Covenant House youth help Tijuana children prepare for school

Photo essay by Ellie Hidalgo

Two vans and a truck filled with boxes of back packs, school supplies, donated sneakers and clothing wind their way up hilly dirt roads to get to a group of special kids in Tijuana.

These are the children who live near and around one of the city's open dump sites, and the people reaching out to them this cloudy Saturday August morning are Los Angeles Covenant House teens and young adults, who themselves have known personally what it's like to be young and not have a good home or a home at all.

A dozen youth and six staff, volunteers and interns arrive at a small health clinic next to the neighborhood Colonia Fausto Gutierrez where they unload their cargo and begin intensive set-up for an afternoon party filled with balloons, face painting, arts and crafts, lunch and the distribution of school supplies and clothing. For many of these 130 impoverished Mexican children, the donated items mean they will be prepared to go back to school with notebooks, folders, pencils, pens, crayons and markers.

"I've never done anything like this before," says a wide-eyed Louis Angel, 22, as he surveys the poorly constructed homes perched atop a smelly dump site and prepares the food for the children and their mothers. "This makes me want to help more and more and more."

Although most of the teens and young adults don't know any Spanish, they connect with the kids through play, face painting and sharing food. A group of giggling girls teaches tall lanky Tommy Ferrtaw how to pronounce their names which he practices in exaggerated tones, intensifying the girls' laughter.

"I like making somebody else smile," observes the 20-year-old from St. Louis, called "Country" by his L.A. friends.

Covenant House teens and young adults end up homeless or choose to run away for different reasons --- poverty, abuse, broken homes, family drug addictions or their own, arguments with parents, getting in trouble with the law. The Hollywood complex offers some 100 youth a safe place to sleep as well as counseling, case management and job placement services. Religious Sister of Charity Margaret Farrell coordinates spiritual ministries which includes service trips like this one to Tijuana.

The youth meet several nuns from the religious order Servants of St. Margarita, Maria and the Poor who have risked the poor air quality created by the dump site to construct a small health clinic and promote health education throughout the community.

Says Covenant House resident and high school student Paquel Saunders: "After this you start to look at everything different."

A mother named Jacinta said she scavenges through the dump site regularly to find discarded clothes and shoes which she can wash and resell. "You have to make a lot of sacrifices so your kids can study," said the mother of three as she tries to earn enough for her children's school needs.

The arrival of visitors from Los Angeles makes the burden of poverty a little lighter for these Mexican families --- and for these U.S. youth who are stepping outside their own struggles to give someone else a hand.