comunidad para baja california

Los Gatos High School students Carley Stavis and Ashley Quisol aren’t planning a typical fun-filled spring break next week.

Theirs will be a more serious adventure, as they join adult volunteers from the Los Gatos-based non-profit Comunidad Para Baja California on a mission to impoverished villages south of the border.

You might call them the advance team: Ashley and Carley, both 17, are going to scout needs at schools attended by indigenous children in Baja California to prepare for a larger student mission this summer.

“My main purpose is to see what we’re dealing with,” Ashley said. They will “look at what they have, what they need and what they want,” she said.

Among the areas the two will focus on are the school playgrounds, which they’ve heard are full of dangerous junk.

Available to replace that junk are two used school play structures slated to be donated to Comunidad, including one from Blossom Hill Elementary School in Los Gatos. As part of the extensive renovation of the school this summer, a kindergarten play structure will be dismantled to make way for construction. With the kindergarten moving to a different part of the site, the structure has been declared surplus equipment, said Superintendent Mary Ann Park.

So when about 25 Los Gatos High students return to the villages Ashley and Carley have seen, they will bring the playground equipment, along with a play structure donated by Trinity Preschool in Menlo Park. Among the other supplies they will bring are dozens of surplus desks and chairs, which had been replaced in the remodeling of two other Los Gatos schools and sit in a district warehouse.

Every public school and some private schools in Los Gatos participate in Comunidad’s work, with students collecting school supplies and warm clothing to donate.

Comunidad is described by one of its founders and president Tom Hogan as “a non-profit start-up,” and one of its goals is to provide health care and service to the indigenous tribes of Baja California, whose lives evoke “a definition of poverty most of us in this room can’t begin to understand,” Hogan said at a recent school board meeting.

“We don’t believe in triage,” he said. “We believe in full health care — prevention, immunization and health education.”

Among Comunidad’s efforts: The Salud program sends doctors, dentists, nurses and dental hygienists to provide care. The Tierra program assists the indigenous people to become more self-sufficient, as in the sale of their crafts.

What Ashley, who has led fundraising drives at the high school for two years, said she likes about Comunidad is that `it’s not a giant organization, it’s just between Los Gatos and these particular tribes” who live about two hours south of San Diego.

“These are our neighbors,” she said.

Participation in Comunidad activities dovetails with the district’s emphasis on character-building education.

“It educates them to the larger world,” said Park, “and gives them the opportunity to share their resources.”

Madi Cope, 10, would agree. “It’s really fun to see how different tribes live and how much we have compared to them,” she said.

Madi was one of three Blossom Hill Elementary School students who went along on a Comunidad trip last fall to deliver donated supplies. She, along with Rachel Hogan, 10, and Emily Kessler, 8, talked about the trip at last month’s board meeting of the Los Gatos Union School District.

Said third-grader Emily to the rapt audience: “Even though we speak different languages, we still got along.”

Comunidad Para Baja California can be reached at P.O. Box 565, Los Gatos, Calif. 95031 or by visiting the Baja Comunidad website.

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