Volunteers Help Mexico Day Care
 Theresa Hogue - Gazette-Times
| | At Casa de los Angeles in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, volunteers are essential to running the day care center, which serves young children of single mothers. Here, Jake Taskay, 16, from Illinois, helps 5-year-old Miriam with her alphabet. (Theresa Hogue/Gazette-Times) |
San Miguel de Allende, Guanjuato — It’s almost impossible to see 16-year-old Jake Taskay from under the pile of children who have leapt on him. You can just make out a mop of fair hair behind the waving arms and giggling faces.
A few days ago, Jake firmly told the other high schoolers in his church youth group that he was not good with children. Now, he said with a sheepish grin, he’s learned something new about himself. Children love him, and he doesn’t mind them so much.
“I like it,” he said, as he helped 5-year-old Miriam struggle over her crayon-written alphabet. “I’m not very good at Spanish, but I try.”
Jake and six other members of the Cross of Glory Lutheran Church youth group near Chicago are volunteering a week of their time at Casa de los Angeles, a day care center for the children of single mothers in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Along with their adult leaders, the teens are teaching in classrooms, playing with kids in the center’s courtyard, and even pitching in with manual labor, such as pouring cement to repair a broken floor.
Casa de los Angeles depends on volunteers to operate, and has hosted students from Oregon State University, who came to San Miguel de Allende through an internship program operated by the state university system.
The Illinois Lutheran teens and their youth leaders held a major fund-raiser to make their trip, raising enough money to pay for transportation, room and board, and even trinkets and postcards to send to those who supported them. They have enough money left over to give a donation to the nonprofit when they leave.
“Our congregation kept giving and giving and giving,” said group leader Dan Murtaugh, whose wife and daughter also accompanied him to San Miguel.
Cross of Glory has long-standing ties with Casa de Los Angeles, explained the organization’s founder, Donna Quathamer. It was a parishioner’s $10,000 gift that got the project off the ground.
In 2000, Quathamer, a campus minister at Lewis University outside Chicago, was trying to find a way to settle in Mexico and devote herself to improving the lives of women. She had made many trips to Mexico to participate in volunteer work, and fell in love with the country and the people.
“Each time I came I felt like I should stay,” she said. So she started thinking about where she should settle, and what kind of work she should do.
She finally decided that San Miguel de Allende in the state of Guanajuato was small enough that she could live comfortably, and had a population that could use her help. She began talking to women she met, including those selling goods on the street, working in markets or cleaning houses, and asked them what they needed to improve their lives.
Overwhelmingly, the response of single mothers was that they needed a safe place to leave their young children while they were working. Quathamer discovered the women often locked their children in their homes when they went to work, depending on the 5-year-olds to watch the infants and toddlers.
Once Quathamer knew what was needed, she began looking for a building to start a day care center, and in June 2000, she found an abandoned restaurant that would be the right size and location. The owner agreed that if she paid a $10,000 down payment, she could have a year to raise the rest of the money for the building, but when Quathamer flew home to Illinois, she wasn’t sure where she’d find $10,000, let alone the remaining $140,000.
That was when she felt the first miracle occurred. On her home answering machine was a message from Kelly Fryer, former pastor of Cross of Glory Lutheran Church. A parishioner had heard about Quathamer’s day care project, and wanted to donate $10,000 to the cause.
“Miracles happen here,” Quathamer said firmly.
By September, she had moved to San Miguel to begin work on the center, and by March 2001 the doors were open. Now, the day care center serves 52 single mothers and 73 children, and employs a staff of nine local women, including teachers, a cook and an educational coordinator. Most of the staff members are also mothers of children in the program.
Quathamer’s business partner is Casa de los Angeles director Miguel Hernandez, who was born in San Miguel and left a career as the chief financial officer for Kellogg in Queretero to direct the project after his wife passed away. Hernandez helps Quathamer bridge cultural gaps and is essential to the success of the program.
“I couldn’t be here without him,” she said.
The center is free to single mothers, and is open only to those who have restricted financial means. Many work cleaning hotel rooms or selling food in the streets. Most were abandoned by their husbands or boyfriends, many of whom went to the United States to work, and never came back.
The mothers must volunteer one hour per day that their children attend the program, and once a month, they participate in a “mom’s meeting,” where they discuss issues including nutrition, health, discipline and other topics related to raising a family.
OSU connection
Casa de los Angeles depends on financial donations, 95 percent of which come from outside Mexico, as well as a rotating staff of volunteers, including youth groups like the Cross of Glory, and university students, including a few from OSU.
According to Rob Thurston, IE3 Global Internships regional director for the Oregon University System, university students have the opportunity to participate in social service programs and other projects across Mexico, including many in San Miguel de Allende and Morelia, Michoacan.
“We’ve sent 400 students from Oregon State University around the world,” Thurston said.
The program pairs students with programs in their field of interest, and specializes the internship programs to the benefit of both the students and the organizations that receive them. They participate for as little time as a school quarter to as long as a year, and remain enrolled at their home institutions while they’re participating in the internship projects.
Thanks to a recent donation of land, Quathamer said, they are adding a new day care center in San Miguel, which will include a medical and dental center to serve the families who attend Casa de los Angeles. Groundbreaking is expected this September on the new branch. There is currently a wait list of 50 families hoping to join Casa de los Angeles, and the new center will be able to serve those families.
Additionally, the center has started a new project aimed at helping families who rent to buy property and build their own homes. What started as a way to keep the children of single mothers safe and happy, has branched into a program that will make families more financially secure, and has opened up new possibilities for mothers struggling to survive.
Quathamer believes the program is succeeding because she didn’t come in with a preconceived notion of what local women needed. She asked, she listened and then she found a way to make it happen.
“It was something they were asking for.”
Theresa Hogue writes feature stories for the Gazette-Times. She can be contacted at theresa.hogue@lee.net. |
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