Seniors leaving two high schools

Since 2004, a group of Spokane students has raised $30,000 to pay the entire operating costs of a high school in a Central American village.

The 20 or so students from Lewis and Clark High School and a few students from St. George’s School are aware that without their group, Los Hermanos, there would be no high school in Huizisilapa, El Salvador.

This reality now weighs on the students as they prepare to go their separate ways when they graduate in the spring.

Los Hermanos has made it possible for children raised in the affluence of the United States to understand the poverty elsewhere in the world. Huizisilapa has taught them that with opportunity comes responsibility.

“We got this connection with Huizisilapa, and we ran with it,” said Aaron Fitzpatrick, an LC senior and officer in Los Hermanos, which is Spanish for “brothers.” “Now it would seem weird if we didn’t have it.”

So far this year, the LC students have raised about $2,300, most of it from a fundraising dinner and auction last month. The St. George’s students, meanwhile, have raised about $1,132 by making and selling Valentine’s Day cards.

Los Hermanos grew out of a group of Spokane women who share an interest in El Salvador and who built a relationship with the women of Huizisilapa.

The Spokane women’s group, called Las Hermanas, were inspired by Phyllis Andersen, a Whitworth instructor who served in the Peace Corps in El Salvador in the 1960s. Andersen returned in 2001 to do field research for her dissertation.

Some of the people of Huizisilapa were participants in that study.

“I got so attached to them I vowed to have a community in the United States” that would support the community in El Salvador, Andersen said. “So, I sent invitations to about 50 women that I knew. It was after 9/11, and people were like, ‘Hey, we better wake up and make a difference.’ “

After the support began, some members of Las Hermanas visited El Salvador and developed friendships in Huizisilapa. They helped the Salvadoran community start a jewelry cooperative and raise funds for uniforms and computers for their school.

Huizisilapa is a community of displaced Salvadorans who met in Mesa Grande, a Honduran refugee camp, during the Salvadoran civil war in the 1980s. After the U.S.-backed government signed a peace deal with the guerrillas in 1992, the group built a town on land in central El Salvador bought for them by the government of Denmark. Today, the cinder-block village has a population of about 800.

The grade school in Huizisilapa was built and financed by the government, but there was no money for a high school.

Members of Las Hermanas have been together five years. Some of their children are the core group of students who founded Los Hermanos. Their goal was to provide funding so that high school students could study at the Huizisilapa school, as well.

“The endeavor was meant to be a partnership, not a charity,” said LC senior Nate Conover.

Though the people of Huizisilapa have little to give back, Conover said, “they gave everything they had” to him and other Los Hermanos members – more than half the group – who visited El Salvador in 2005. Each member of the group stayed in the home of a Salvadoran student.

“After seeing the poverty and how important education was to them, it made it a lot easier to find the time for fundraising,” said Lillian Dubiel, an LC senior and a Los Hermanos officer.

The group’s adviser, LC English teacher Cory Davis, said the students have a deep-rooted passion for helping.

“They are concerned they are not going to keep that passion alive” in the few underclassmen in the group, Davis said.

Andersen’s daughter, Juanita, a sophomore at LC, hopes to continue Los Hermanos when the seniors graduate. Some of the seniors also hope to continue their efforts after graduation.

“I have friends now (in Huizisilapa) I have to keep supporting,” said St. George’s student Laurel Fish. If Los Hermanos dies, she said, “they don’t go to school.”

Dubiel said Los Hermanos is seeking grants from nonprofit organizations to continue financing the Huizisilapa school after this year.

There also is a chance of funding from the Salvadoran Legislature, Andersen said. The community is putting pressure on the Ministry of Education, where rural and urban schools are paid for separately.

“We’ve been hoping it would happen for the last couple of years,” Andersen said. “The ideal would be for there not to be a need for Los Hermanos to help Huizisilapa.”

If that happens, the group could evolve differently, she said.

This year, two Huizisilapa high school students were accepted into college in the capital of San Salvador. It will cost them $243 per month each to attend, said Dubiel, who is already looking for ways to raise the money.

“Education is the most feasible and important way for people to bring themselves out of abject poverty and change their lives and the lives of people around them,” Dubiel said.