GIOVANNA DELL’ORTO, of Associated Press, reports on how pastor-run shelters have partnered with educators to help ensure migrant children in Mexico have access to education…
Ciudad Juarez, Mexico
AP
His completed geometry exercise in hand and a smile lighting up his eyes above his face mask, Victor Rodas rushed to the teacher as other students were still drawing.
“I’m winning the race!” the 12-year-old exclaimed. “I’m already done, teacher. I beat everyone.”
Migrant children participate in a classroom activity at Casa Kolping, an alternative education centre in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, on Monday, 28th March. Child migrants often miss months or even years of schooling on their turbulent journeys. In Ciudad Juarez, a sprawling city on the US-Mexican border where thousands are waiting to cross, pastor-led shelters are working to provide them an education, however transitory. PICTURE: AP Photo/Christian Chavez.
Being enrolled in a school program designed for migrant children in Ciudad Juarez, Victor does have a leg up on many others like him who, fleeing poverty and violence, lose months or even years of schooling on their journeys.
Giving them access to education is a daunting and urgent challenge.
“They get integrated in the educational system so they can keep gaining confidence. It’s also important…that the families feel they’re not in hostile territory.”
– said Teresa Almada, who runs Casa Kolping.
Just in this vast desert metropolis next to El Paso, Texas, thousands of migrant families have hunkered in shelters, waiting to cross into the United States. They’re prevented from seeking asylum there by US policies that made some wait in Mexico for their court hearings and banned others under a pandemic-era order set to expire on 23rd May.
Pastor-run shelters have partnered with educators to help – either busing children to an alternative school that teaches everything from math to reading to dealing with emotions, or bringing in specially accredited teachers.
While the curriculum is not religious, faith animates these projects, as it does many other migrant relief efforts at the border. It also informs many of the educators, who recognise schooling as crucial to the youths’ future, including their ability to socialise and eventually find jobs and feel at home wherever they end up.
“They get integrated in the educational system so they can keep gaining confidence,” said Teresa Almada, who runs Casa Kolping, where Victor studies, through a local organisation funded three decades ago by lay members of Catholic parishes. “It’s also important…that the families feel they’re not in hostile territory.”
Victor’s oldest sister, Katherine Rodas, 22, fled death threats in Honduras with him and two other siblings she raised after their mother died. While she and her husband are so fearful of gangs that they don’t dare leave their Catholic-run shelter, she leapt at the chance for the children to be bused to Casa Kolping.
“They say the teacher always takes good care of them, plays with them,” Rodas said. “They feel safe there.”
Their shelter, Casa Oscar Romero, is named for a beloved Salvadoran archbishop, known for ministering to the poor, who was assassinated during his country’s civil war and later made a saint by Pope Francis. Many housed at this shelter and elsewhere in Ciudad Juarez fled Central America; growing numbers of Mexican families from areas engulfed in cartel warfare are arriving, too.
For a while after the school program started in October, teachers encouraged parents to join their children in the classrooms to build trust. Among them was Lucia, a single mother of three who fled the Mexican state of Michoacan after a drug cartel “took over the harvest and everything” in their home. She asked to be identified by just her first name for safety.
“Education is important so that they can develop as people and they’ll be able to defend themselves from whatever life will put before them,” Lucia said as she made breakfast in the small communal kitchen at the shelter, where the family had lived for nine months.
With her mask and pink backpack already on, eight-year-old Carol, centre, waits alongside other migrant children for the special bus that will take them from the Casa Oscar Romero migrant shelter to an alternative school program for migrant children, in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, on Monday, 28th March. Carol’s mother, who fled the Mexican state of Michoacan because of cartel violence, is grateful her child has a chance to attend school. PICTURE: AP Photo/Christian Chavez.
Her daughter Carol, eight, already had on her mask and pink backpack, ready to run ahead of the pack as soon as the school bus’s arrival was announced.
About three dozen children from Casa Oscar Romero and another religious-run shelter attend Casa Kolping. First to third graders like Carol gather in one classroom, and fourth to sixth graders like Victor meet across the hallway in a large room whose windows frame views of El Paso’s mountains.
Across the border, Victor imagines, schools will be “big, well-cared for,” and will help him reach his goal of becoming an architect. He already practices drawing detailed houses, when he can find paper.
“If you ask the kids, their biggest dream is to cross to the United States,” said teacher Yolanda Garcia.
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Many parents see no point in enrolling children in school in Mexico, where they don’t plan to stay. Also, many public educators are reluctant to admit migrant students, for fear of losing teacher slots if class sizes shrink when they leave suddenly, said Dora Espinoza, a primary school principal in Ciudad Juarez. She actively reaches out to families, including at a shelter two blocks from her classrooms.
“Why all that paperwork if the kid is going to be gone in two weeks” is one argument that makes promoting child migrant education such a challenge, said Paola Gómez, Mexico’s education officer for UNICEF. The UN child protection agency helps finance Casa Kolping as a pilot program, where attendance gets a kid transferable credit for both Mexican and US schools.
In addition to uncertainty, poverty and discrimination keep nearly half of refugee children from school worldwide, according to the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR.
But the biggest barrier is insecurity. Hounded by violence in their hometowns and preyed upon by gangs along the journey – often right up to a shelter’s doors – many parents are afraid to let children out of their sight.
Samuel Jimenez instructs migrant children at the Buen Samaritano or Good Samaritan shelter in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, on Tuesday, 29th March. Jimenez said that beyond merely educating their students, the teachers must also contend with serious traumas that migrant children bring with them to the classroom. PICTURE: AP Photo/Christian Chavez.
The faith-run programs address that by providing secure transportation, as in the case of Casa Kolping, or bringing instructors directly to the migrants, as in the case of another Ciudad Juarez shelter, Buen Samaritano, Spanish for good Samaritan.
Still, the children take serious traumas with them to the classroom.
“‘Teacher, I’m here because they murdered my parents.’ They tell it in detail, children don’t cover anything up,” said Samuel Jimenéz, a teacher at Buen Samaritano on a recent blustery afternoon. “In the moment they’re here, we can take them out of that reality. They forget it.”
Led by a Methodist pastor and his wife, Buen Samaritano housed more than 70 migrants that day, half of them minors. Children swept swirling desert dust out of the temple area, where the altar was curtained off to create the classroom.
Ten-year-old Aritzi Ciriaco, a fourth grader from Michoacan who had been at Buen Samaritano since August with her parents and grandparents, couldn’t wait to get started on the day’s Spanish exercises. She worried that learning English and navigating US schools would be hard once they cross the border.
“The teachers were telling me that there you can’t miss a single class,” Aritzi said “Still, it’s good to know other countries.”
Other challenges for the instructors include catching up students who arrive unable to read or write.
“We are faced with all kinds of falling behind,” said Garcia at Casa Kolping. “But most of all, with a lot of desire to learn. They missed school. When you give them their notebooks, the emotion on their face … some even tell you, ‘How lovely it feels to learn.’”
Migrant children play on the swings during recess at Casa Kolping, an alternative education center in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, on Monday, 28th March. Education is a big challenge for children on their migration journey, but opportunities like this give them a chance to find safety and forget for a few moments the traumas they endured. PICTURE: AP Photo/Christian Chavez.
One chilly spring morning, one of her students, Juan Pacheco, 12, struggled with a punctuation exercise taught in Spanish – his first language is Mixtec, one of the many Indigenous tongues in Mexico and Central America.
He had spent more than eight months at Casa Oscar Romero after his family fled the Mexican state of Guerrero, where cartel fighting made it too dangerous to farm even their meager plot of beans.
But with some coaching, Juan successfully completed another task faster than his classmates: drawing a banknote, a cooking pot, a radish and an ear of corn, and explaining which one didn’t fit with the others.
“I don’t like to talk much, but yes, I’m a good student,” Juan said, beaming.
