Culture club helps local kids learn about Mexican heritage

The four school teachers just wanted one thing: to bring a piece of Mexican culture to the kids of the Yakima Valley.

They have.

Or so said Sister Maria Helena Robinson, the Wapato-based nun who is partly sponsoring four educators from Zacatecas, a state in Mexico located in the North Central region of the country.

Since mid-July, the teachers -- two men and two women -- have been teaching arts and crafts, folk dancing, singing and showing how to make computerized videos to children from ages 5 to 15 at the Wapato Community Center and at CAD-LAC, another popular neighborhood place. The goal has been to teach local kids about Mexican culture during the summer, said Robinson.

Last Thursday, about 40 children learned how to do paper crafts with teachers Mary Varela and Merced Guzmán (both describe themselves as "twentysomething"), while other students were busy making videos on computers with the help of instructors Miguel Pinales, 35, and Luis Gabriel Haro, 43.

Robinson, who belongs to the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, has visited Mexico several times. The nun said she hopes the contact between local students -- Wapato's population is made up of about 70 percent Latinos from Mexican origin -- and the instructors from Zacatecas will help kids tap into their roots.

"They are being exposed to a cultural richness that they can call their own," said Robinson.

All four teachers volunteered to spend their summer vacations schooling in Wapato, Robinson said. They are scheduled to head back to Zacatecas from Sea-Tac airport on Aug. 17 and will start their classes the next day.

The teachers said that they were doing this because of the challenge to instruct in a foreign country. But mostly they wanted to convey the beauty of Mexican culture to the younger generation of local Latinos.

"Each generation always has to leave to their descendants the teachings of their culture," said Haro, who works in the capital of Zacatecas, while his students enthusiastically worked on their computers.

Robinson said that was the idea behind bringing the teachers here to the Yakima Valley: to connect them with a sense of culture and language. She said that she was involved in a similar program near Tacoma some years ago and the results were quite revealing.

"The students later went on to do well in school. I can't prove that it was due to the visit by the Mexican teachers, but I think their participation had a lot to do with it," Robinson said.

So when she learned that she could bring a group of teachers from Zacatecas through the Binational Migrant Education Program (PROBEM), a Mexico-U.S. teacher exchange, she jumped at the chance.

Often the Mexican Consulate in Seattle has led the program in Washington, but in this case the state of Zacatecas and Robinson spearheaded it, she said. Still, she added that the consulate was in the loop.

Teachers who volunteer for this program get room and board paid for by sponsors like Robinson. The four educators are staying with the nun at Marie Rose House in Wapato.

For Haro, an important part of his job is to show students how to make right choices.

"My duty is to try to teach kids to really be happy, to not follow the path to drugs or vandalism, to live life in a positive way," he said. "Each student has many gifts to use and many times they are used in a negative way."

In addition to the wealth of culture and knowledge that the Mexican teachers bring to Wapato, just as important is the human touch, Robinson said.

"To me, living day by day with the Mexican teachers is certainly showing me in many ways how different our cultures are," Robinson said. "And how much are we going to choose to learn from one another or to shut ourselves out."

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