WHITING – Sarah McCabe, who has spent two summers working in an orphanage in southern Romania, is heading back for more of the same.

This time she is planning to spend two years there.

The Whiting woman, 22, graduated last spring from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va.

The college is quite unlike the environment she is moving into. And she says she knows what’s ahead.

She flies out today from Boston, her departure already delayed twice this spring as she scrambled to piece together financing for the project.

“I just feel that this is the right thing for me to do,” McCabe said. “I prayed about this decision, and I also have my parents’ affirmation that it’s the right thing to do.”

McCabe anticipates homesickness, but she won’t be far from e-mail. The apartment where she will stay is wired for the Internet. The program for which she is working has its own Web site, www.heart2heartint.org.

McCabe is going as a missionary with Heart to Heart International Ministries, a 10-year-old nonprofit organization started by a California couple.

About 150 students and others join the ministry each summer for work in the Romanian orphanages, as McCabe first did. Even though conditions were trying, McCabe has found the program rewarding.

After arriving in Bucharest, the capital, she will travel to the southern town of Alexandria, about the size of Machias. While working daily in the orphanage, she will help with a long-term goal of developing a transitional house for young women who grow too old for the orphanage.

“They may have basic, basic schooling, but they haven’t got any skills,” McCabe said. “We want to help them be able to work, rather than be forced out on the street. They don’t know anything about life in the real world.”

McCabe, who majored in linguistics, discovered the program when attending a missions conference organized by Intervarsity Christian Fellowship,

“I wasn’t thinking about Romania or Eastern Europe at all,” she said. “But I saw this tiny booth and read their material. They were pushing the summer teams.”

Now comes her longer commitment, for two years.