It's been eight years since a Mexican mission discovered entire families living at a dumpsite near Puerto Vallarta, in the western state of Jalisca along the country's Pacific coastline. The famous resort city has a population of close to 300,000 and was once known as 'La ciudad más amigable del mundo'… 'The Friendliest City in the World.'
Friendly for many of its citizens and the thousands of tourists and Canadian retirees who reside there perhaps, but certainly not so accommodating to the hundreds of families who lived at a dump located nearby.
That's why a joint Mexican-Canadian charity organization called Families at the Dump was created. It's a project that avid readers of the Gazette will remember in past reports involving community members John and Brenda Power, and Kristy Amerongen.
The organization is now known as Families of Hope, as the dump is closed, but the group works to help fulfill the many physical, educational, medical, spiritual and emotional needs of these people. The many residents live adjacent to the area on what is called Hope Road. Families of Hope has spent years working with the dump's owner and the city to establish an apartment complex with some basic amenities to give the residents a hand up, help them get educated, learn some job and life skills, and move into the city.
The dream has come far but is still not near to realization. The challenges in doing so have been difficult, partly because they multiplied unexpectedly once the work started.
Members of the Saint City Rotary Club have spent years fundraising and taking turns travelling down to Mexico to offer their assistance in person. Several of them shared their experiences with the St. Albert Gazette during a recent group interview.
The group included Linda Perras, Ross Algar, Maryann Pelletier and Gerry Mazer.
The meaning of ‘Hope'
When the residents were still living in the dump, they had more to shoulder than just the shoddy environment.
"It was the most horrific smell that you've ever imagined in your entire life," Perras said. "You know what a dumpsite smells like? Well, these people were living there. Their kids were living there. Everybody was living there."
Because they didn't technically have a street address, none of them were actually considered Mexicans in the eyes of the government.
"They're basically personae non gratae," Algar emphasized. "They don't exist as far as the government is concerned."
They were just squatters, Perras continued.
"They weren't born at the hospital. They were born at the dump. Generation after generation after generation lived at the dump."
There were hundreds of families who earned a meagre living by recycling what they could from the place. The owner of the dump paid them modestly for the recycling materials but then turned around and charged them rent at the same time. Nobody was allowed to get ahead, to get out.
"They were living in cardboard boxes. Then when Families at the Dump got started, they started moving them off of the dump and into shanties along the dirt road going up to the dump. They called it Hope Road."
Don't be fooled by how wonderful it sounds. That was the first lesson to learn for the Rotarians, already long understood by the residents of the unpaved stretch of drive path. Hope Road sounds like a gorgeous road, Pelletier said, with an anecdote about the night it rained.
"It was pretty much a river out of the dump," she scoffed, adding a humorous but sober note. "We were in a little, tiny cab. I didn't think we were going to make it through the potholes. It looks fine dry, but wet … a whole other road."
Since the dump closed a few years ago, the 450 or so families were forced outside of the site. 'Hope' might be a smelly, wet road to live on but it's a road nonetheless. That in and of itself meant something very, very important.
It provided a street address.
New possibilities, new problems
Families of Hope had been working to establish a new housing facility. The structure had been built along with a community centre that would help change the way of life of the new residents of Hope Road.
The organization first got everyone registered as citizens of Mexico using their new street address. Once they were citizens of Mexico, they could get immunized. Once they got immunized, the kids could then go to school. Education was always the key to breaking the cycle of poverty, but the Rotarians and the organization had an education or two of their own to face.
You can't just snap your fingers and magically move hundreds of people from their long-term home in a dump into the real world where they live in apartments and go to school and have jobs.
"It's a big community dynamic of need," Perras expressed.
For one, families who wanted to live in the housing complex had to take a course on how to maintain a household. They would still have to pay rent too.
The transitional housing facility had rooms for 70 families. Each apartment is furnished with a queen-sized bed in the master bedroom, two sets of bunk beds, a bathroom with a shower and a kitchen suite, a couch and a deck. It will eventually house 500 people and give them running water, electricity and modern appliances.
"Once they move in to the new apartment building, they've got a really good solid footing for changing the next generation. There's still lots of stumbling blocks," Perras said.
Saint City Rotary itself raised $25,000 for this homegrown international aid effort, a figure that was bolstered by matching grants from Rotary International and the Morinville club. They also paired their efforts along with a local club in Mexico. Altogether, they accumulated more than $80,000. With that money, they furnished and equipped four rooms plus the kitchen, the daycare, the kindergarten program, and the teen centre.
The idea is to give those first families a toehold of stability while they get educated and learn trades so that they can progress in their lives before they then move out to other accommodations, allowing space in the apartment complex to be filled by other families from the dump.
"The rooms are pretty amazing, above and beyond what we thought we could do," Pelletier exclaimed. "When you're planning it and trying to stretch a budget, and the list keeps growing. We had no idea if we could complete what was on the list and what was asked for. It's pretty amazing, when we left, what we accomplished. They have all the tools. If they're willing to change, the tools are there."
What it doesn't have is the one thing that most defines modern civilization: a sewer line. The Rotarians explained that the Mexican government insists that it's the community's responsibility to pay the 500 million pesos to connect the sewage pipes underground, a project cost that translates to about $42 million Canadian.
"When we left they still hadn't worked out who was going to pay the utilities," Perras added.
While that detail is still being ironed out, the community centre is thankfully operational. It includes a large, multi-use building for special events plus an industrial kitchen. That kitchen, as a side note, was also equipped with the assistance of Morinville Rotarians including the Interact Club, the Morinville High School chapter of Rotary.
It's a fine kitchen and very well suited to its intended purpose.
"Most restaurants would be jealous," Mazer noted.
Perras elaborated.
"When we were equipping the commercial kitchen, all they hoped for was a juicer so they could take the rotten fruit and still turn it into juice so the kids could get their vitamins. They asked for a bean pot and a rice cooker. We left them with a commercial kitchen to feed 2,000. All stainless steel appliances – commercial grade. They have enough pots to cook and feed 2,000 people any meal they could dream of … if they get the food to put in the pots."
The nearby Paradise Village is a nearby hotel that frequently accommodates 'voluntourists,' out-of-town travellers who pay to offer their assistance at the community centre. That money, in turn, is used to buy food to be cooked to serve to the hungry masses.
The centre also has offices for medical, dental and mental health support, a food bank, a co-op store (that provides low cost options for families to buy their necessities of life) and an education building to house the daycare and the teen program, along with physical education, pre-kindergarten, computer and English classes.
"They're just born into it and didn't know any different. This centre will probably change that. They'll see what's out there and what life can hold," Mazer said.
The objective was to get all of the kids to school but they had never been to school before. The organization responded by starting a program to help them prepare.
The school itself had its own crisis when so many children started attending classes for the first time in their lives.
In order to attend school, they had to have their immunizations, they needed shoes and had to have breakfast. In order to get into the teen centre in the afternoon, the kids needed to have attended school that day.
Accomplishing that one time doesn't ensure success the next either. Not by a long shot.
Perras remarked on the events of the new start at school.
"The very next day all the dump truck drivers came running in, saying that there's babies lying in the dump pile. Why? If you send the older kids to school, there's no one to watch the babies."
That's when the daycare was established on an impromptu reaction to exigent circumstances.
"(Every program they created) wasn't a choice; it's out of necessity," Perras continued.
Then there was the other issue of nutrition. If they go to school, they have fewer hours to find food. They soon found themselves hungry again.
"A lot of these kids weren't eating. Having the daycare and kindergarten there was also essential because the five-year-olds weren't going to school because they were babysitting the babies. When they were living at the dump, [the parents] would just leave them and go to work. Somebody had to look after the kids all day.
There was still the issue of food. If kids are in class then they're not scavenging and scrounging for food as they otherwise would, and so they soon found themselves hungry. This soon led to skipped classes.
That's not all. The teen centre is there mainly to get the kids off the street, Perras explained.
"There's one streetlight in their little area and they're losing kids. The drug cartels come by and just steal the boys at 12, 13. They're never seen again. When we got there, they had lost four or five boys that summer."
Teens have a very tough time getting through high school but they just need to become employable. That's when they decided the centre could use some sewing machines. Give the kids something fun to do while learning a valuable job skill at the same time.
"We really looked at what we were doing: how can we change the future? I think the teen centre is going to have the biggest impact, just getting the kids through high school and getting them off of the streets."
The never-ending road?
The work continues but for the local service club members, it's time to find another project to devote their efforts and energies to.
"Right now, from our club's perspective, this project is over, other than we'd all like to go back and see how it is," Algar admitted. "I think it changed our lives … as much as it changed theirs. It's such a shock to see what they didn't have, how they lived. To be perhaps part of changing the cycle was just really, really rewarding for all of us."
Families of Hope offers a school sponsorship program plus other educational supports that members of the global public at large can offer their financial assistance to. People can learn more by visiting www.familiasdelaesperanza.org.
The Saint City Rotary Club meets on Tuesdays at the St. Albert Inn at 5:15 p.m. The club is set to host Morinville Rotary member Kathy Sandmaier and members of the Morinville High School's Rotary Interact Club who recently went down to offer their own assistance with the project. That presentation will take place at 5:15 p.m. on Aug. 26 at the St. Albert Inn. Members of the public are invited to attend.
Saint City Rotary is also hosting its annual charity golf classic next Thursday. Breakfast is at 6:30 a.m. with a shotgun start at 8. Details can be found on the club's website at www.saintcityrotary.org.
