Passing goodness on

Resilience is the ability to find hope in the face of adversity, to see opportunity in the midst of challenge and adapt accordingly.

Resilient people don’t dwell on negativity. Despite the darkness that sometimes shrouds humanity, they can still see the goodness in the world that is worth fighting for.

This is the kind of resiliency that Mai Whelan possesses.

Whelan first began learning about resiliency when she was an 8-year-old child and her family had to flee their home country of Vietnam. That experience shaped who she became. She learned what it was to do without, to survive in the face of poverty and displacement and fear of the unknown. Despite overwhelming circumstances, she encountered enough good along the way that she also learned the power of hope and compassion.

Now at 56, Whelan is retired from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, she’s a decorated former enlisted petty officer in the U.S. Navy and the first winner of the Netflix reality competition series “Squid Game: The Challenge.”

And as a longtime Unbound sponsor, she’s making it her life’s purpose to put good — in equal amounts of hope and compassion — back out into the world by supporting other marginalized and vulnerable individuals on their own journeys toward brighter futures.

Her reasoning is both simple and profound.

“There is goodness in the world,” Whelan said. “We should each pass good on to one another. That’s how I think humanity should work.”

Motivated by memories of the pain of survival

Over the course of a decade of sponsoring through Unbound, Whelan has walked in solidarity alongside no less than eight sponsored individuals as they navigated their paths out of poverty, including seven children and one elder.

Whelan, who now makes her home in North Carolina, makes every effort to forge personal relationships with her sponsored friends, in addition to her financial support. She has taken four trips abroad with Unbound — including three Unbound Awareness Trips and one individual sponsor visit — and has met with some of her sponsored friends in person multiple times.

Her longing to alleviate the suffering of those less fortunate comes from a genuine place of understanding — an empathy so strong that, at just 16 years old, she donated her first paycheck to UNICEF to help feed the poor.

“I knew what my family went through and how we came out of it,” Whelan said. “I want the same for every poor kid that lives in that situation. I want to give them inspiration and an avenue to be self-sufficient.

“I know how they feel; I can feel their pain of survival.”

Whelan remembers her own pain of survival all too well, of rushing with her family to the airfield for evacuation during the fall of Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, in 1975. She remembers the horror of staring down the barrel of a scared soldier’s M-16 rifle during the chaos and the uncertainty of not knowing if she would ever see some of her family members again. Her father, a police officer and journalist, was captured and detained by the Viet Cong, while five of her older siblings were over the age limit to board the evacuation planes.

The event — which marked the end of the Vietnam War — saw some 7,000 South Vietnamese refugees evacuated and eventually brought to resettlement centers in the U.S.

Whelan and her family members spent 18 months at one of those resettlement centers in Pennsylvania, where they acclimated to the colder seasons and learned the English language and culture before they were matched with an organization that further helped the family adjust to their new lives. Eventually many of Whelan’s other family members were able to emigrate to the U.S. — including her father — and the family was reunited.

Though this was a traumatic time of her life, Whelan, ever the optimist, saw the good in the situation.

“The trauma I experienced … opened up in me a whole new world of gratitude to the U.S. for helping us get out of the country and giving us a home in the land of opportunity where anything can happen if someone is given a chance,” Whelan said.

At the age of 18, Whelan enlisted in the U.S. Navy, where she served for 20 years and earned an array of prestigious military awards. She eventually worked for, and retired from, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security as an immigration adjudicator.

Despite all of this, Whelan’s proudest accomplishment in life is that she learned to keep the perspective of a “glass half full,” seeing opportunity in life’s challenges and rising above them.

Inspiring others to rise above the challenges

All it takes is one sponsor to have a world of impact on the life of a sponsored child or elder living in poverty.

For Whelan, sponsoring individuals who live in poverty in developing countries gives her “a sense of doing God’s work” and the self-satisfaction of knowing that she’s playing a part in helping a child live a better life. But, traveling with Unbound to visit with her sponsored friends opened her up to a whole new level of awareness.

In 2017, while on an Unbound Awareness Trip to Uganda to visit one of her sponsored friends, Whelan encountered Jane, a 5-year-old orphan girl, on the street, eating pineapple with her elderly grandmother.

“She had an injury on her ankle and was starving,” Whelan said. “I could not walk away.”

Whelan, with the help of Unbound staff, took the child to a health clinic and had her wound treated. She took the grandmother to a market and bought the family food.

That day, Whelan became Jane’s sponsor.

For the last seven years, she’s ensured that Jane and her grandmother would never have to know the pain of survival again. According to Unbound Uganda staff, with Whelan’s support, Jane, now 12, attends a good boarding school where she’s diligent with her grades. Her family was able to install a water tank at their home to access clean drinking water and they now enjoy three full meals a day, among other benefits.

“Every child has potential,” Whelan said. “If I could have the biggest arm to gather all the kids that I saw on the awareness trip that I could, I would.”

And she did just that on her first Unbound Awareness Trip to Guatemala in 2015 to visit her sponsored friend Abner, who was 7 at the time. By the time she departed, Whelan had decided to also sponsor Abner’s then 4-year-old brother, Denilson, who was on the Unbound waiting list.

In February 2024, 10 years after sponsoring Abner, Whelan, along with her husband, Jay, returned to see the family as part of an Unbound individual sponsor visit. Whelan was proud to see how her support has helped the family of six move forward.

“They’ve been able to stay in school,” said Whelan, who spent time touring the city with the family and talking with them about their lives. “They were able to save money and their mom started a business, which has made them more self-sufficient.”

Abner, now 17, said Whelan’s visit showed him how important he is to her.

“My favorite part of the day was seeing her get out of the car,” he said. “My godmother [Whelan] means everything to me; in one word, she is important to me.”

Passing goodness on with the help of a new challenge

More than a year ago now, Whelan faced yet another, albeit different, kind of challenge, but one that she wholeheartedly accepted.

She was chosen to be one of 456 players on the inaugural season of Netflix’s, “Squid Game: The Challenge,” a reality competition show inspired by the series “Squid Game.” In the competition, players put their skills to the test against each other.

Over the course of the two-and-a-half weeks of filming in London, Whelan — known as Player 287 — bonded with key participants and used her strategic thinking and military training skills to claim victory at the show’s conclusion.

Whelan said every step of the game was stressful and she often felt like “throwing in the towel,” but the friendships she made with the other participants motivated her to keep pushing forward.

“To play in the game, there is some required strategy, to think fast, and that’s what I did,” Whelan said. “You have to be strong because one moment of weakness, you can be gone.”

The 10-episode competition was Netflix’s most-watched show of 2023, with more than 31.5 million viewers.

With the attention that has come with winning the game, Whelan has stayed focused on plotting her next steps with purpose — putting even more good into the world.

“I believe in causes that aim to improve our society,” said Whelan, whose three passion areas are global poverty eradication, helping animals and improving the environment.

A little over four months since the finale of “Squid Game: The Challenge” has Whelan writing her memoir and preparing to host an upcoming documentary-style video series, called “Mother Mai,” where she will travel across the globe highlighting nonprofits that align with her values and delving into profound human experiences centering on her three passion areas.

Whelan has also sponsored another child through Unbound, an 8-year-old boy from Peru.

"I hope to achieve the goals in life that I want by helping others and by helping to make the world a better place,” Whelan said. “It’s a big task but I want to tackle it one day at a time, one animal at a time, one person at a time.”

And she’ll keep putting good into the world by conquering challenges with the same resiliency she has shown throughout her life — the kind of resiliency she has in common with Unbound’s families working to move beyond poverty — and with the same philosophy born from experience.

“No matter what life throws at you, you can cry about it, but you have to stay strong,” she said. “Keep climbing until you reach the peak, and you can say, ‘I’ve done it.’”

Regional reporter Oscar Tuch and other Unbound staff contributed photos and information for this story.