My daughter Sara, who is 12, was emotionally prepared for a week without her favorite food, Caesar salad. We were headed for Chihuahua, Mexico, on a church mission trip, and Sara knew uncooked vegetables would be off-limits.
“Do they have Nutella?” she asked. Sorry.
We didn’t worry about Sara wasting away. If she ate nothing but rice, beans and tortillas for a week, that would leave her better off than many of the children we intended to serve.
Casa Hogar Misericordia is a children’s home on the outskirts of the city of Chihuahua. Its founders, Fidel and Mariana Rubio, call it an orphanage, but most of the kids, ages 5 to 17, aren’t really orphans.
Some are street kids, some are neglected or abused, some come out of foster homes or the justice system. Some have been kicked out of other children’s homes. Many are brought to Casa Hogar by parents who are too destitute to feed them.
They’ve been through a lot for people who haven’t been on Earth for very long.
A number of Colorado churches have connected with CHM over the years, helping financially and sending down teams to build and repair buildings, teach and entertain the children.
Our group included people from Trinity Presbyterian Church in Arvada, Grace Evangelical Free Church in Longmont and Church of the Hills in Evergreen, plus five University of Colorado students and 10 children ranging in ages from 4 to 15.
We knew that Casa Hogar had weathered a few tough months. It snowed four times in Chihuahua last winter. The headcount swelled from 50 children to more than 90. Construction interrupted their water service for two weeks. The propane tank and the bank account both went dry.
An American businessman donated a trailer full of food that is sitting in El Paso waiting for Fidel to finish the paperwork to prove that Casa Hogar is a nonprofit. In the interim, someone has to drive the 250 miles from Chihuahua and can transport only half a pickup load at a time, at a cost of $200 in gas. It’s expensive to be poor.
But we were met with warmth and hospitality. Every day, the kitchen ladies, Martha and Elida, made us lunch – quesadillas from handmade tortillas and tangy local cheese, burritos filled with picadillo (ground beef and onions) or refried beans. Our second evening in Chihuahua, Fidel’s mother prepared our dinner: tangy lime agua fresca from a glass barrel and the most flavorful chicken mole I have ever eaten. Another night, Fidel’s sister made chiles rellenos fried in a batter as soft as silk.
Even the packaged food – Ricanela cinnamon grahams and bottled Cokes – tasted better in Mexico.
A study in contrasts
The city of Chihuahua has a great deal of industry and some prosperous residents. One night a friend of the orphanage made us a reservation at Las Vitrales, which turned out to be a lavish Cantonese restaurant serving tasty spareribs and moo goo gai pan. Ordering Chinese food in Spanish created cognitive dissonance, but not as much as we experienced 12 hours later when the contrast between our table groaning with leftovers and the reality of life for many Mexican families could not have been sharper.
The Rubios have a second children’s home in La Junta, about two hours west of Chihuahua in the Sierra Madre. Before we visited the orphanage, Mariana took us to meet “some friends” from the Tarahumara indigenous tribe. In a dirt courtyard, two women were heating water for laundry on an open fire. It took me a second to realize that the pile of wood next to them was actually their house.
Five or six people lived in a shack that most Coloradans wouldn’t store their lawnmower in. Built of scrap pine and lined with cardboard, it had a tin stove for heat and plank beds. An open carton of Jumex mango juice and a jar of Nescafé were the only food in evidence. La Junta had received as much as 10 centimers of snow last winter, Mariana said. “Muy dificil. Muy dificil.”
My children have visited historic homestead shanties that looked like that. “People are living here, in 2007,” I reminded them.
Later we showed a movie and served palomitas – popcorn – and soda to 120 kids and adults in the sawmill village of San Juanito. Then we visited another Tarahumara family that lives in a cave by the side of the road. A pig wandered outside the cave house, where “HUELCOME” was scratched into the rocks next to the door.
All this reality was tough on the kids in our group. Ten-year-old Amelia Faraco-
Hadlock cried. My son Mark, 15, retreated to the van and fell asleep.
Sara stopped complaining about the food.
But not for long.
“Is that a pig head?” Sara asked. We were helping prepare the La Junta house for the wedding of a staff member. Reyna had been one of the first children Fidel and Mariana took in. They found her as a toddler, sleeping on a pile of trash, looked after by her 8-year-old sister.
Now she is 21, marrying an adorable young man named Carlos, and Fidel and Mariana pulled out all the stops. Part of the barn had been cleaned out and transformed into a reception hall with pink tablecloths and an elaborate set of cakes connected with little staircases. The American guys were building a platform for the wedding service.
Mariana had e-mailed, “Can you bring a wedding dress, size 5?” And Lilly Croke, one of our team members, found a perfect dress in Evergreen.
In the garage, a man with an enormous knife carved up a whole pig. Two cauldrons fired by propane tanks were loaded with chunks of pork simmering slowly into carnitas and pieces of skin sizzling in deep fat to make chicharrones. And the ears were sticking up out of the trash can.
“Not eating that,” Sara said.
All the kids from Chihuahua arrived on a rickety bus with “Tenemos la Palabra” (We Have the Word) written in the dust on the back window. I had wondered about the wisdom of this move until I watched them watching
Reyna stand at the altar in her beautiful dress. She had been one of them.
How do you save the world? One little girl, one busload of kids, one quesadilla at a time.
Lisa Everitt is a freelance writer who lives in Arvada. Contact her at lisaeveritt@comcast.net.
The details
You can find out more about Casa Hogar Misericordia, children’s homes in the city of Chihuahua and the Sierra Madre, at the website of Bandera Road Community Church of San Antonio, Texas, one of the congregations that supports CHM: casahogar.brcc
.com. Or contact Tom Olschner, group leader at Trinity Presbyterian Church in Arvada, at olschners@ecentral.com.
