07/13/2006

Special to the Record-Eagle
Safe Passage children are fed a healthy lunch and snack every day. For some of the kids, this is the only source of nutrition they receive all day.

A voice from afar

Local chapter aims to help Guatemalan children

By
Record-Eagle staff writer

Special to the Record-Eagle
Sarah Wigton of Maple City entertains a young Safe Passage participant. She visited the project in March with her parents, Tom and Joan, and her sister, Theresa.

TRAVERSE CITY — When spring break rolled around in March, Tom and Joan Wigton embarked on an alternative to their traditional family vacation.

Instead of traveling to Florida or Mexico for a leisurely week by the sea, they packed up daughters Sarah and Theresa, students at Hope College, and flew to Guatemala to work with some of the country's poorest children at the Guatemala City garbage dump.

The Maple City family is among some 20 area residents who have volunteered their services in Guatemala since 2005 through Great Lakes Friends of Safe Passage, said team leadership member Sharon Workman. Founded by Maine native Hanley Denning in an abandoned church at the dump's edge, Safe Passage is a non-profit agency that provides education, food and a drop-in center for children living there.

"The thing that surprised me the most was the poverty, the condition that some of the families were living in," said Joan Wigton, adding that families at the dump live in makeshift houses without electricity, running water or ventilation and dig through the filth for food. "I knew it was bad but I didn't know it was that bad."

Now Wigton, Workman and other "Friends" are hoping to drum up support for the organization with a "Fiesta" celebration and fundraiser from 5:30 to 8 p.m. Wednesday at the Hagerty Conference Center in Traverse City. Denning will travel from Guatemala to be the guest speaker and will share stories of the group's 1999 formation and its challenges and successes since then.

Proceeds will support the operations budget for Safe Passage, whose intensive school support program helped more than 538 students this year, Workman said. Besides providing assistance with school enrollment fees, books, supplies and uniforms, the organization offers before- and after-school programs designed to teach children the value of education, give them a safe place to play and study and provide them with hope for a better life.

"In Guatemala, it's always been a system where children are required to pay fees, even though the schools are public," said Denning from the organization's office in Antigua, an hour from Guatemala City. "In the past, the government has been plagued by a lack of resources, instability and leadership corruption. The government has so many things on its plate, so many things it has to deal with, that education hasn't received the attention it deserves. And in a country where so many people don't go beyond the third grade, it's a way of maintaining the status quo. It's an elite group that owns land (and businesses).

"This is a very comprehensive program in the sense it's not just the financial support," she said of Safe Passage. "We're giving health care, nutritional care, vocational training, outreach, emotional support. We're really giving the kids the tools so they can go to school and stay in the schools."

Besides its office in Antigua, Denning said the organization maintains an "educational reinforcement building" near the dump for children 5 years old through high school age and a house in Guatemala City where carpentry, adult literacy and life skills are taught. A third building — landscaped by Empire musician and nursery owner Chris Skellenger — will open in January for preschool children, who traditionally forage at the dump with their parents or are left home alone in an area where there is rampant drug use, gang activity and violence.

A vocational center also is being constructed where breadmaking and metal-working will be taught and plans are in the works for a community garden designed by landscape design students from the University of Washington on a piece of donated land.

Denning said volunteers are the backbone of Safe Passage and calls the Great Lakes Friends — the only chapter outside Maine — a "gift." Besides sponsoring children financially, collecting needed supplies like chewable vitamins and backpacks and volunteering their skills with various projects, members of the group have helped spread the word at home, she said.

"These people can be a voice for the children. It's very hard for people to believe that these conditions exist," she said. "This program had grown to a level where I couldn't do it alone, but we didn't have a mechanism to do outreach stateside. They not only have the organizational skills but the heart for it and have run with it to do what was needed.

"Now I just sit back and think it's just incredible what they've done. It's just an example of what can be done on a local level."

Like Denning, who also has worked with mental health, Head Start and AIDS programs, Workman has been involved in children and family programs her entire career. After 12 years in Boston, where she worked in inner city neighborhoods to help prevent child abuse, she moved back to northern Michigan in 2000.

But it wasn't until friend Paul Sutherland met Denning on an airplane and inspired by a visit to the Guatemala City dump, told other locals about her efforts, that Workman decided to put her family ecology degree to work. She joined Safe Passage's board of directors in August and, accompanied by husband Wayne, made her first trip to Guatemala in January.

"I knew that it was going to be a really difficult thing to see and to witness, but the poverty there was even worse than I imagined," said Workman, of Cedar. "The good thing was that the program was better than I imagined. I see the difference it's made, and there's so much hope."

"Everybody wants to know that they're giving money that will make a difference," added Tom Wigton, a nurse anesthetist at Munson Medical Center. "We saw that happening."

Workman said the goal of the Great Lakes Friends group is to raise $20,000 for Safe Passage, whose operations budget this year is $1.4 million. If they're lucky, they'll net much of it at Fiesta.

The event, which is entirely underwritten by donations, will feature Guatemalan food; music by local groups including 3 Hour Tour, the Original 3rd Coast, Adair Correll, Les Dalgliesh and Norm Wheeler; and a silent auction with Guatemalan handcrafts and other items such as a trip to Guatemala.

Tickets are $25 at the door and can be reserved by calling 590-6072. For more information about Safe Passage, visit www.safepassage.org.