Tag Archives: bolivia

A positive role model can make all the difference. Single mothers in Santa Cruz, Bolivia are finding that out, and so are the children who look up to them.

Sister Pilar

Hidden behind the popular tourist destinations and modern attractions of Santa Cruz lurks the shadow side, where many children knew nothing but homelessness, poverty and crime–until Sister Pilar showed up.

Sister Pilar and her fellow nuns at Villa Emilia regularly venture into the darkest sides of Santa Cruz to find and talk to women working on the streets. These women, mostly single mothers, struggle to keep their families intact and their children fed – a task that is always difficult, dangerous and often illegal.

But those who cross paths with Sister Pilar find not only help, but a new way of life. The nuns provide a safe, temporary home for the women and their children on a spacious, beautiful compound where they learn job and child rearing skills.

The environment and help offered at Villa Emilia provides a lifeline for the families. More importantly, however, it provides positive role models for the women, allowing them to become positive role models for their own children, thus breaking the generational cycle of poverty, homelessness and crime.

A beacon in the dark

At the heart of the project is Sister Pilar, a 75-year-old nun from Spain, who has devoted her life to helping the poor regardless of their background or beliefs. Her primary focus is to provide concrete support to the women and children under her care. 

“It doesn’t matter which religion you believe in, as long as you help the poor.”

– Sister Pilar

More than 70 children are in the Villa Emilia program, and Sister Pilar takes care of them all, along with their mothers. The women are trained in garment-making with the expectation that they’ll later be employed in the large industrial garment industry in Bolivia. For the time being, however, they work in a garment factory managed by the sisters of Villa Emilia. There they learn not only technical know-how, but also work ethic and workplace skills that will help them succeed – and that they’ll later pass on to their own children.

During their stay at Villa Emilia, the women learn to look up to and trust Sister Pilar, and they work hard to prove themselves and to “graduate” from the transitional program. Their children do as well – they attend school and are tutored by Sister Pilar, learning from the nuns and from their mothers to work hard to succeed. The results are measurable — an unusually high percentage of the Villa Emilia children are at the top of their classes at school.

A stable future

Once the families are ready, they transition into permanent housing. The homes are initially owned by the sisters, but the women buy them for their own, using their wages to pay the mortgages and thus learning about budgeting and homeownership – more lessons they pass on to their children.

Once in their new homes, some of the women stay on working at the sisters’ factory, while others land jobs on the outside. Either way, they become the proud owners of small, modern houses built close together on a large, subdivided plot. The neighborhood allows the families, who have become friends and colleagues, to stay together in schools, commuter buses and workplaces.

Sister Pilar and her volunteers have purchased nine more plots of land for new homes. Roberto Andrade, who oversaw the Montero school expansion, will oversee the construction plans for the additional houses. Once an impoverished Bolivian child himself, Andrade is now an architect and a regular volunteer on the Children Incorporated team, living proof that sometimes all you need is a chance to become a role model for change.

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HOW DO I SPONSOR A CHILD IN BOLIVIA?

You can sponsor a child in Bolivia in one of three ways – call our office and speak with one of our sponsorship specialists at 1-800-538-5381, email us at sponsorship@children-inc.org, or go online to our donation portal, create an account, and search for a child in Bolivia that is available for sponsorship.

SPONSOR A CHILD

Roberto Andrade and his wife, Verónica, are waiting for us when we step off the plane in hot, humid Santa Cruz. Roberto is an artist and an architect now, but he was once a little boy with enormous potential and struggling parents who worried about his future. They saw the talent and creativity in their son and knew that a quality education would help him develop into a happy, healthy adult.

“Because the happiest people in life aren’t the ones who have everything; the happiest people are those who share everything.”

– Roberto Andrade

It took years of patient waiting, but a sponsor finally stepped forward, and the 8-year old was enrolled at Escuela Cristiana. His art skills blossomed, nurtured by a supportive community, and he discovered his interest in architecture.

school architect rises from poverty

Roberto lives and works in Santa Cruz, following his three passions: art, architecture, and helping children in need. His architectural skills were employed in the expansion of the Montero School in Okinawa, a rural community a few hours out of Santa Cruz. But he is not only a talented artist and architect; he is also a humanitarian who donates his art to raise funds for impoverished children.

Luis with Roberto and his wife

He lived most of his life in Sucre, one of the capitals of Bolivia, where he grew up and attended college. The trip here to Santa Cruz, over 500 km of rough roads, would have once been impossible for his family, but art shows and exhibitions have brought the successful artist to New York City and further.

We’re here to see the inauguration of the school expansion, but this site visit is also a sort of reunion. I first met Roberto in Richmond, where he stopped en route to an art show in New York, and Luis met him on a trip to Bolivia when he was 14 and still in child sponsorship. After graduation, Roberto stayed in touch with Luis and was brought on to work on the school expansion program with Sister Geraldina, our coordinator near Montero.

More than just a school: It’s a window to the future

Before the expansion, this school was heavily overcrowded and poorly ventilated. La Paz is a beautiful colonial city above the clouds, and Santa Cruz a populous modern city with chain stores familiar to any American. But here in the countryside near Montero, people live in lean-tos and one-room huts with thatched roofs, and poverty is as staggering as the heat.

The poverty may be greater, but the parents aren’t different from those we’ve met in La Paz. They hold the same hopes Roberto’s parents did – for education to empower and elevate their children into stable adulthood. The school is more than just a means to an end: it’s a powerful symbol of a future. Before the expansion, and despite substandard conditions including poor ventilation and no sewage system, this symbol drew more than 1,000 children from all over the region, stretching it far past capacity.

Before the renovation, over 1,000 children packed into the dilapidated school — with bad ventilation and no sewer system.

Sister Geraldina: a 75-year-old volunteer leads the charge

Our volunteer coordinator Sister Geraldina

Our volunteer coordinator, Sister Geraldina, runs the school. She has devoted her life to helping children, since entering a religious order as a young woman in her native Chile. After 25 years of service there, she came to Bolivia, where she’s worked for the last 31 years.

She starts her mornings with a modest breakfast and immediately gets to work, involved with the children throughout the entire school day. In spare moments, she organizes parents and community events and spends her afternoons scheduling the other sisters and helping with their work.

If that all wasn’t enough, she also planned and oversaw every aspect of the expansion, upgrading this school from a collection of run-down buildings to a modern, well-ventilated facility with classroom space for the hundreds of students who attend. She’s already working on a second and third proposal, and she uses our visit to show us the improvements still necessary to accommodate more children in conditions conducive to learning.

Sister Geraldina is warm, but very serious, and never slows down as she coordinates the inauguration. Her energy belies her age. At 75, she worked side-by-side with the much younger Roberto to oversee the construction. In just a year, the duo and their construction team built five new slab-and-beam classrooms, restrooms, and a modern sewage system, with funds raised in tandem by our child sponsorship network and Sister Geraldina through the local community.

The school: new beginnings for the future

More than 600 people from the local communities attended the inauguration. The event is kicked off with performances of traditional dances by joyous, happy children in the gym. After the event, families of the 80 children in sponsorship meet with Luis to discuss their community and the children’s needs.

The celebration continues the next day when the children attend school for the first time in their new classrooms. In these new rooms, these children seem like children everywhere, laughing at silly jokes, goofing around, and working on class assignments.

growing up and growing into service

Education provides a lifeline for these children. Despite crushing poverty and a childhood marked by need, Roberto has become a successful artist and architect, dedicated to improving the lives of children who are growing up in even more impoverished locales. Some of these children will move on from the dusty towns and rough, dirt roads of their past, and others will stay, engineering the conditions and infrastructure to elevate the next generation, the same way their parents and Sister Geraldina did; the same way that Roberto did.

I look at the children of Montero the same way I imagine that Roberto’s parents looked at him, and I see bright futures, full of potential, compassion, and acts of kindness and charity. Which ones will become architects? Teachers? Doctors? How will they give back to the next generation?

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HOW DO I SPONSOR A CHILD IN BOLIVIA?

You can sponsor a child in Bolivia in one of three ways – call our office and speak with one of our sponsorship specialists at 1-800-538-5381, email us at sponsorship@children-inc.org, or go online to our donation portal, create an account, and search for a child in Bolivia that is available for sponsorship.

SPONSOR A CHILD

As we continue our tour of La Paz, we met Efrain, an energetic fourth-grader who lives near the Pedro Poveda School. Like any child, Efrain is proud of what he owns and likes to show his belongings to visitors. He shares an infectious smile with us as he holds up a prized pair of shoes Josefina has brought him. He’s equally excited to show us the kittens he’s raising. They sleep in their own little bed beside the bed he shares with his brother in a bedroom where the whole family sleeps.

Efrain with his new shoes

Getting support at Pedro Poveda

His mom works long hours as a cleaner, so this excellent student spends afternoons at the community center, where he breezes through most of his homework. When he has trouble, local college students help him master challenging material in their roles as volunteer tutors.

Efrain lives with his mom and three siblings in a small, single-bedroom home owned by his grandmother. She used to rent it to lodgers, but she let her daughter and grandchildren move in to save money as they struggled with hardships and poverty after the children’s father abandoned them.

Efrain faces many challenges, but he has resources, particularly the tireless support of Josefina, our Children Incorporated Coordinator in La Paz. She was the principal of the Pedro Poveda School he attends, but she retired five years ago at age 70 to run the community center. The center was once a simple library, but she had a vision for it to be so much more. She transformed it into a comprehensive facility for her students, where they could have a stable refuge from sometimes difficult home lives and learn modern skills to get ahead.

A vision for the children

Efrain faces many challenges, but he has resources, particularly the tireless support of Josefina, our Children Incorporated Coordinator in La Paz.

I’m fascinated by Josefina and ask her many questions after we leave Efrain for the next visit, but she doesn’t talk about herself much. She prefers to talk about her vision for the children, focusing on their needs and ways to ameliorate the hardships in their lives. We know she has lived in La Paz for most of her life. While she isn’t a nun nor does she use the title “Sister”, she does belong to a religious order, and her faith has led her to devote her life to helping children. She lives simply, sharing communal space with other women from the order, all of whom come to La Paz just to work with her at the community center.

Meeting Carla

Our next visit is with Carla, who was enrolled in the Children Incorporated program while she was a student at Pedro Poveda. Carla works as a teacher and has been pursuing further education to become a linguist. She is happily married to her husband, a mechanic named Juan Carlos, and the couple has a three-year-old daughter.

Life hasn’t always been good. Carla was abandoned by her parents at age 8. They left her with her grandmother, a vendor in the local market with few resources to take care of her properly. Thankfully, she was a student at Pedro Poveda and was quickly enrolled in child sponsorship. Carla still writes letters to her sponsor, practicing her English and expressing gratitude for the role they played in helping her thrive.

Josefina, always the gracious host, and so proud to show the work being done through the program she leads, hasn’t taken us on a typical site visit. Carla isn’t in the program anymore, and her daughter is too young to be sponsored. Josefina has brought us here so we can see how a woman who was once sponsored has done since leaving the program.

Even more importantly, she wants to show us her vision for Efrain’s future. From a broken home to a stable home; from surviving to thriving. This is who Josefina is and this is what she brings to the children and the families touched by her program. She’s a woman who can look at a child and see their future, and then devote her whole life to helping them get there.

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HOW DO I SPONSOR A CHILD IN BOLIVIA?

You can sponsor a child in Bolivia in one of three ways – call our office and speak with one of our sponsorship specialists at 1-800-538-5381, email us at sponsorship@children-inc.org, or go online to our donation portal, create an account, and search for a child in Bolivia that is available for sponsorship.

SPONSOR A CHILD

Our Director of International Programs, Luis Bourdet, and I flew into La Paz just before sunrise, after an overnight trip from Richmond. I was woozy from fatigue or the elevation — 13,000 feet above sea level — and grateful when a young woman woke up at 4 am to check us into our hotel.

A City in the Mountains

I woke up as the sun rose, and got my first view of an amazing vertical city. I’ve never seen anywhere else like it; skyscrapers and colonial architecture sit unevenly, side-by-side, built on the hills that once made this city so difficult to navigate. Bridges, new since Luis’ last trip here, have made connections that never existed over ravines and valleys, letting even the poorest residents make trips that were once impossible.

Not every place is accessible by bridge though, and automobile traffic is congested and slow. Many residents still walk because they can’t afford a car or to avoid congestion. The city introduced a cable car system in 2014 to address their needs. This system, Mi Teleférico, connects La Paz with its poorer neighbor, El Alto, the highest major city in the world, built another 1,500 feet up the mountains.

La Paz is impoverished, but El Alto is also a grim place, home to recently dispossessed farming families fleeing drought and famine. The families are primarily from indigenous backgrounds, and they face additional hardships seeking jobs and opportunities. Until Mi Teleférico, they were only connected to opportunities in the more prosperous city below by slow buses on long, winding roads.

The cable cars were designed to cost less than the buses, and are powered by the sun. Residents use them to get to the sprawling markets in El Alto, and tourists use them for the stunning views of the cities below.

The image of those cable cars and the bridges lingers long after I first saw them. I keep reflecting on how this infrastructure, a gift from the state government, has empowered so many people and changed their lives so dramatically.

We visit neighborhoods that Luis remembers from his last trip, before the bridge, and he remarks on the improvements. Unsteady brick shacks have been upgraded into sturdy concrete homes, safer and more stable over the soft soil and steep slopes they are built on.

I am reminded that it is often the simplest thing, like building a bridge—or sponsoring a child—that can make all the difference.

Parts of La Paz may just as well have been on the moon for those without the means to drive. Now, three bridges and these amazing cable carts in the sky connect the city. I am reminded that it is often the simplest thing, like building a bridge—or sponsoring a child—that can make all the difference.

Exploring Pedro Poveda

Of course, we didn’t visit these sites alone. Josefina, our volunteer coordinator, gave us a tour of the city, showing us some of the highlights and attractions. At a bustling market, we ran into two children sponsored through Children Incorporated, Daniel and Nicole, who rushed up to kiss and hug Josefina.

The children’s mother owns a small tienda at the market—a tin shack where she prepares breakfast 7 days a week. By day, the children’s father works as a taxi driver. Their mother works a second shift as a taxi driver after the market closes every evening.

After exchanging money at a local bank, we went to Pedro Poveda. Like everything here, the school is built on a hill, and there are many stairs that lead up to the classrooms. We first visited students in a carpentry class, who are learning the trade. We also visited students in an electronics class working on small electronics like radios, and then a cooking class, where students were learning to combine local food with their meals — pasta with local spinach, or other vegetables.

After, we visited the community center directly across from the school, where Josefina had been the principal of for 15 years. Originally a library, she helped transform the center into an after-school program for students who have parents who work long hours, or suffer from complex behavioral problems and need extra support and love.

The room was filled with children busily working on homework or teaching games. Local university students volunteer their time as after-school tutors. After homework is done, the children are invited to the playroom for crafts and games.

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HOW DO I SPONSOR A CHILD IN BOLIVIA?

You can sponsor a child in Bolivia in one of three ways – call our office and speak with one of our sponsorship specialists at 1-800-538-5381, email us at sponsorship@children-inc.org, or go online to our donation portal, create an account, and search for a child in Bolivia that is available for sponsorship.

SPONSOR A CHILD