County’s Children of Privilege Meet Poverty’s Children : Yule Miracles Happen for Tijuana Poor

The first miracle, Sister Beth Muir said, was the traffic. There was none.

Then there was the Mexican border guard who merely peered at the headstrong nun behind the steering wheel of the monster truck and inquired politely, “Santa Claus?” before waving on the gift-laden convoy.

And after that the real miracles started happening, far too many to keep track of, when Orange County’s children of privilege met Tijuana’s children of squalor and Christmas came early.

Not that it looked like Christmas, here on the dirt streets of Colonia Terrazas de Rubi Saturday among the junked cars and fetid pools of water. But it felt like Christmas.

Feeling of Generosity

Muir, the mastermind behind this meeting of two worlds, could feel it as she watched her students from Anaheim’s Cornelia Connelly School of the Holy Child unload hundreds of their Christmas presents. The feeling was that of generosity.

And Magdelena Guillen de Mendoza, who was helping to stack those same presents in her living room, saw it on the faces of the neighborhood children. It was wonder, it was excitement, it was awe.

“I asked Santa for some shoes because the ones I have are almost worn out,” said a shy Erica Ivet Rodriguez, 6, glancing at her scruffy black shoes, their sides split to the soles. “My mama can’t buy me new ones. And also, a Barbie. I’d like an original Barbie, with movable arms and everything.”

Erica was among the 750 impoverished children in the Catholic parish of La Maria, Madre de la Ecclesia, whose letters to Santa were intercepted by David Lynch, a New Yorker who transplanted himself to Tijuana 6 years ago and can best be described as a free-lance do-gooder.

Lynch, who runs a school, three medical clinics and a group home in Tijuana, teamed up with Muir 4 years ago to bring Christmas to some of the city’s poor children. From that has come a bounty beyond all expectations.

“These are the only Christmas presents that these kids get,” Lynch said as he stood in the makeshift staging area outside the church on Saturday. “In the dump (one of the neighborhoods where presents were distributed), they didn’t even celebrate Christmas.”

This year, because of the tremendous amount of letters, Muir passed on about half of the humble wish lists to Rosary High School, a Catholic girl’s school in Fullerton, and others to Servite High School, a Catholic boy’s school in Anaheim. Several other Orange County residents, who just happened to hear about the program, also leaped at the chance to play Santa.

“I’ve never seen a project take off like this,” Muir said. “It just accidentally touches a lot of people.”

Not that Saturday’s convoy of 14 trucks, vans, cars and one camper, all of them packed with gifts, was anything but well planned. Parents and teachers pitched in to drive, students donned their acid-washed jeans and Reeboks, and Muir, who does not wear a nun’s habit, wore a huge wooden cross around her neck.

“The bigger, the better,” she said, holding up the cross she hoped would ward off any bad vibes.

It worked, apparently. The only groans came from the engines of the vans and trucks as they chugged their way along rutted dirt roads. The students, ordered to get a reality fix, walked.

Parent and van driver Charlie O’Brien, whose daughter, Erin, 14, is a Connelly freshman, said he hoped the experience of sharing one’s good fortune with others would show the girls “the other side of the street.”

“These kids are pretty well off,” he said. “They live a pretty special life. They don’t get an opportunity to see this very often.”

Erin, meanwhile, was amazed by the Christmas wish lists. They showed her how so little can be so much.

“It’s really weird,” she said. “My little girl asked for school supplies. These are like everyday things that we have. We go to a grocery store and get a notebook. Here they get it as a Christmas present and they think it’s neat.”

But Erin, like the other girls, didn’t feel constrained by wish lists. She also threw in “a lot of shirts, sweaters, tennis shoes and a doll.”

“They get excited,” her father said. “They want to buy them label stuff, stuff that they’d want, not just a regular skateboard.”

Although students at Connelly, where tuition runs $5,500 a year, are required to do 8 hours of community service work per semester, the Christmas program is strictly voluntary. Many of the students, however, have been visiting the same Tijuana neighborhood once a month as part of their community service work.

The experience, they say, has humbled and enriched them.

“Last year, I got a (Santa) letter from a little girl who asked for a Communion dress and a doll for her little sister,” said Maria Porche, a Connelly sophomore from Villa Park. “But then she said, ‘If you can only get one present, just get the doll for my little sister.’ ”

Maria, however, bought the dress, the doll and then some.

Yet despite the girls’ generosity, there were still children Saturday whose names were not on any of the hundreds of beautifully wrapped presents.

Local coordinator Magdelena Guillen de Mendoza, showing a visitor a neat ledger of 250 children’s names in Terrazas de Rubi, explained that last year nearly 500 children sent letters to Santa.

“So this year, they told us we would have to cut that in half,” she said. “Then they said we could add another 100, so we did. But that still left out some children. We’re hoping to have some presents left over for them.”

Manuel Guevara, a skinny 7-year-old with his T-shirt on inside out and backwards, just shrugged his shoulders when asked what Santa would be bringing him. Manuel didn’t find out about the letters to Santa, but he said he would have liked a bike.

Anel de la Paz Hernandez Ochoa, 12, said she didn’t ask for anything either, but that her 2-year-old sister, Yadira, whom she held in her arms, did ask for a doll.

“So maybe she’ll get something,” Anel said with a shy turn of her head.

Carmen Ivet Castillo, 6, dressed in red pants and suspenders, said she didn’t ask for anything “because my mama wouldn’t let me. . . . But I wanted a Barbie.”

Muir said most of the children asked for clothing and shoes--drawing an outline of a foot on the back of the letters for sizing--and other extras like a doll or a ball.

So far, she said, only one family has tried to take advantage of the program, asking in a letter last year for a new dining room set and a VCR.

“We put that letter aside,” Muir said with a smile.

But that was the exception. Most of the letters, she said, have gushed with gratitude and love.

Fourth-grader Miriam Consuelo Cornejo Galaz, began her letter like this: “I know that there are children who are poorer than we are and who live in the street suffering cold and hunger and who don’t have the love of their parents and who don’t even have a piece of tortilla or bread to eat, but because we are six brothers and sisters, plus my parents, and my grandmother, there are nine of us all together.”

After explaining to Santa that her family, however, did not have enough money to buy Christmas presents, Miriam asked for pens, pencils, a book bag, socks and, if possible, some chocolates.

“This is all that I ask you,” she said. “I hope it is not too expensive.”