WE ARE PRIVILEGED TO SERVE CHRIST IN THE CHILDREN AND TO BRING HOPE TO THEIR FAMILIES
The Oaxaca Education Fund invites you to participate or to donate to the Annual 5K Walk on March 30th, 2019 in Penasquitos Canyon!
DONATIONS MAY BE ONE TIME OR MONTHLY, WITH YOUR CREDIT CARD VIA PAYPAL OR BY CHECK. ALL DONATIONS ARE TAX-DEDUCTIBLE. PLEASE GO TO THE DONATE PAGE.
This is one of our biggest fundraisers of the year and an excellent opportunity to catch up with many of our dear friends who served the migrant workers in Rancho Penasquitos for so many years! Thank you for your solidarity with the poor and for your passion to keep the children of the Sierra Mixteca in school!
Photos courtesy of Martha Martin and Michael Akong
OUR PROJECTED BUDGET FOR 2019: $32,000.
- 1500 packets of school supplies for all the children K – 12 in 5 villages
- Biannual assistance to 125 high school students
- Biannual partial scholarships to 15 university students
- Monthly food stipends to 33 orphaned and disabled children
- Administrative costs are zero. Volunteers staff all aspects of our program
FIVE VILLAGES
- San Jorge Nuchita
- San Juan Piñas
- San Marcos Zochiquilazala
- San Jorge Rio Frijol
- Santos Reyes Zochiquilazala
WHY OAXACA?
The Sierra Mixteca is in the southern state of Oaxaca, Mexico, at 8000-9000 feet, incredibly beautiful, but isolated, and forgotten by the government. The Mixteco people are an indigenous group with their own language, known as the People of the Clouds. For decades they have come to work in agriculture in the U.S., especially California, to make a better living for their families, in the absence of paid work in their villages where there is only subsistence farming.
BEGINNING THE OAXACA EDUCATION FUND
The Oaxaca Education Fund is the natural outgrowth of Migrant Outreach at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic Church, which started in 1985 to attend to the spiritual, educational, and material needs of the Mexican migrant workers living and working in the fields in McGonigle Canyon, Rancho Penasquitos, San Diego, California. Over the years, until the end of agriculture in Carmel Valley in 2009, we had up to 120 dedicated volunteers from the parish on the weekend at Mass in the canyon, taking turns serving a hot meal. We made fast friends with many of the men who attended. When most of them returned to Mexico or left to work in other areas, we were concerned about the struggles the families in the villages were having to find the funds to keep their children in school. Their education and future were in danger!
In 2011, the migrant men from the Sierra Mixteca who were still in Rancho Penasquitos recommended that we ask the village authorities if yearly school supplies would help the families keep their children in school. In 2012 the Oaxaca Education Fund (OEF) began, with supplies for one village with 750 children.
For the past seven years (2012-2019) OEF has made an annual mission trip. The school supplies distribution has grown to 5 villages.
A total of 1500 children and young people are provided with supplies. A generous benefactor in Guadalajara (Editores Montenegro) provides workbooks for the hundreds of children in primary school!
The volunteers go to Oaxaca for 9 days in August. We buy supplies, pack them with the students, & distribute them over 5 days. We visit the orphans and other families, and meet with the students, parents and teachers. We attend Mass or prayer services. Two volunteer acupuncturists treat over 140 patients in the villages over those 5 days.
GROWTH OF THE PROGRAM
2014: We began to help with high school student’s biannual fees in 2 villages, to encourage them to stay in school. The total number is 125 this year.
2014: We began to assist recently orphaned children with a small monthly food stipend: a 4 year-old girl whose parents had both died in a car accident, and another family of 5 children whose mother had died of cancer, and whose father is incarcerated. Now there are 33 children enrolled. Their stories of grief, loss and deprivation are heartbreaking; their resilience is inspiring. We are honored to help out a little with the hardships they and their grandparents face, to give them a future filled with hope and love.
2017: We began to give partial university scholarships twice a year, to 15 young people. Two have graduated, a nurse and a teacher, and 15 are still in process. The cost averages about $500 each per year.
2018: We took reading glasses for the women embroiderers in one village, so they could continue their art and pass it down to their children. Many had stopped their embroidery art when presbyopia set in. Their excitement was wonderful to behold!
