Feed the Hungry reaches further out
By Mary Murrell (July 14, 2006)

As executive director of Feed the Hungry, I sometimes get telephone calls from teachers at schools, who want to get food from us for their students or calls from people who have had contact with a community they want us to help.

In October 2005, I received a call from an American in San Miguel who wanted to know if Feed the Hungry could provide food for a school outside of town. "Where are they?" I asked. I was told they were "out near Dolores Hidalgo and they only started coming to school after a pastor who is working in the village brought some food to the school." 

I asked for the name and telephone number of the pastor so we could contact him to do our research. Feed the Hungry provides nutritious, hot meals to more than 3,000 children a day from 25 kitchens in San Miguel and the surrounding community. With any request for food we have to find out where the children are located, if the school is getting help from other sources and the economic situation in the village. We don't want to duplicate services, and we have to make sure we are serving the very neediest locations. 

When Americans come to Mexico and go to the ranchos, it is a pretty shocking experience. Nothing in San Miguel prepares them for the poverty of the ranchos: the lack of food and potable water, the unpaved streets, the schoolrooms with a single bulb hanging on a wire. So sometimes we get calls from people concerned about a school they have seen, but they don't realize their view is based on the US and not what is common for rural communities in Mexico. 

Feed the Hungry has developed criteria for assessing the level of need at a school and in a village. The major things we look at are the physical condition of the children and whether there are other food sources available at the school. There need to be enough children to justify the cost of building a kitchen. And the school and parents have to be interested in having a kitchen. So, research is very important before we commit to becoming involved.

Several weeks later, on a cold morning when an unusually thick blanket of fog covered the countryside, Olivia Muniz and I set out to meet Pastor Samuel so he could take us to see the children "out near Dolores Hidalgo."

Olivia, director of kitchen operations for Feed the Hungry, has worked with the program for 12 years. A former schoolteacher, she is our most experienced staff person in terms of the ranchos, schools and hungry children. 

As we followed the taillights on Pastor Samuel's car through the fog for an hour and a half, we talked about whether Feed the Hungry could service a kitchen so far away. "How will we do the weekly inventory and supervise the cooks?" asked Olivia. "And what about building the kitchen? It will be so hard to find construction workers and supervise them," I added. We both were convinced this was out of our range, didn't follow our model of how we run our kitchens, and just wouldn't fit.

By the time we crossed highway 57 I realized we were not in Dolores Hidalgo at all, but somewhere north of Doctor Mora and Pozos. We continued toward San Luis de la Paz, able to see the vast expanses of fields as the sun burned off the fog. We were near the city but took a road around it toward Victoria. Olivia and I exchanged looks. This was really, really far!

Eventually, we turned off of the pavement and bumped down a dirt road full of holes, driving over an open aqueduct at one point. There was nothing except some piles of stone, a few fields and cacti. Then we saw the school, a sad-looking cluster of small buildings in the middle of a desolate landscape that seemed more like the moon than anywhere else. No trees, no cars, no playground equipment, not even the standard fence around the school-just a barren space with wind whistling and clouds of dust passing by.

The school building had two rooms, broken windows and a roof at a strange tilt at one end. We walked over to one of the classrooms, peaked inside and saw tiny tables and chairs for the kindergarten children.

The room was completely bare except for the furniture. No posters, no art, no color-nada. 

Next door, we heard voices and looked into the second classroom. It was packed with almost 40 children of varying sizes. Grades one through six sat in their desks with a single teacher at the front of the room. They stared at us with blank expressions on their faces. 

We introduced ourselves to the maestro, who was shy but friendly, obviously surprised to see strangers at the school. Smiling at the children, we said hello and got no response. As we stood at the front of the room with the blackboard behind us, we could see all of the faces. After a few minutes Olivia said to me in English, "These kids look really, really bad. We have to help them."

Later, in the car going back to San Miguel, Olivia and I were both quiet for a long time. Then she said, "You know these are the worst-looking children I have ever seen. In many places where we have built kitchens we have seen very poor children, hungry children, but these are …," and she didn't finish the sentence.

I am not an expert on malnutrition, and I have been going out to the ranchos only for about two years. But these children looked so listless, with dull eyes and tight, shiny skin and brittle hair. 

They are from Misión Chichimeca, the place where the Spanish pushed the Chichimecas nearly 500 years ago. 

The Chichimecas had presented the Spaniards with difficult and unexpected challenges. They would not settle in pueblos and refused to work voluntarily. Instead, they moved far and wide as hunter-gatherers, able to survive on incredibly barren land. And they were fearless, ruthless warriors. Their attacks on the Spanish (and other indigenous groups) were relentless and especially problematic for trade in the northern parts of Mexico. The Chichimecas favored ambush and rapid fire, fighting with little to cover their bodies and with their hair painted red. Over and over again they exhibited their accuracy with bows and arrows.

After a 50-year war without a victory (La Guerra de los Chichimecas was the longest and most expensive campaign in New Spain), the Spanish adopted a new approach for handling the Chichimecas. They gave them a large tract of land where they could settle and made annual payments to them of food, blankets, seeds and tools. The name of the town became San Luis de la Paz because of the peace that was made with the Chichimecas. And they are still there, living outside of the town.

Today, the number of Chichimecas in the state of Guanajuato is very small. According to census information collected in 2000, there were 1,433 Chichimeca Jonaz speakers (a linguistic group that is the largest indigenous group in the state), and 1,405 lived in the municipality of San Luis de la Paz. Although there has been considerable assimilation, the school we visited is in the most isolated part of Misión Chichimeca-the area set up by the Spanish long ago.

So, we began to look for a way to help these children, to figure out how we might change our model to fit the situation, to be flexible, to color outside the lines. And I told the story about the little Chichimeca children who did not smile back or respond to us. I told it to people who went out to see our kitchens in San Miguel, people who were interested in Feed the Hungry, people I met at social occasions, lots of people. 

And one day, when I was having lunch with some new friends, they asked me which of the schools I had seen was the most needy. My answer was, "The children at the Chichimeca school are in the worst shape, by far." I told them the story of what we had seen and how the Chichimecas had ended up at the Mission. And I added that although we really wanted to help, the location was very hard for us to service. For example, to deliver food would be about a two-hour trip each way for one of our volunteer drivers.

"What if we give Feed the Hungry money to build the school and operating funds for the kitchen for three years?" they asked me. "Will you do it?" Without hesitation I answered, "Yes, we will help them."

So today, Feed the Hungry is building a kitchen farther away than we would have dreamed just a year ago. We are working with the teacher, Maestro Marcos, to hire cooks and help us manage the kitchen. We will deliver dry food twice a month and buy fruit and vegetables locally. 

José Alvarado Briones, a young architect from San Luis de la Paz, has designed a kitchen for Feed the Hungry that will include a place for the children to wash their hands, a water storage facility and a gray water system. He wants to plant trees and a garden around the school. He has also recommended new materials we can use to reduce the cost of building, and he will offer jobs constructing the new kitchen to men in the community. 

In August, the children will come back to school from their summer break. Every school day, they'll wash their hands, line up at the window of the kitchen and get a high-protein, hot comida. And as in all Feed the Hungry kitchens, they can come back for as many servings as they want. When we think about our newest kitchen, we are happy we did our research and could help those who need our help the most.

Through the generosity of our many donors, Feed the Hungry continues its mission of fighting malnutrition among young children-this time in an isolated community that has hardly changed in 500 years.

Feed the Hungry is a nonprofit corporation in the US and Mexico. A donation of US$65 will feed a hungry young girl or boy for an entire year. 

For more information about the Feed the Hungry fund raiser see page 42 and how you can help feed hungry children, please visit our website at www.feedthehungrysma.org, or call Mary Murrell, Executive Director, at 152-2402.

"A Taste of Our Kitchens" Fundraiser for Feed the Hungry, a moveable feast
Friday, July 21, 7pm, Diezmo Viejo 4, US$65, 152-2402