CBB's projects in Mexico are in Juarez, a city on the U.S. border, in abandoned garbage dumps where peasants who have been displaced from their ancestral places, have squatted, built homes, and sometimes acquired title to the land they live on.
Centro Santa Catalina
"With the help of God and in union with women in the struggle for justice, we the women of Centro Santa Catalina desire to present an education to ourselves, our children and others in the neighborhood in order to grow in a community of faith and hope."
Centro Santa Catalina mission statement
Compassion Beyond Borders supports the education of 25 girls at Centro Santa Catalina, located in an abandoned garbage dump in Juarez, Mexico. The Center provides a two year pre-school and an after-school tutoring program for primary school students.
The center has educated community women to be teachers in the pre-school and tutors in the Homework Help Program. Together these women help educate over two hundred children. CBB has helped to fund the education of these women.
Parents pay two dollars a month for the pre-school program, but only if they are able. The pre-school is of such high quality that local school principals actively recruit is students for their schools in preference to children from outside this slum area. The average annual cost of supporting a girl in this project is $200.
Las Hormigas Center
In a second abandoned garbage dump in Juarez, CBB funds a Montessori school for girls who are unable to attend public school. Through their specialized instruction, girls are able to regain their ability to study and learn, and to continue their education. This school has been very successful in re-habilitating distressed girls.
Also at this center, Compassion Beyond Borders sponsors non-violence training for mothers living in the commonly violent families and neighborhoods of this area. Women in this training learn how to cope with the violence in their lives and how not to perpetuate the violence in their families. The skills they learn enable them to break the cycle of violence so commonly perpetuated in garbage dump families.
The average annual cost of supporting a girl or mother in these programs is $140.
One woman's story: Wilma
When Wilma came to the former garbage dump of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico with her husband twenty years ago, they built a shack out of wood pallets and cardboard, covered by a sheet of plastic. “When it rained, more of the rain came in than stayed outside,” she describes. Wilma and her husband then built a small adobe house, making their own bricks.
Wilma’s husband drank, not sharing his income with her and their two children. With her own money earned by working in a maquilladora, Wilma added to the house. When her husband wouldn't stop drinking, she told him to leave. Some time later, he came back. “He pulled himself together, stopped drinking and began helping to support the children“, Wilma relates. She and her husband now have a “good marriage“, she says.
When Wilma came to Centro Santa Catalina, “I felt I was the most useless woman in the world,” she relates. “I have learned to be assertive and move myself ahead. I have discovered who I am--that I am worth something”. Wilma found other women at the center with the same problems she had. Now she is helping them. “I learned to express myself” in the Center's leadership class, Wilma explains.
With financial support from the center, Wilma completed her secondary schooling and is now studying for a degree in education. She taught kindergarten with a teaching certification from the Mexican government. Now, Wilma has been appointed coordinator of the Center‘s educational programs, supervising three teachers in the pre-school and six Homework Help tutors.
