When Giving Is Worth It : A Mexican Orphanage Confirms a Visitor’s Charity

My mother wanted to visit the orphanage. It was way down in Mexico, about an hour’s drive from Cuernavaca, and she wanted to see it.

About 10 years ago a friend of hers had died up in the California high desert. His last wish had been that instead of flowers, his friends would send contributions to Los Pequenos Hermanos , in the Mexican town of Miacatlan. Mother sent $25, and a month or so later got back a carefully hand-typed thank-you note. Mother sent more money. And got another thank-you note.

It was not lost on her that no one in the big American charities--I need not name them here--had ever sent her a hand-typed “thank you.” What they sent her was another envelope with another “urgent message” with little boxes designating the amounts of money they wanted. Sometimes they even printed a check-mark in the box that the computer figured mother could afford--a demeaning $35. That was more than she wanted to give, but so much less than the amounts printed beside those other boxes: $50, $100, $500 and so on.

So my mother, closer in years to 80 than 70, wanted to see the orphanage. Several years ago she got close. She was with a group of friends in Mexico City. A day-excursion was planned to the countryside. Mom voted for Los Pequenos Hermanos . The rest wanted to go to Taxco to see the silver factories. Mother was steamed, but there was nothing she could do about it.

This year, with her birthday coming up, we decided to go to Mexico City, then Cuernavaca, then Miacatlan, to see that orphanage! The trip came at a peculiar time, just a month before taxes and two weeks after a scathing expose on television’s “60 Minutes” revealing that a hefty percentage of many of the charitable contributions that Americans make go into the pockets of sociopathic scoundrels who take their ill-gotten gain to Rio or the Bahamas where they spend it on tango lessons and expensive yachts instead of curing cancer or heart disease.

On the other hand, charitable contributions were still the sure way a poor but honest taxpayer could cut down on paying income tax. Faced with the metaphysical question: Would you rather pay for “Star Wars” or some scoundrel’s tango lessons--well, that was a hard one. It would be nicer to pay for curing cancer, unblocking arteries and voting the good guys into office. But who could be sure these days where that money went? Probably it went into printing up more envelopes with those insulting little boxes on them.

Let me say that I had my own dark thoughts about this trip, this orphanage. Why give your hard-earned money, thought I, to people in a foreign country, 2,000 miles away, when everywhere about us the homeless shiver in the street, or beggars try to sell you geraniums picked from out of your own back yard? For people who aren’t rich, white and well-educated, Los Angeles--once in living memory, the prettiest, safest and most prosperous of cities--really is going to hell in a hand basket. And what about our own incrementally-increasing population of people sick and dying from AIDS?

But my mother lives in a mobile home in the high desert, and she washes her hands of L.A. So one bright morning we headed out of Cuernavaca in a hired car toward the little town of Miacatlan. It turned out the orphans lived in what was once a sugar hacienda liberated in the last century by Emiliano Zapata himself. There were acres of cultivated land that stretched to the horizon. And huge, white-washed, spotless buildings. A tired director took our contributions and pecked out a thank-you note for us on his manual typewriter. But the 450 boys who lived there had their own computers, and the little kids had perfectly made beds with toys piled on each one. Lots of older boys played soccer, but some others took care of 1,300 chickens and 20 sows nursing their litters in spotless stys. The orphans’ fish farm was amazing, set up by a visiting American so that these kids would never have a protein deficiency.

My mother, who had gone through hard times in her own life, asked what happened when the orphans misbehaved. Our guide, a nice teen-ager with pretty good English, said, “They go to a separate room to think about what they’ve done. But we never kick them out. We never kick them out. They’re part of our family forever.” The sun beat down on vegetable gardens and bougainvillea vines, and it became perfectly obvious that these orphans lived about 10 times more nicely than we did.

My younger daughter worries herself sick about the Los Angeles homeless. I went with her last Christmas to take toys and clothes to a church in Venice. People there were working hard, but the work was stop-gap. Sad women on drugs nodded and gibbered in pews, locked in their own lonely nightmares. A zillion kids clustered around us. We hadn’t brought enough toys or anything else. The feeling was, there might never be enough . . . .

In our family we tend both to agree and disagree. We agree now that the people who send us those expensively printed envelopes with the boxes already checked and the single-spaced harangues about some cause or other better look somewhere else for their dollars. Why should we pay letter-writers and middle-level PR people and print-shop employees? My daughter gives and gives, to people she can see and touch--to women and children, perhaps because she’s a child of divorce, and to see women and children alone and poor tears her heart. But my mother, I think, is the real visionary. As my mother looked into big fish tanks down there in Miacatlan, I saw that she was something more than “happy.” She owned those fish tanks. She was giving right up there at the top of the line, to her own concrete idea of life as it should be. She gave as freely and easily as a queen, rather than what she herself had been from the age of 11, an orphan, without even a fish--let alone a fish tank--to call her own.