A fairy-tale ending
Text and photo by Cate Lazen

Liz, a Waldorf Santa Julia supporter, smiles as she envisions the new possibilities opening for Guille as a result of her new education.

It all started with a dragon and a knight in shining armor. Children dressed as kings, queens and townspeople in colorful handmade masks and paper costumes performed a fairy-tale story of good prevailing over evil in an outdoor school theater surrounded by the mountains, cacti, wildflowers and hummingbirds of central Mexico.

Fifteen little girls, whose lives resembled no fairy tale, were in the audience among adoring parents of the actors. Those attending the performance saw the girls from Casa Hogar Santa Julia looking lovely, dressed in donated matching pink track suits. They saw beautifully braided hair and clean brushed teeth. They also saw broken hearts, idle hands, hungry minds and irrepressible spirits.

Those spirits are now driving a partnership between the Waldorf San Miguel School and Santa Julia. The successful launch of this effort brought three wonderful people to sponsor four girls from Santa Julia through the eighth grade. Their pledges to support Angeles, Dulce, Guille and Maru over the long term allowed Waldorf to place them into classrooms right away.

Through this partnership, Waldorf and Santa Julia are working to ensure that poverty and abuse are not reborn in a cycle of unrealized potential. Without these generous donations and sponsorships, happy endings and the fulfillment of potential might have been unimaginable luxuries. 

Waldorf is a private school with tuition that is high compared to public schools. In fact, some might say that the amount of money invested in one child for an education at Waldorf could help 10 children afford the costs of public school. However, some sad statistics about the quality of public education in Mexico reveal that 46 percent drop out by the end of the sixth grade. 

The scholarship program at Waldorf is an acknowledgment of the failure of public schools to meet the needs of children. Waldorf teachers are highly accomplished educators from Mexico and around the world, trained to nurture the minds, bodies and spirits of all kinds of children. They come to San Miguel and earn less than half what they could earn elsewhere, to provide the kind of holistic education that Waldorf Schools provide all over the world: education that teaches social consciousness and environmental responsibility in these perilous times.

The Waldorf community of Madres, parents, teachers and friends know the girls need more than their math tables. They need friendships with children from other parts of the world. They need one-on-one attention from teachers and parents who will recognize and nurture their gifts. Financial support doesn’t just pay tuition. It buys a membership into a local and international community of love and opportunity. Private school parents, teachers and graduates help each other and show the way to do significant things with their lives. 

The dragon of poverty and abuse in this world is too big to overcome and yet the donors and sponsors of this scholarship program stand together like knights, able to make a difference. Kindergarten tuition for each child costs US$2,815 per year. Other children are waiting to enjoy the same healing, love, nurturing, academic rigor and fairy-tale ending that Angeles, Dulce, Guille and Maru are enjoying. They, too, want to slay the dragons of their pasts and hold their heads up proudly.

To learn more about Santa Julia, go to http://www.santajulia.org. To learn more about Waldorf and to make a tax-deductible contribution to the scholarship fund, go to http://www.waldorfsanmiguel.org/engHome.htm. 



___________________________________________





New Yorkers for CASA
By Cynthia Villagran

My friends and family are accustomed to my being on the go. I am used to working hard in fast-paced environments. However, I was unprepared for the work at the lively nonprofit organization, CASA in San Miguel de Allende.

CASA has been serving the poor—particularly adolescents, rural women and their families—through health, social service, education and environmental outreach programs since 1981. It created Mexico's first government-approved Midwifery School, which has been cited as meeting international criteria for effective replication in countries worldwide.

CASA prides itself as being a true double-impact organization. The education and training it provides to its own peer counselors, midwives and staff not only improve their lives, but empower them to have a greater and more profound impact for those they serve.

With this objective, CASA spends 60 percent of its annual budget on educational scholarships. This amount doesn’t encompass the many discounted services CASA provides with its sliding-scale fees. In not a single CASA program do the recipients of services pay the full costs. For this reason, we always welcome sponsors: for children in our daycare, midwives-in-training, peer counselors and individual programs.

Eight months ago, when I first went to CASA for a job interview, I immediately knew I wanted to work there. Since then, I have met many people who have been working hard for CASA for decades. I now understand that they, like me, fell in love with what I describe as CASA’s irresistible life force.

Another person who recently fell in love with CASA is Anne Newman Bacal, from New York. Anne met CASA’s founders, Nadine Goodman and Alejandro González, in New York City and wanted to acquaint herself with our programs and staff.

When they came to San Miguel, I gave Anne and her husband Joe a tour of CASA’s facilities. Today Anne is a co-chair of New Yorkers for CASA—an ad-hoc group of New Yorkers who are committed to social justice and support of CASA.

Anne said in a recent letter, “I just want to reiterate my joy and amazement when I visited CASA my last trip to San Miguel. Of all the beauty in that city, CASA was the most beautiful. I was stunned by the enthusiasm of the staff, the wonderful sparkling facility and the children, so happy and busy. I returned to New York inspired, along with Esther Cohen, to host a gathering to share the news of the wonderful work being done at CASA. Thanks for all you do, and Esther and I are glad to be a small part of it.”

CASA’s annual budget is US$800,000: 63% comes from international foundations, annual campaigns and events; 37% comes from low-cost services we offer to the community. We welcome additional resources to provide these services to our community. We are grateful for Anne and Esther, who are working to bring attention to the CASA.

They are hosting an event in New York City for CASA on Thursday, June 11, from 6pm–8pm at 670 West End Avenue 17 D (93rd between Broadway and West End.) They will show a short film about CASA midwives working in rural villages across Mexico. The film premiered at the Clinton Global Initiative Meeting in New York this past September. All are welcome at this event. Anne only requests that you RSVP by telephone (212) 874-5514 (US number) or to bookdoctor@rcn.com.

If you’re on the West Coast, you can get involved with Californians for CASA. Last April, CASA founders Nadine Goodman and Alejandro Gonzalez started Californians for CASA at a fabulous event in a gallery space that houses studios for many artists. The co-chairs of Californians for CASA are Amber Hawkes and Susan George, who have both worked with CASA over the years. To become a Californian for CASA, please contact Amber Hawkes at (323) 369-7529 or amberhawkes@gmail.com. 

Cynthia Villagran is the Development Director for CASA.




Celestial Lights
By Phyllis Burton Pitluga

Mars hoax continues

The internet is both a wonderful and terrible source for information. The continuing Mars hoax stems from a misinterpreted sentence in an email message in 2003, when Mars was closer to the Earth than usual in a 15-year cycle.

 The original message said Mars, through a 75-power telescope, would look as large as the full moon. The hoaxers neglected to mention the telescope in resending the message. The Earth/Mars encounter might have been the closest for thousands of years, but certainly the Red Planet didn’t loom over us.

The entire planet was no larger in our night sky than a single crater on the Moon. To put it in perspective, it was even smaller than the Moon’s crater Tycho—especially visible at Full Moon, with brilliant rays of ejected debris sprayed away from a comparatively recent impact.

Earth passes Mars either closer or farther, depending on where Mars is in its orbit, which is oval. Mars was twice as close to Earth in August 2003 than it will be at our next closest encounter on January 29, 2010. The next time Mars will be exceptionally close again will be in August of 2018. How close is close? At its closest, in 2003 and 2018, the distance of Mars from Earth is 56 million kilometers (about 31 million miles) compared to its distance in February of 2010, of 100 million kilometers (about 60 million miles). The effect in our sky is a noticeably brighter or dimmer Mars. Through a telescope, Mars appears twice as large to regular observers.

Right now, Mars is in our dawn sky and will rise earlier and earlier as we orbit past it in the coming months. By January 29, 2010, Mars will rise at sunset as the Sun, Earth and Mars line up in the solar system. This is the date Mars will be closest in its two-year orbit of the Sun. You can see Mars getting brighter in the night sky as Earth draws closer in the coming months. Through telescopes, we see dust storms develop with the start of spring on Mars. 


Sky Calendar—June 2009 

By following the Moon as the biggest and brightest “pointer” in the sky, during the month you can identify different planets and bright stars. On following nights you can relocate them, but without the Moon—the Moon moves about 25 times its own diameter from one night to the next. The Moon is much closer to Earth than the planets of our solar system and the stars are even farther away. So, when the Moon appears close to a celestial light, they are truly separated by millions, billions or trillions of miles.



June 5, Friday: Venus reaches its highest position above the dawn glow. For the coming months, Venus gradually moves toward and, eventually, behind the Sun.

June 6, Saturday: The Full Moon moves across the brilliant star Antares tonight. Start watching at 8pm as the Moon approaches Antares. As the Moon moves ever eastward, watch for it to uncover Antares after 10pm. Binoculars or a telescope will enhance your view.

June 13, Saturday: Mercury is farthest above the dawn glow. In the evening, the Moon passes above bright Jupiter. 

June 15, Monday: The Last Quarter Moon rises about midnight and sets around noon the next day. Earth passes by Jupiter over the next several months. Thus, Jupiter appears to “back up” in front of the stars of Capricornus over this time. Take weekly photographs or make drawings to record this change.

June 19, Friday: The Waning Crescent Moon, bright Venus and fainter Mars make a beautiful sight in the dawn sky. 

June 20, Saturday: The Summer Solstice is the time of year when the Sun shines high over the northern hemisphere and gives us our longest days and shortest nights. The exact moment of the solstice occurs 46 minutes before midnight in San Miguel.

June 22, Monday: This New Moon causes exceptionally large tides this month because the Moon is closest to Earth the next day in its monthly orbit and the Earth comes closest to the Sun on July 3 in its yearly orbit. High tides occur at New and Full Moon and extra high tides occur when the Moon and Sun are also especially close. 

June 27, Saturday: The Moon passes below Saturn this evening.

June 29, Monday: The First Quarter Moon is halfway across the sky at sunset from west to east and will continue orbiting eastward each evening.


Phyllis Burton Pitluga is Astronomer Emerita at Adler Planetarium & Astronomy Museum, Chicago. She is now a resident of San Miguel.