kind of really mapped out for us as far as the hotel. There was not really any security issues when we went to the different parks. The tourism there is really growing back because of the pandemic. Places really greeted us with open arms.
When we walked up to the hotels, they had hot towels for us. They had homemade juices, squeezed juices, and they were so happy to have us. They said, please be ambassadors for Kenya. Tell everybody that we’re here, we’re open and we’re safe. We saw so many animals. We were in the game parks all the time, we would go on game drives in the morning, game drives in the afternoon and you got to meet a lot of people that were from varied backgrounds and why they wanted to travel. You could talk with them. It was wonderful. Everybody there had never been to Africa and it’s still kind of unusual to go. We were just amazed at how beautiful it was and how different it was. That’s what we did.
Anne Forcine (09:39): Then I took a week and I went to Tanzania as well. I got to see Mount Kilimanjaro. I got to see the Serengeti. There is a wildebeest migration that happens every year in Africa. People go from about June to August where literally they’re in the Serengeti in Tanzania, and it’s the end of the rainy season. It’s starting to be more of a kind of a dry season and famine. The wildebeest from a couple hundred miles away can literally smell the fresh green grass in Maasai Mara, which is in Kenya. They travel millions. If you go there and you take a balloon ride, which I did, I didn’t see the wildebeest quite like this, you can see them stretch for miles and miles and miles.
They all go back to Maari, hang out there for, I don’t know, a couple months and then they go back. That’s really fascinating. The zebras go along with the wildebeest. They’re buddies. We got to see like world heritage sites, there’s something called the Ngorongoro Crater. We got to stay in some tents, semi-permanent tents they were called, they were beautiful. Full bathrooms, beautiful beds with mosquito netting. We stayed in some hotels and then we stayed in some lodges. They had the full gamut. It’s not rustic. It’s not on the ground. A lot of people think well I could never do that. You were in Jeeps that pop open and you can stand up there, hold on to bars, take pictures, have cameras and binoculars. It’s very well run, the tourism over there.
Stormy Bell (11:43): I bet you came home with lots of photos.
Anne Forcine (11:46): Oh like 3000. I culled them down to 600, but I have a lot. The tour guides, the drivers, they have to go to school, they have to go to the university, and they take hospitality and they know the animals. They were like National Geographic experts. It was so educational. They know so much. They have to be like counselors, you know, they get six people that don’t know each other in a Jeep. Everybody has different expectations, so they have to make sure everybody’s happy. They did a great job. It was really fun.
Stormy Bell (12:25): That’s awesome. Now this was a missions trip, so did you have to raise your own funding for it?
Anne Forcine (12:31): I did. To take the plane over, I had to pay for my plane flight, my lodging and food is paid for while I’m doing the trip.
Stormy Bell (12:46): Okay.
Anne Forcine (12:47): I stayed in a guest house. It was in a compound. All of the places in Nairobi, they’re big, huge gates and fencing around the property with guards, a lot of places have guards. We had a guest house in there that was really nice. For people that are interested, your airline is deductible as a contribution tax, tax wise. Anything that you put out to be able to do the job is tax deductible.
Stormy Bell (13:23): Oh, that’s good to know.
Anne Forcine (13:24): Yeah.
Stormy Bell (13:25): Very cool. All right. Anne, why do you volunteer?
Anne Forcine (13:29): Well, I feel as though I have this gift of accounting that I’ve done all these years, and I really wanted to see how I could use that in a different way. That I feel like God is calling me to different places. I wanted to do something that wasn’t just for me, even though the second half was. I wanted to get out of my comfort zone and do work for an organization that I really believe in. There are, I’m trying to think of how many languages today, like 7,500 languages that do not have a Bible translation. My organization will do that. They will raise funds to be able to translate the Bible into their language. They’ve partnered now with another big organization called Illuminations, and they have said that from 2013, it was gonna take 125 years to get every language in the whole world translated. Because they’ve been raising more money and because of technology, they’ve been able to move that timeline back within 10 years. Every language in the world will have been translated and they will have a Bible.
Stormy Bell (14:50): That’s very interesting.
Anne Forcine (14:51): They don’t usually even have anything written. Sometimes they have to invent the written language. I went to Papua New Guinea 10 years ago. They did not have written languages in the different tribes, and they have over 600 different languages that they speak on that island. It really blows your mind how many people are in the world and how many languages [there are]. Once they get a Bible that is speaking to their heart it’s so much easier for them to understand about God. I wanted to do something that I was passionate about.
Stormy Bell (15:34): Okay. Think of your experience with SIL over in Africa. Can you share a story of impact? Something that you saw during your time there that was really making a difference in the community?
Anne Forcine (15:51): Well I don’t know if it was making a difference in [the] community. It made a difference in our lives is when it comes to the weekend, and we had about 10 people we were working with in the office. My friend Catherine and I on Friday afternoon, and since she was a young 20 something, she’s like, so what do you guys have going on this weekend? What are your plans? They kind of looked at her like, well on Saturday we go grocery shopping, we do our laundry, we clean our apartment, and then on Sunday we go to church, and then we go over and visit with family and just hang out for the day. We’re like, okay, do you do anything for fun? They said, no. In America, you guys are constantly being entertained and you have to entertain and you’re so busy.
We’re like, I wish you would come and visit us. They’re like, no. You all have three jobs and you all are so busy. I’m like, well, not everybody has three jobs, but we are rather busy. They’re very content and they’re all like that. They don’t have all of the places that we have to be in America and have to do. We have to be entertained on a Friday night and a Saturday night. It was awesome to just have our little suitcase, have our camera, and just be very free to do whatever we wanted to do. That was impactful for us to consider gratitude. There was some impactful things on the actual tour that we got to see with the Maasais and within the park, and they protect their cows and the lions were coming after them. We saw the Maasai trying to go after the lion because he had killed his cow. We were watching this and it was really interesting to see their back to the basics of defending their livestock and going after the lions. And there were lions. We enjoyed seeing things that we’d only read about in books that we would never see in America. That was kind of impactful.
Stormy Bell (18:14): That’s cool. All right, I think this next question’s fun. Some people agree with me, some people don’t. Think about something that didn’t go as planned, kinda like a blooper, and what did you learn from it? What did that experience teach you?
Anne Forcine (18:33): Well I have an idea. I don’t know if it’s a big blooper, but my friend, her luggage, my luggage didn’t come for two days. Her luggage didn’t come for six days. Their market for clothes over there, they have a huge secondhand market because they love clothes that are made in Europe and in America, and they’re made so much better than even in Kenya. Most everything they wear secondhand, but we didn’t realize that. We had to get a few clothes, so we had to be driven to the market and she had to buy a few things. She had worked for Ernest Young as an auditor as an internship. She understood, you wear a very professional, very conservative jackets and white collar blouses.
Here she’s going into an audit and I’m like, no, we can just be, we can be a little more casual. She’s like I only have one pair of pants and one top. So I had these pair of pajamas that were just navy blue, like pull on cotton pants, and then a gray, kind of a cotton top and they were pajamas. I said, here, why don’t you wear these. These look okay. Nobodywill know the difference. She wore them for one or two days and finally she got her luggage on Saturday. We had been there since Sunday, and we’re like, this is amazing how little we need to live on. We could live on two blouses, and two pairs of pants. Why do we need a huge suitcase full of clothes? When we were getting ready to leave, we had a big lunch with all the people we worked with, and we told them that we had gotten her luggage. She said, yeah, I had to wear pajamas to work a couple days, and I’m sure you didn’t know. They all looked around the table and started laughing. They go, yeah, we all knew. We all knew you were wearing pajamas to work or like, you did it, but you never said anything. They’re like, yeah we know what pajamas look like and they definitely weren’t your work clothes.
Anne Forcine (20:49): We just learned a big lesson about how little we need to work. We have so much here. I think it was those kinds of things. You always had to go through checkpoints when we were going anywhere and they had to search the car and search her bags but, we just kind of went with it. So there wasn’t any really big bloopers except this poor girl didn’t have clothes for six days.
Stormy Bell (21:19): But you learned something how little that you actually need.
Anne Forcine (21:21): We kept saying that over and over again, how little we need to live. Then when her suitcase showed up, it kind of burst on her bed and she’s like, yeah, I don’t need this. I don’t need this. She had so many clothes, so many clothes. So she donated those and just said, I don’t need those.
Stormy Bell (21:41): That’s awesome. All right, Anne, we’re at the point of our conversation where you can love, just love on SIL. Just why should people check them out? Why should they get involved? Why should they look at becoming an accountant or whatever their skill is and going someplace around the world just love on them.
Anne Forcine (22:04): Well, I think I did that a little bit before. I just love the idea that this organization is dedicated to getting the Bible in everyone’s hands so that they can learn about Jesus. I love that. I’m not an evangelist, so it’s hard for me to go out and tell the world about Jesus in a way that so many other people can do. I’ve worked down in Katrina when they had the floods, and that was years ago when I was a little bit younger. I love the way I can just go. A lot of retired people do this. It’s safe and I feel like I’m contributing something. They are so grateful, so grateful that we do this because they don’t have to pay an outside firm to do it. Wycliffe Bible Translators has a good name. A lot of people in the Christian community know about them and they know about their work. Their integrity is really intact. I know that they always have more trips and yeah, I don’t know what else to say, but I really love them there.
Stormy Bell (23:21): That’s a lot, that is a lot.
Anne Forcine (23:24): They’re very organized when they do this. You’re not just thrown on a plane. Technology is so wonderful now. I mean, we can Zoom with people back home in Dallas, Texas is where their headquarters are, and you don’t feel like you’re just in the middle of nowhere anymore. Everybody has a cell, everybody has a wireless connection, so it’s a lot easier than it ever has been before. So if you have an accounting background, I did not have auditing that did not make it difficult because they have it all planned out for you. Once you’ve done it the first time, you can pretty much pick it up and do it. It was a wonderful experience. I cannot wait to do another one, I don’t think. Maybe next year we’ll see.
Stormy Bell (24:17): Okay. Well, Anne, thank you for being my guest today on The Art of Volunteering. After hearing your story, I hope that my listeners will consider how they can impact the world with their talents. You know, accounting, videography, masonry, there’s so many skills that we do in our daily lives that can make such an impact in the States or around the world. Just not to be self-limiting with.
Anne Forcine (24:51): You know, who knew that accounting could be used in a missions type of environment.
Stormy Bell (24:56): Right, right. Absolutely. All right. Thank you, my listeners. Thank you for being a part of today. Thank you, Anne.
Anne Forcine (25:28): Oh, thank you.
Stormy Bell (25:29): I welcome you back for the next episode of The Art of Volunteering. Have a great day. Bye-Bye.
Show Notes & Links
SIL International – www.sil.org
SIL International’s Facebook – www.facebook.com/SIL.International
SIL International’s X (Formerly Twitter) – www.twitter.com/silintl
SIL International’s LinkedIn – www.linkedin.com/company/sil-international
SIL International’s Instagram – www.instagram.com/sil_international
Join the FB Community: bit.ly/3tLaY1B
Join the Mailing List: bit.ly/36VmYUY