Santa Julia

Last week I went to Santa Julia, an orphanage in San Miguel. It was the first time I’ve ever been to an orphanage – I had no idea what to expect. I’d heard about it from a friend of a friend who handed me a card and briefly said I ought to go check the place out.

When I got to Santa Julia, I found that it was, in ways, grimmer than the orphanages I had imagined: the girls at Santa Julia have not been orphaned because their parents have died; instead, most are there because their families simply can’t afford to feed them.

Most of the girls come from single mothers. Some have court ordered placements here because of abuse or neglect, but the vast majority is from families too poor to have another child. Mothers and fathers come to visit, and sometimes if circumstances have changed, a child is reunited with their family.

Santa Julia is run by four nuns with elementary-level education and gigantic hearts. They work from five in the morning until midnight and demand that volunteers do the same (probably explains why they rarely have them…). Together the nuns care for 48 girls ages one to 24.

There are poor kids everywhere in the world. There are orphans and neglected children everywhere in the world. But seeing Santa Julia and interviewing some of the people who work there made me realize that Mexican poverty has a distinctly female face.

In the world of international economic development, the education of a nation’s females is one of the best indicators of human development and potential for economic growth. Lack of education for females in Latin America, though has proven to have disproportionate effect on the income levels of women; that is to say, if a boy and a girl are equally uneducated, the girl will probably make less money.

And then there is the mass exodus of men to the United States and Mexico City: a survey of Mexican rural women conducted in 11 of the country’s 32 states by the National Network of Rural Promoters and Advisors revealed that in 7 out of 10 rural Mexican homes, women are the sole breadwinners in the family and that only 31% of rural households headed by women have an income above the monthly minimum wage.

If drugs and emigration are the only viable economic options for poor men, both leave women faced with hard decisions, alone or abandoned.

P.S. I’m thinking of trying to start an online pen-pal program between girls Santa Julia and kids in the states. The emails could be translated by the social worker at the orphanage, or they could be an interesting way for English-speaking kids to practice Spanish. Email me if you (or your kids) are interested in trying to make something work …