As she has done for the past 10 years, Pam Lathrop is hunting for sponsors for children living in Guadalajara’s Salvation Army shelter. And the approach of Christmas this year brings into focus the necessity of her work and its intangible benefits.
“I love the kids. I’ve grown up with some of them,” she says.
Although many of the shelter’s 66 children go home during the holidays to stay with their often distressed parents, “about six of them don’t have families to go home to. So I continue to visit them during the holidays. I play dominoes with them or take inexpensive prizes. I love kids and I don’t have any of my own.”
Every Wednesday morning, Lathrop spends a couple hours at the home, officially called Ejercito de Salvacion Hogar de Niños Evangelina, helping a group of second graders with their homework. “If for some reason I can’t go one week and the major forgets to tell them, the kids don’t forget! The next week they’ll say, ‘Where were you?’”
It’s gratifying to know she is providing a bit of continuity in their lives, Lathrop says. “My part is small. But I know the home makes a difference. Let me give a couple examples. One Christmas I was out there playing dominoes with the kids and a man in his forties came with toys. He lives in the States now — he’s a successful businessman. He told me, ‘I used to live here! Every year, when I come home to visit my mom, I always visit here.’ And the couple who are taking over as majors in January — the man used to live at the Hogar!”
Stories like that keep Lathrop going, she says, even though the Women’s Auxiliary that once helped support the Hogar has been defunct for some time and it has recently become more difficult to find sponsors due to the poor state of the economy.
“Of the 66 kids, 27 already have sponsors and a lot of them are my personal friends. But sometimes sponsors spring up when I least expect it. One man who had fought in World War II, called me from Lakeside out of the blue. He said he wanted to sponsor because he remembered what the Salvation Army did for him during the war — volunteers crawled out on the battlefield to bring him coffee. He said, ‘Other relief groups charged the soldiers for coffee, but the Salvation Army didn’t charge me a dime.’”
*Restricted Article* - To view rest of this content, please login or register..
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
