Luis Estavillo and San Felipe Lachillo, Part I.

Most of the time, I think change happens gradually. Our perspectives carry an inertia all their own. It's tough to alter the way we live or think when we've come to find comfort. Yeah sure, over time we might grow more relaxed about taking the trash out, or more adamant about recycling. But these are little changes that come from experience and learning. Rarely, does a single event transform our life's course or revolutionize the way we think. Here's a story of one that did:



Two yeas ago at the suggestion of a friend, Luis Estavillo, a restaurant owner in La Crucecita, Oaxaca accompanied a Red Cross mission into the mountains around Huatulco. The trip was to survey conditions and resupply clinics with basic medical equipment. Luis had never worked with the Red Cross or participated very much in any kind of volunteer aid projects. Although he had lived in Huatulco for 20 years, he hadn't so much as left the pavement, let alone set foot into the mountains that lay just outside of town. For all purposes he saw the trip as a chance to explore, a fun day in the hills.



What he encountered though, was a kind of poverty that he had only read about. Coming to the village of San Felipe Lachillo, Luis found children suffering from malnutrition and disease. Many of them were plagued by lice and fungus, diarhea and deficiency. But what struck deepest was the feeling of defeat staring back at him, of children barely school-age looking through desperate, old eyes. He decided to do something.

San Felipe lies at the end of a dirt road three hours from Huatulco. As the crow flies it is barely 20 miles. But the 4X4 road, the various stream crossings, and the absence of through traffic (it is after all, a dead end) isolate it and keep it cut off from the rest of the world.

While the isolation of San Felipe has helped to preserve things like custom and tradition, it has also secluded the village from services like health care, medicine, education, and outside income. There is no doctor in San Felipe, no dentist, no nurse. There is no high school, only a ‘telesecundaria’, which is basically a room with a T.V. where kids can watch videos of teachers teaching high school. There are no jobs. For work villagers must travel to Huatulco, which means they also must stay in Huatulco, returning home only on Sunday to visit their families.

One of the things that struck a chord in Luis was malnutrition, especially among children. Hungry kids don’t do well in school, he says. They don’t do well in anything. They don’t have the energy. As in most of the schools in rural Oaxaca, there is no free or reduced lunch program. Kids must either bring their own or go without. For the children of San Felipe, it wasn’t a case of not wanting to pack a lunch. They didn’t have any lunch to pack.

Luis knew that if there was going to be real change in San Felipe, it would have to start with the children. A few weeks later he met with local leaders to determine what the community needed most. The School Breakfast Program was born.

Its aim was simple: provide the kids with one nutritious meal to start the day. Food would not only keep children coming to school, but give them the energy they needed to enjoy it. Before breakfast could be served though, they needed a place to prepare it. So, community leaders drew up the plans for a simple shelter, chose the materials, and estimated the cost. The only problem left was finding a way to pay for it all. Enter Luis.

“I had wanted to take on a new challenge,” he says of his decision to raise money for the breakfast project, “I liked swimming, but I was never going do it seriously just for myself. I needed to find a greater cause,” he says.

By the end of the meeting in San Felipe, he knew he’d found it.
With help from friends and family, Luis took up the Nine Bay Challenge – the then unconquered crossing of the nine bays of Huatulco – to raise money for the program. Donors pledged money by the hour, the kilometer, or the number of bays crossed. All the proceeds went directly to the construction of the shelter in San Felipe.

Crossing the nine bays of Huatulco is an epic feat. Not only is the distance long – at minimum 20km (12.5mi) – the route is plagued by jellyfish, rough seas, and unpredictable currents. (In our recent attempt Luis came out with over a half a dozen stings on his chest and back). Without warning large eddies can arise and carry a swimmer out to sea. Unlike long lake crossings or pool distances, success in the open ocean depends heavily on luck – on the chance that the conditions will remain calm, the weather will hold, and the currents will maintain their favor.

In his first attempt, Luis swam for an incredible nine hours. Although the swim ended far short of its goal, it succeeded in raising over $1100 and getting the school breakfast program to its feet. Money raised through the swim purchased not only the materials to build the shelter, but enough food and cooking supplies to feed the school’s 50 children a daily breakfast for the entire school year.

Undaunted by the failed attempt and seeing the results of just one meal a day, Luis decided to try the swim again. The kids sent him back to the ocean, he says. He wanted to give them more opportunity to succeed, to provide lunch for them as well. Much like the first attempt, Luis’ second attempt likewise fell short to rough seas in the bay of Chachagual, where he swam for five hours in the same location unable to overcome the currents. Exhausted after seven hours, he drug himself into the lifeboat and collapsed.

Stung by failure yet again, Luis nevertheless returned to San Felipe with the money for school lunches. The results were amazing. In just a few short months kids were not only returning to school, they were learning and advancing like never before. Not wanting to turn their school into a soup kitchen, teachers in San Felipe knew to treat school meals as a privilege.

The kids have to work for their breakfast and lunch, said Eloisa, one of the teachers I met with in La Crucecita. The lunches are free, but they’re not free. They don’t do their work, they don’t get fed – simple as that.

Likewise, they had similar plans for doling out the school supplies and backpacks from the Rivers of Tomorrow project. All the basics would stay in the school, she said. Kids could obviously take home what they needed for homework, but the majority of it would remain in the classroom. The backpacks however, would go to the kids who both needed and deserved them. They wouldn’t be just presents, said Eloisa, rather rewards for the kids who worked hard.

Along with putting the initial project in motion, Luis’ swim opened the eyes of locals and tourists alike to the poverty that lies just outside the opulent hotels and wide streets of Huatulco. For many, seeing the kids firsthand and Luis’ bold effort was enough for them to pledge money for future projects. Since the beginning of the school breakfast program, several new investments have been made including a sustainable egg and poultry operation, plantain farming, and equipment for a commercial bakery.

Others have donated their time and energy, teaching the children to swim and paint. It is this emotional effort, says Luis that makes perhaps the greatest difference. Kids being free to be kids, feeling like somebody cares about them. Flipping through his photo album, he points again and again to the children’s faces. The collection of pictures is like a graphic timeline of his work in San Felipe. Look at their eyes, he tells me, do you see the changes? I do. They are still the same forlorn gazes from before, but something is different about the recent photos. In four words Luis reveals his greatest reward and says, “they are smiling now,”

Rewards

One thing I’ve learned in doing this project is that the true heroes are the ones striving to make a difference in their own communities. They are the ones with the knowledge and connections to make things happen. They know what’s best for their community, even if they don’t know how to obtain it. More importantly though, local leaders are the ones that local people trust. They have a genuine, long-term interest in their communities. After all, they have to live there.

Relief agencies may come and go. They can provide aid and make life more enjoyable for awhile. But in the end, sustainable progress grows from the community itself. It starts with a change in mentality, a shift toward positive thinking. Ideas grow into actions. Actions grow into changes. Changes in turn, feed more positive thinking.

People have asked me, ‘how did it go?’ ‘How did it feel to drop off the supplies?’ Honestly, I think, it was a little anti-climatic. There were no ceremonies, no speeches. Kids and teachers weren’t falling to their knees saying, ‘thank you, thank you!’ The donations themselves were quiet ordeals. I can’t say I felt much of anything per se, save for the satisfaction of seeing these projects come to completion.

Much more than the supply drop-offs, the real reward of this project was seeing people in action. It was seeing secondary and elementary kids in the States donating piles of their unused stuff. It was schools offering up boxes and boxes of notebooks and printer paper. It was people buying T-shirts and making donations. It was finding out that people actually cared and were willing to act.

I got the same reward seeing all of these things in Oaxaca. Perhaps the greatest thing is seeing how much people can do with so little. How something as simple as free breakfast at school can completely change a child’s outlook. Or how people can take such pride in their land that they refuse to sell it no matter the offer, or how badly they could use the money. For sure, the greatest reward is knowing that there are still heroes out there – everyday people that truly change lives.