A Lesson for Children, Young and Old

This story is about Barry Baxter.

Baxter, 69, has run his church’s annual Christmas toy drive for the better part of two decades. This, however, would be his last tour of duty delivering gifts to orphans and abandoned children in Tijuana.

“I fell in love with these kids in Mexico,” Baxter said. “I was just moved by the need down there.”

But he and his wife are moving to Stockton in January to be closer to their kids and grandchildren.

Did his children ever go down to the orphanage when they were younger?

“Of course,” he said. “Children come back from there different people.”

This story is about my kids.

I decided to bring my two oldest sons--Taylor, 11, and Tristan, 8--with me when I traveled with Baxter on his last Tijuana run for Irvine Presbyterian Church.

My kids live in abundant ease--skateboards and $70 shoes, hundreds of baseball cards and regular trips to Disneyland. They had to come back different people from a daylong trip to a Tijuana orphanage.

On an early Saturday morning two weeks ago, about 30 people--cups of Starbucks coffee in their hands--met in the parking lot at Irvine Presbyterian to caravan to Mexico.

Within two hours we arrived at the Tijuana Christian Mission. The mission consists of two-story, whitewashed, cinder-block buildings crowded around a rectangular courtyard about the size of a tennis court.

The orphanage, located in a hilltop neighborhood no more than a quarter-mile from the California border, is spartan but clean, though it’s hard to keep up with the dust. It’s also very cold. The mission can’t afford heat.

But you can look out from one of the balconies at the orphanage and see--almost touch--the affluent suburbs of San Diego.

Martha Lopez, 58, has run the mission for 35 years. It started out as a church, but soon turned into an orphanage when children kept arriving on the doorstep with nowhere else to go.

In the courtyard, the children from Irvine Presbyterian quickly mixed with the Mexican kids thanks to a basketball and a hoop. Later, there would be Christmas carols, a visit from Santa and a homemade lunch of tacos, tamales, rice and beans.

Tijuana is home to 70 orphanages, Lopez said, and still 7,000 children live on the street. She turns kids away from her mission “nearly every week. There’s just not room. Only the children in the worst situation are accepted.”

Today, 65 children--infants to 17 years old--live there. Some of them are orphaned, but most have been abandoned by mothers who are drug addicts, prostitutes or simply too poor to care for their children. The fathers, in most cases, have left long ago for parts unknown.

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Lopez manages all this on a $72,000 annual budget. Small donations trickle in from across the United States and Canada. Irvine Presbyterian is the mission’s top benefactor at $9,000.

“People ask me if I get discouraged,” Lopez says in English. She answers the question with a story.

One day, thousands of starfish washed up on a beach. A boy, walking along the shoreline, stopped and started throwing as many back as he could.

A man passed by and asked, “What are you doing? You’re not going to save very many of them.”

The boy held up the starfish in his hand and said, “I can make a difference for this one.” And he threw it back into the sea.

Lopez makes a difference. The children arrive with nothing but the dirty clothes on their back.

“We have so many problems,” Lopez said. “They’ve never had any discipline at all. So you start from the bottom. Discipline and a lot of love. You have to show them that you love them.”

Lopez uses the annual Christmas party--at which every child gets an armful of presents--to underscore this point.

“I tell the kids, do these gifts appear by magic?” Lopez said. “No. It’s something greater than magic. These Americans, who you don’t know, feel love for you. And that’s changed the lives of so many kids.”

This story is about Martha Lopez.

Lopez and her staff of seven do their best to be moms and dads to 65 children. But the kids take care of each other. The big ones, if you can call 8-year-olds big, take care of the little ones with a simple tenderness that makes your heart ache.

My boys took it all in. On the way home, when Taylor discovered he’d left his beloved Stanford sweatshirt at the mission, he said, “That’s OK. They need it more than me.”

Maybe they had changed a little.

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As for me, I’ve thought about the mission’s children every day for the past two weeks. The images I keep turning over in my mind:

The small, cold rooms--bunks stacked three high--where the younger children sleep two or three to a bed.

The toddlers trying to carry away their presents from Santa Claus, barely making it back to their seats under the weight of the gifts.

The small boys’ bathroom with a urinal and two open toilets.

The kids saving one of their two or three presents to give to terminally ill children at a nearby hospital.

The smiles. The gratitude.

The grace.

On this Christmas morning, I’m thinking--and you’re probably way ahead of me here--that this story is also about me.