Learning From Their Mistakes

From wounded to healer.

Gerardo Garibay, 35, grew up in a home with domestic violence and saw his five younger siblings run with gangs. His father eventually abandoned the family, and one brother died in a gang shooting.

That painful background, Garibay said, makes him more effective today in leading his “parents teaching parents” gang-prevention classes.

A lot of his students have the same type of experiences, said Garibay, a goateed father of five who wears two gold hoops in his ear. “That’s why we can relate.”

At a daylong leadership workshop last week, instructors drew upon their varied pasts to teach parents how to better communicate with their children, resolve problems nonviolently and serve as community leaders.

The workshop, held at Camp Unity in the Angeles National Forest, was conducted by Soledad Enrichment Action, a community education program based in East Los Angeles. For the last 25 years, SEA--as the program is commonly known--has provided high-risk youths and their families with alternatives to gangs, drugs and violence.

For Garibay, who began teaching two years ago, watching his students improve parenting skills is gratifying.

“I like the change in a person’s face once you’ve listened to them,” he said, smiling. “You can see when they realize that there are possibilities.”

Before he became an instructor, Garibay was a student, ordered by a family court judge to attend parenting classes provided by Soledad Enrichment Action.

Garibay started the course when a daughter began acting out in school. Though he was reluctant to participate at first, Garibay said, he credits SEA with sparking an emotional turnaround in him.

“I really found myself,” he said.

Garibay’s parenting class leader saw that he was an articulate and enthusiastic student, and encouraged him to become an instructor after he completed the 20-week course.

Soon Garibay found himself trading in his career as a $60,000-a-year chemical formulator to work full time for SEA.

“I can do a lot of things,” he said. “But God wants me here and I want me here.”

SEA’s classes work, Garibay said, because they address parents’ needs. “They still carry neglect, violence, sex abuse and spousal abuse with them.” His job is to give them the tools to change old patterns.

Though he counsels others on how to be better parents, Garibay is the first to admit that his own family life is less than perfect. “I still struggle,” he said. His sons accuse him of “trying that counseling stuff” on them, he said. He also carries a double load with “the problems with my own family and the families I care about.”

But perhaps that is precisely the point, said Sister Ines Telles, director of curriculum at SEA. Telles, who created the “Parents Helping Parents” course, feels that “wounded healers,” or instructors with real-life hardships of their own, would better understand their students’ problems.

“The idea is come with me, we’ll walk through this together,” Telles said.

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At first, the spirited 60-year-old with short coal black hair and white sneakers said she felt ill-equipped to design a parenting course, given that she wasn’t a parent and had never been married. “I thought, ‘Who am I to do this?’ ” she said.

But after spending 22 years as a Catholic missionary in Peru, she felt that she could bring solid teaching experience to the table.

Concerned that there was not enough information on minority family issues, Telles aimed the course at “nonwhite, non-middle-class families,” covering child development, family communication, discipline skills, family meetings, gangs, drugs, suicide and domestic violence.

The 30 participants at last week’s workshop were culled from SEA’s citywide “Parents Helping Parents” program, a free course sponsored by the county’s L.A. Bridges project. The parents were invited to the session because they wanted to share what they had learned throughout the course with other families in their neighborhoods.

Parenting student Grace Stone, 33, a mother of three, was one of four women at the seminar who did not speak Spanish. She too came to SEA via a court mandate after a domestic dispute.

Through the classes, Stone said, she realized that she had been taking out her anguish on her children. “I was the kind of parent who was always yelling and screaming at my kids,” she said.

A survivor of two prior relationships involving domestic violence, Stone said she had closed herself off to the world before joining the parenting classes. Now, she has gone back to school, joined the PTA, passed the postal exam and plans to do volunteer work. “My kids notice that I’m changing,” she said. “I’ve opened myself up. I’m more patient with them and they see it.”

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Connie Rivera, Stone’s parenting class instructor, said that when she initially took the course, she “felt like the Wicked Witch, like the only way to make myself heard was to scream.”

Rivera, who has four daughters ages 6 to 15, added: “I was a tyrant, and that’s why I sought help.”

Rivera said the non-intrusive approach to the class, where parents are given the tools to change but are not pressured, worked for her.

Now, as an instructor, she says: “All we’re doing is planting the seed . . . and it’s going to grow.”

SEA began in 1972 when a grieving mother came to bury her second son and consulted Brother Modesto Leon at his church at the time, Our Lady of Soledad in East Los Angeles.

Now the executive director of a large nonprofit organization, Leon’s strategy is to straighten communities out by tightening family bonds. “We’re trying to get the parents to listen to their kids,” Leon said. “If you heal the family, you heal the community.”

SEA also operates alternative high schools throughout Los Angeles County.

Funding for the parenting courses, held in middle schools across the county, is guaranteed for four years, said Leon, and Camp Unity is rented to SEA for a token dollar per year.

He thinks the program is strong enough to stand on its own. Leon however, is all too aware that funding is not forever in the world of community work.

“Even if the funds are gone in four years, you’ve left something behind,” he said. ‘You’ve empowered these families.”