Helped evacuate hundreds of Vietnamese orphans at the end of the Vietnam War. She adopted three of these, all girls, in 1976: Nguyet Baty, Ba-Nhi Mai and Kim Thuy. The eldest, Ngyuet, who is part African American and part Vietnamese, has three children (one named Ina). In the made-for-television movie
The Children of An Lac (1980) (in which all three of Balin's daughters appeared),
Shirley Jones starred as real-life Red Cross volunteer Betty Tisdale, who along with Balin, rescued 219 orphans right before the fall of Saigon. Tisdale and her own husband, Patrick, adopted five Vietnamese girls from An Lac and continued to raise funds for An Lac from their home base in Ft. Benning and Columbus, Georgia.
