Happy to Foot the Bill

Throughout the year, Carlos Saez and his Irvine-based Friends of the Orphanages supply clothes to the 50 Mexican children who live in Orphanage Estado 29 in Baja California.

But for the past 14 Decembers, Saez, his wife, Linda, and a team of volunteers have done something extra: They have loaded the children into vans and cars for a shoe-buying trip into Ensenada, where the children, ages 2 to 19, are allowed to pick out their footwear.

Each child is paired with a volunteer, and as they shop, one volunteer, dressed as Santa Claus, passes out snacks and toys.

“It’s really a big party for them,” said Carlos Saez, who describes the cramped, noisy scene as “organized chaos.”

“You can imagine 50 children in a shoe store, plus the adults,” Saez said with a laugh. “Do you know what a mega-speaker is? It’s 4 feet high and 2 or 3 feet wide. They have two of those outside the store playing Mexican music almost to the max. Now you try to talk inside.”

For many of the children, it’s the first time they’ve been allowed to buy something for themselves. And while most of them are happy with the shoe store they’re taken to, Saez said, “the older girls always like to go to two or three other stores to see what their choices are.”

“Last year, the big thing all the girls wanted was platform tennies, but this year it varied,” said Linda Saez, who teaches kindergarten at Oakview Elementary School in Huntington Beach.

The approximately $2,000 spent on shoes this year--and hundreds more on socks, underwear and gloves, which the children are also allowed to select--is only a small part of what Friends of the Orphanages provides for the children’s home, which is nine miles northeast of Ensenada.

With the help of individuals, churches and organizations, the nonprofit charitable corporation gives about $60,000 a year to operate Orphanage Estado 29. That includes money for food, utilities, schooling, clothing, medical and dental expenses for the children, wages for 10 workers, building maintenance and construction materials.

The Chilean-born Saez, 56, a biomedical engineer who serves as the organization’s president and executive director, is spearheading the remodeling of the orphanage’s kitchen with volunteer help.

The complex of buildings with a huge courtyard paved by volunteers is a far cry from what the Saezes saw when they first visited Orphanage Estado 29 with members of a church group 16 years ago.

At the time, Saez said, the orphanage consisted of a tiny kitchen and two dark bedrooms that slept about 15 children each.

“Conditions were terrible,” Saez said. “There was garbage all over, there was no running water, no showers; they had outhouses. Children were sleeping almost one on top of the other. They were alive [only] because the Lord was looking upon them.”

Today, the orphanage boasts 12 bedrooms and 15 bathrooms, a large dining room, a kitchen three times as big as the old one, a spacious pantry, a computer room where the children can do their homework, and even a basketball court.

“People go over there now and say this is so nice,” said Saez, “but the important thing is the children. The children are clean. Everyone is fed and goes to school. All their medical needs are [met] and they are all into a dental program. And I would say almost anything that they want to do in respect to studies they can do it.”

Saez said one boy is one of the best basketball players in Baja. “Every time they ask him to play in [another] part of Mexico, he says, ‘I need a little bit of money or shoes,’ and he can do it.”

The Saezes average two trips to the orphanage a month, always taking their two children--9-year-old Neil and 7-year-old Natalie--with them.

“They’ve been going down there since they were 2 months old,” said Saez, who has seen many of the children at the orphanage arrive as young children and leave as young adults.

The motto of Friends of the Orphanages is “Touch the future--help a child today.”

And there have been numerous success stories.

Eight of the children at Orphanage Estado 29 have gone on to trade schools, one is a student at the university in Ensenada and two more plan to attend. One young woman is an executive secretary. Another, who spent 11 years at the orphanage, works as a cook in a nearby restaurant and plans to get married in a few months.

It’s satisfying, Saez acknowledged, “just to give a child an opportunity to be a child and be able to laugh and play and not have to fight for life. We give them a home and the peace they need to be a child.” Saez said the children come from varied backgrounds.

Some are victims of parental abuse. Some have parents who are in jail or are in drug rehabilitation. Other children have been abandoned. And some have only one parent who is very poor and unable to support them.

Which is why the shoe-buying trip--the children call it “viaje para los zapatos”--means so much to them.

“I think for many of the children it’s an occasion where they’re bonding with their friends to the north, which we are,” Saez said. “It’s responding [to] love and friendships and they can say, ‘This is someone who cares about us.’ ”

After they returned from their recent shoe-buying spree, the children, workers and volunteers gathered in the orphanage’s large dining room, where two Christmas trees were surrounded by presents.

They had been eating so much turkey since Thanksgiving, Saez said, “that the children begged me, ‘Please, no turkeys.’ So we made carne asada [thin, marinated steak] for them. After dinner everything was cleared and the children had a program for us where they sang and did little sketches. That’s the way they say thank you to us for going down there all year.”

As they watched the children laughing and enjoying themselves while they performed, Saez said, many of the volunteers had tears in their eyes.

“It is a very touching moment,” he said.

Friends of the Orphanages, 8 McLaren St., Suite F, Irvine, CA 92618. (949) 768-7830.