Couple's mission to help Salvadoran orphans finish high school

By AMY ROE
March 9, 2005
Bellevue Reporter

Ricardo Pocasangre is a soft-spoken man who lets his American-born wife, Joy, do most of the talking. Thus, when Pocasangre interrupts with an anecdote from his harrowing life story, it's all the more dramatic. He remembers, for example, being 10 years old and traveling with his grandmother from the Salvadoran countryside to the capital, San Salvador, to visit her nephew, who was the head of a private college. "My grandmother promised me when I finished sixth grade, I could come to San Salvador to study with my uncle, " he said. Ricardo worked and waited for a day that would never come. When he finished sixth grade, there was no money for school. Instead, he milked cows on the family farm, and later escaped El Salvador during the 1980's civil war that killed 75,000 people. Now a Bellevue resident and part-time driver for Overlake Terrace, an assisted-living facility, Ricardo is helping to give some of El Salvador's poorest citizens, children from state-run orphanages, called hogars, the chance to graduate from high school. The Pocasangres are soliciting sponsorship from local churches and service organizations to help Salvadoran orphans pay for high school. A high-school diploma erases the stigma of being an orphan, the Pocasangres said.

"Your whole status changes," Joy said. "Especially the females," added Ricardo. "You are no longer to live your life as a maid. You can be a secretary and be clean, decent." For Salvadoran orphans, graduating from high school can seem like an insurmountable challenge. First, there is the price. Salvadoran school goes until the ninth grade. After that, students must pay $400 for a year's tuition and books. Then there's the fact that many have no place to stay, because orphans who have completed the ninth grade must leave the orphanage. "A lot of people put off graduating or try and flunk," Joy said, "because there's no place for them to go." The Pocasangres, who run a nonprofit organization called Niños Estudiando El Salvador (NESES), have to let students who are continuing their education stay on in the orphanage. The couple agreed to fund 19 students. They have been offering the scholarships since 2003. Two of the girls they sponsored, Tomasa and Gladys, graduated in December. Joy keeps a binder full of the students' applications, along with their photographs and copies of their grades. She also has made a PowerPoint presentation with pictures of the students. She hopes these personal touches will move people to donate.

Ricardo and Joy Pocasangre run a nonprofit organization, Ninos Estudiando El Salvador, that works with orphanes in El Salvador to allow children to stay while continuing their education.

"A congregation could say, 'We're sponsoring Transito. Wow, we're sending a Salvadoran kid to high school,'" she said.

The Pocasangres know the applicants well. Each has joined them on a weeklong sightseeing trip through El Salvador that NESES has sponsored for orphans since 1998. In all, they have taken about 150 children from Mayan ruins to the general assembly in San Salvador to repatriated communities like Ciudad Romero, named for the archbishop and champion of the poor who was gunned down by right-wing forces while saying mass in 1980.

Despite the fact that the country is slightly smaller than the state of Massachusetts, most of the children had never seen such sites. "This could be like 15 minutes away and they wouldn't even know it was there," Joy said. The trip exposes them to their country and presents possibilities for a better life through education. It's a different perspective in a nation where improvement is viewed as synonymous with immigration. Joy remembers reading a survey that found that 80 percent of Salvadorans want to leave their country and move to the United States. At the end of the weeklong trip, the Pocasangres hope that the children will decide to be part of the 20 percent who stay. It's a tough sell, Ricardo said, adding: "The people don't see opportunity to earn a living." Many of the children living in orphanages are there because their parents have moved to the United States, Joy said. Directors of orphanages also are lured away by the promise of a better life in America. In the past two years, one of the orphanages NESES works with has had five directors. "I think all the kids who are there (in El Salvador's orphanages) have been abandoned," she added. "And I think they[the children] feel that very strongly." For information about NESES, call (425) 747-0877 or email joypoca@neses.org.