Happy New Year FOPPERS

PNN Pimpollo News Network

01 07 2011

Happy New Year!!!

Dear Friends of Pimpollo Board, Donors, and other FOP Insiders,

We have just completed another amazing year...the 21^st year since my first trip to Oaxaca and Mexico City with Northwest Medical Teams, and March 10^th of the coming year will complete our 11^th year since our first FOP team trip to Pimpollo. By the summer of this coming year we will have Friends of Pimpollo Team number #50!!!

We now serve over 500 impoverished kids and families. I think by the end of 2011 we will have 30 students going to college in our Education Scholarship programs. We are helping out eight schools in the Vicente Guerrero area and we continue to love and support the Pimpollo community in every way we can.

We are very close to those we serve. We know them, we visit them in their homes, we read to them and hold them in our laps. We go to school with them, we eat meals with them, we stay with them, we attend their church services with them, their first communions, and their weddings. We laugh with them, we have traveled with them, and at times we have cried with them.

From the day of the formation of Friends of Pimpollo as a 501c3 Charitable organization we decided on the following five words to describe our VISION:

We are a VOLUNTEER organization. You can add to that “intern.” I am happy to say that we remain a volunteer/intern organization. What that means is a lot of you have put in long hard hours to make this work so 90% plus of our donors contributions go to our projects. Thank you FOPPERS!!! You are amazing. I don’t know how long we can continue to exist as a volunteer/intern organization before we run a handful of volunteers into the ground! Time and future financing will tell the tale.

We are a very PERSONAL organization. We are not a “send money and monitor the results” non-profit. We are a “to know them is to love them” group and we know all of them. We love being with these people we serve and knowing them really motivates us because they are warm, wonderful, fun, and funny and oh so sweet...kind and very humble. They are our teachers.

INCLUSIVE. We are certainly not exclusive. We include members of many different traditions that can practice their own spirituality by helping the very poor through FOP. All who want to serve by serving the poor in a kind and loving way are more than welcome.

RESPECTFUL. We are respectful of all we encounter and the different cultures we work in. Because we respect them we are able to learn from them.

THANKFUL. We appreciate our donors, volunteers, and all the lessons we learn from those we serve. We thank God for the opportunity we have to know and be with these wonderful kids and families. We see it as an incredible privilege.

So these are the five words that direct FOP: Volunteer, Personal, Inclusive, Respectful, and Thankful.

Here is an update: It may be lengthy but I think it is better than yet another meeting. You are all very busy always and especially at this time of year!

1. Matching Funds: We have $16,500 in matching funds that came primarily from the organization of my amazing fraternity brothers, called Our Brothers Keepers. We have donations to match what we call the “OBK Funds” that now exceed $18,000 and more to come. Total take is over $35,000. Without the match I think we would have ended up with something like $10-12,000 from our year end appeal letter.

2. Major Donor Campaign: I am writing up our major donor plan. We will be discussing it at our Development Committee meeting next week. January.

3. Busses: We (Marina) continue to work on getting the busses to Pimpollo. It appears that Padre can come up with the “tax” needed to get them there. We still need to put the details together so we can drive them to the border and hand them off to Padre and co.

4. Pimpollo continues to evolve and as a result so does our child sponsorship program. With Julie’s leadership we are writing a new news letter to address the change in the Pimpollo population and the expansion of the program to include dupporting our college kids or Vicente Guerrero kids. More to come.

Thanks everyone for your great effort in 2010 on behalf of these great kids and families. The work is so very worthwhile and we can make a huge difference in these communities. The best if yet to come.

God bless you and your family!

juan

More About Rosalba...

More about Rosalba...December 30, 2010

In our year end letter it was my pleasure to write you all about a girl named Rosalba. She and her family are a wonderful story of perusing dreams under difficult circumstances...at least circumstances that seem very difficult to me!

In 2011 we hope to post the stories of most of the kids in our education/scholarship program. By year end 2011, if all goes well, we could have more that 30 kids in our program. Eventually I hope we can help 100 kids but that is a ways off, but possible. These are very poor kids that have been put in front of us. They need a little help...usually between $100-300 per month although our law school student Chely is about $350 per month. They are good students and we haven’t had one who flunked out of school. I don’t think there is any risk that these kids won’t take advantage of the opportunity.

We are requiring a monthly report and a way to keep track of them (like living with a family or living in one of our three student houses in Chiapas). They don’t need straight “A” to be included but they do need a strong desire for further education. Also, we aren’t interested in educating kids who want to use that to come to the US or leave their communities. We are interested in students who want to help in their own community...that is the idea.

For those of you who would like to know more about these kids, soon you will be able to go to my blog (johnjuan@blogspot.com) or on the Friends of Pimpollo web site (friendsofpimpollo.org). It is our intension to update these stories when we visit these students in their homes in the spring and fall.

One thing I like about using my blog or the FOP website is I can write whatever comes to my heart and I don’t have to worry about how long the article is (brevity not being my strong suit) and you can choose to read it or not. I hope you do because their stories are “so compelling” as my fraternity brother /childhood friend Larry says. I know them all personally and they are just great kids and each one is so worthy of our help.

I am going to repeat the stuff I wrote about Rosalba in our year end letter later in this article and add other information we have about her and her family.

So here we go with “More About Rosalba”...Rosalba Regina Ambrosio Juarez.

She lives with her mom, Regina Felicita Juarez, and sister Sara, in Vicente Guerrero, where the garbage dump is, 20 minutes outside of Oaxaca City.

Their home has dirt floors, tin walls, no running water, no sewage system as we know it, and minimal, if any, electricity. Regina cleans houses in Oaxaca City and makes $200 per month and this is the family income as her father has problems with alcoholism and doesn’t contribute anything to the family. There is an older brother who is married and lives elsewhere and he helps at times but it isn’t much.

Sister Sara also likes school and is doing well. She has one more year of secondary school before she goes on to high school. We are encouraging her to persist with her education. We want to make it possible for both Rosalba and Sara to continue.

Next store to the Ambrosio Juarez family lived two sisters that I have known for 15 years or so. Karina and Mago Santiago. Recently these two and Mago’s two small kids lost their home. Basically, they were abandoned by their mom (not the first time) and ended up unable to pay the rent and thus homeless. The Ambrosio Juarez family, despite their meager circumstances, had some space and took them in. Karina, a middle school student and a pretty good student dropped out of school in order to work and help feed Mago and her kids. That is another story I will write about soon. Karina should be in school.

Through it all, Rosalba just completed her first semester of Civil Engineering at the university in Oaxaca City with the equivalent of a 3.6 grade point average! It isn’t easy however and there isn’t always enough food. However, this family prioritizes education!!!

Rosalba gets up at 5:00 am, takes the bus into the city, takes another to the university, has only bread and coffee for breakfast, and many days has little else to eat until she returns home at 4:30 pm. She isn’t complaining. On the other hand she is motivated to continue. This amazing family knows what it is like to be hungry but they have the faith to take in their homeless neighbors and do whatever is necessary to keep Rosalba and Sara in school. Rosalba's mom Regina is a saint in my opinion, and more importantly in the opinion of her daughters...unfortunately her husband is an alcoholic, is of no help, and is separated from the family. This family needs our help in the form of a scholarship for Rosalba.

The most impressive part of the interview that we conducted with Rosalba was her response to this question: “It is obviously difficult for all of you. Why don’t you get a job, like so many others in Vicente Guerrero, in order to help your family?”

Her response was positive and without hesitation and sealed the deal for us.

Rosalba said, “I need to get my degree and become a Civil Engineer and get a very good job so I can truly help my family. If I get a job now without finishing school I won’t make enough money to change things for my mom, and I will be frozen at that level for the rest of my life. I am doing this for my mom because she has done everything for me.”

Gulp. It was an emotional moment for me and my friend Jorge who was with me...and Rosalba. She went on firmly, “I need to finish and get my degree in Civil Engineering and get a good job. I want to be a professional; a civil engineer.” We were so impressed by her vision, the clarity of it, and her purpose. To be honest we were blown away by her.

Other information about Rosalba:

She tries to find work when she has any free time...She loves to read novels...she loves music and is learning to play the guitar...she has household responsibilities to help her mom when she can but she has a lot of homework. “Civil engeneering is very difficult”, she says.

Rosalba is a good representative of the 24 kids we are now supporting in pursuing their dreams of higher education. Including her, we have seven students we would like to add to our program.

These kids have academic dreams and truly deserve the opportunity to go to school.