"I hope the results of your own generosity are a good and satisfying message of God's power and love in you.  I also hope your parish members who were here, get a chance to share with you all the happiness you are supporting."  John J. Halligan. S.J.

Activities and Lenten Resources for Families:

Award Winning Priceless Bake and Craft Sale
Word Search
Recipes from Ecuador
February Lenten Calendar
March Lenten Calendar

The Working Boys Center (Centro del Muchacho Trabajador) was founded in 1964 by Jesuit Fr. John Halligan and Sister Mary Miguel Conway, BVM (aunt of our parishioner, Patricia Jessup). The Working Boys Center began in an attic in the Company of Jesus church in Quito to serve Quito’s “shoeshine boys” and their families. Today, the Working Boys Center provides food, education, child care, housing and education for thousands of children, men and women in the city of Quito — estimated to include 100,000 boys, some as young as 5, who work in the city’s streets shining shoes, washing cars and selling gum to help support their families. The boys provide up to 85 percent of their household income, and some of these families survive on two dollars per day. Originally designed to serve the “shoeshine boys,” the Center has changed to include the whole family, in order to make a difference in their lives.

The Working Boys Center is an amazing ministry that goes well beyond charitable giving to the poor, and instead preaches a message of education, hard work and self-sufficiency. There are few “handouts,” however education, food, healthcare and other assistance is made possible for those determined to learn new values and change their own lives. The WBC’s working children (many of them still work as shoe-shine boys) are not thieves, runaways, or delinquents in any way. They are working children who earn money to help their families — families that show willingness to pull together and lift themselves out of poverty through hard work and personal formation. Typically, many of these poor families have been deprived of security, goals and support that many of us enjoy. The founders of the WBC believe that the misery the poor experience results from the lack of 10 moral values necessary for a Christian life. For this reason, the WBC aims at changing attitudes and behavior, based on formation and self-help, surrounding ten important areas of life:

Loyalty — One of the characteristics of families who become members of the Center is that they live too much a life of expediency. Families commit to the rules of the Center, and share in serving other families.

Personal Formation — Each person, no matter how young or old, takes responsibility for his or her own education and development.

Family — The working child may become a member only if his or her family joins also. All family members are expected to work, to participate in education, and receive instruction on parenting and family life.

Religion — Families who join the center tend only to have minimal religious education. The WBC puts an emphasis on “living in Christ,” and members attend daily Mass.

Instruction — The WBC provides preschool, grammar school and technical education for children, and literacy/technical education for adults. All members must attend school, and must learn a trade. The courses provided by the WBC provide each one of its teenagers a diploma and technical training by graduation — enabling them to get good jobs.

Economy — Each family member learns how to manage a budget, and are required to save part of their pay each week to finance their own homes. Even young children are required to save a certain portion of their income each week, and when they reach graduation, have often saved enough to buy equipment or tools needed for their trade.

Work — Each family member is required to work and contribute to their family.

Health — The Center requires and provides facilities for a daily bath (most people have no plumbing), three meals a day, medical and dental care.

Recreation — The Center provides opportunities for fun and family strengthening.

Housing — Weekly “work gangs” build and improve homes for Center members.

Every member of the family works, goes to school, is raised in the faith, and is taught basic values. The Working Boys Center provides unique program in that it motivates families to become agents of their own prosperity — giving a helping hand without taking charge of the personal responsibilities for the poor. Elimination of poverty is possible — with a helping hand as well as personal change. Wouldn’t you like to be part of this effort?

He started with lunch.

Quito, Ecuador, has 100,000 shoeshine boys. You see them on every street corner, in every plaza. Some are only five, six years old. They work long hours to help support their families. Some earn up to 85 percent of their family’s entire income. In 1964, Fr. John Halligan, a Jesuit from New York, was working with indigenous poor in the Chimborazo province of Ecuador, south of Quito. Even during theology studies he had dreamt of just such an assignment. “I was interested in working with poor people,” he says. “I heard they had Indians and jungles [in Ecuador], but I didn’t know anything about them.” Happy in his assignment, Halligan balked when his superiors asked him to move north and look into the problem of Quito’s shoeshine boys. “There were thousands of kids out early in the morning until late at night,” he remembers. What could one man possibly do for a hundred thousand boys?

Well, he started with lunch. Halligan set up shop in an attic above the Jesuit high school, then sent word out on the streets that there was a free lunch for any kid who was hungry. Eleven showed up that first day. By the end of the week he was feeding 35. Within six months, 250 hungry boys were lining up for lunch. The priest had only two rules. Hands had to be washed before eating (despite the fact that there was no running water in the attic). And each boy had to deposit 50 centavos in a savings account that Halligan scrupulously maintained. When he wasn’t feeding the boys, he was begging money. He outfitted his makeshift kitchen with a real stove and pots and pans. After a year he was able to buy some tables and benches. Six volunteers from the Peace Corps and a nun signed on to teach trades and crafts. With the tables pushed to one side, the dining room was turned into a classroom. By 1966, Halligan was providing medical and dental care for the boys. Ironically, instead of attracting more kids, the expanded services had the opposite effect. Numbers started to drop. Padre Juan failed to realize that boys do not naturally gravitate toward doctors, schools, and rules about washing hands. He had built his staff up to seven people and was spending $2,000 a month, but only a hundred boys were showing up.

In 1967, the padre’s struggling project got a huge shot in the arm when a BVM sister from Iowa, Sr. Miguel Conway (aunt of our parishioner, Patricia Jessup), signed on. Halligan credits her with bringing order to chaos. A new kitchen was installed, along with water storage tanks, toilets, and showers. They started serving three meals a day. A small library came next. Within a year, construction began on a permanent center for these working boys. Now the kids not only had a padre looking after them, they had a madre, too. Sr. Conway—Madre Miguel, as she is known— recalls her first impressions of Halligan’s place. “They had a little carpentry shop set up in front of the kitchen— lots of sawdust over everything. There were guys teaching shoemaking, carpentry, and metal crafts. The doctor and dentist were in place. He had games for the boys. He even had a little pretend school for those who couldn’t read or write.” During her first two years, the Madre was the only full-time staffer besides the Padre. “We were the mom and dad, the teachers, the scolders . . . everything,” Conway says. She could read and write in Spanish but couldn’t speak it. “I learned to speak Spanish by looking at the children’s books and having the kids read to me.”

They moved into their new center in 1974, hanging a sign above the door: Centro del Muchacho Trabajador Número Uno, Center for the Working Boys Number One. A new rule was introduced: any boy wanting to enroll in the center had to sign on his whole family. Parents, brothers, sisters—everyone had to participate. They called themselves “A Family of Families.” Meals were served six days a week, and medical and dental services were available for all. Everybody, parents included, was expected to complete grammar school classes taught by faculty and volunteers and then go on to one of several trade schools: metal and auto mechanics, carpentry, toy making, baking, sewing, and beauty care.

With skills like those, job opportunities became available to a population chronically underemployed. “In 41 years we’ve never had a problem getting a job for one of our graduates,” asserts Halligan. Halligan, now 76, oversees a team of seven codirectors and a staff of over 200, some of whom are graduates of the center. All are dedicated to improving the individual and family lives of the people in the program. At any given time, about 400 families are enrolled at the center, which has expanded to two campuses. Halligan estimates they serve 35,000 meals a day. At breakfast, lunch, and dinner the huge cafeteria is filled with families, all dining as one. The priest wanders from table to table, stopping to visit or helping restore order to a long line of children waiting for their food. Before lunch, one end of the room is used as a makeshift chapel for daily Mass. Most everyone attends.

The minimum wage in Ecuador is about $150 a month, but Halligan estimates only about 25 percent of the population make that much. He said the average income for families coming to the center is about $2 a day. The families they serve have no way to pay for the costs of the center. So to raise the $1.3 million to keep the program running, Halligan spends half his time on fundraising and development. Halligan has built a small strip mall facing a busy street at the edge of the five-acre main campus. The businesses include a beauty parlor, restaurant, bakery, and a variety store that offers crafts made in the trade schools. The employees are students at the center; they learn how to deal with customers and earn a modest income. Halligan emphasizes, however, that profits are not the primary objective. He wants to keep the focus on education. “We need to earn something so we can show kids that this is how you make money,” he explains. “When I’m gone, the temptation will be to make it profitable. But then you’ll no longer be with the poor.”

Despite immense poverty, Halligan believes the people of Latin America can build successful lives for themselves through education and hard work. He disapproves of those who leave their homeland, abandoning their families to find work up north. Halligan recognizes the problems but insists that emigration is no solution.

“It can be turned around. The whole show can be turned around.” After 40 years of working with Quito’s shoeshine boys, Halligan knows he won’t save them all. But that doesn’t stop him from trying. “Of the one hundred thousand shoeshine kids, there are probably ten thousand who want to change,” he claims. “Those are the ones we go after. The others just hear about the rules—you have to go to school, they make you take a bath—they’re not interested in us.”   He pauses, looks around the crowded lunchroom, and smiles. “We know there are over five thousand families we’ve changed,” he says. “They’ll never be poor again.”

Written by Fr. Brad Reynolds, SJ, and appeared in Company Magazine, a Jesuit publication, Fall 2006.

The Working Boys Center: A Family of Families

Sometimes, when we look at the poor in other countries, we may see them as deadbeats, as people who aren’t hard workers, as people who live off of donations and aid from others. Nothing could be farther from the truth at the Working Boys Center in Quito. The families served by the Center are certainly quite poor. They are not poor because they want to be, but because they have lived in circumstances where they have been deprived not only of economic means, but been deprived of security, goals and support.

When a family comes to the Working Boys Center, they are not given handouts — but a hand up. In a totally unique program that preaches the message of hard work and self-sufficiency, families are given a way out of poverty. The Center’s directors, Fr. John Halligan, SJ, Sr. Mary Miguel Conway, BVM and Sr. Cindy Sullivan, BVM, believe that the misery of the poor results from the lack of ten moral values necessary not only for Christian life, but for prosperity. Their goal is to teach these moral values to families who come seeking help. Many of the activities in which families participate have the characteristics of social assistance programs. But in practice, every activity at the Working Boys Center is related to teaching one of these ten values. Families that persevere and work hard change from being victims of poverty to becoming agents of prosperity.

The Working Boys Center has educational programs that function on four levels:

• Day care and early childhood education for children from ages 1 to 5

• Grammar school — The Center’s grammar schools have schedules that allow for three half-days spent earning the money needed by their families to survive. The regular classroom hours are supplemented with special classes of music, art, health, religion, library science and physical education. The Center also operates classes for children with special needs and challenges

• Technical education — Teenagers participate in a four year program, offering diplomas in auto mechanics, industrial mechanics and metal carpentry, cosmetology, furniture carpentry, toy making, sewing, plumbing, baking and sales and marketing

• Adult education — Parents receive a technical education which lasts from one to three years, depending on their entry-level skills.

The Working Boys Center assures a good diet for its 2000 members by providing three meals a day. With a team of four doctors, four dentists, four nurses, a clinical psychologist and three medical assistants, the Center provides medical and preventative care, dental hygiene, physical and psychological therapy for children with special needs, and the “Drop of Milk Program,” which is a special program for malnourished children, providing daily milk, nutritional supplements and medical attention.

All Center families participate in education, weekly sessions aimed at strengthening values, voluntary community service, Mass and religious educations. Saving and budgeting are taught and monitored for children and their parents. Center graduates can apply for and receive start up loans for small businesses.

The results of over 40 years of work are that over 5,000 families (25,000 persons) that have graduated from the programs have left poverty behind and now contribute to society as free, active and dedicated persons. 4000 people have achieved professional li-censes as auto mechanics, carpenters, industrial mechanics, bakers, cosmetologists, plumb-ers and professional seamstresses.

Become a part of the hope for the poorest children of Quito. Help make a future for them, free of poverty and hopelessness.

St. Dominic Parish “Minga” to Quito, Ecuador
November 2007

In November, parishioners Bernie Palm, Ethel Cahill, B.J. Schneider, Tom Schneider and I traveled to Quito, Ecuador, in the heart of the Andes mountains, to participate in a “Minga,” which is a Spanish word for working group. Mingas are just one ministry of The Working Boys Center, run by Fr. John Halligan, S.J. and Madre Mary Miguel Conway, BVM (and aunt of our own parishioner, Patricia Jessup).

L-R:  Ethel Cahill, Bernie Palm, BJ Schneider, Tom Schneider and Susan McNeil

The Working Boys Center began in an attic in the Company of Jesus church in 1964, and today provides food, education, child care, and housing for thousands of children, men and women in the city of Quito. The WBC is an amazing ministry that goes well beyond charitable giving to the poor, and instead preaches a message of education, hard work and self-sufficiency. The WBC’s working children, many of them shoeshine boys, are not thieves, runaways or delinquents in any way. They are working children who earn money to help their families — families that show willingness to pull together and lift themselves out of poverty through hard work and personal formation. As part of this effort to help the poor, the WBC organizes work groups, or “Mingas” where every member assists other members toward the goal of home ownership. Center members must save for homes, purchase materials, and assist other in building their own homes — and once they have completed these goals, others come to help them build their own home.

We left early on a cold Friday morning, and after quite a few travel snafus, arrived in Quito — it was a balmy 60 degrees. Answering God’s call, we found ourselves 11,000 feet or so above sea level, high on an Andes mountainside, working on the home of Martina Toapanta, a grandmother who is a member of the WBC — and one of the hardest workers any of us had ever met. We spent our week pouring cement for walls, laying cement block and putting up the frame for the roof. We learned some new skills, including how to mix cement by hand (no wimpy cement mixers for this group!). Bernie Palm stayed back at the Working Boys Center, where he put his electrician skills to use wiring a new shop.

Our trip involved lots of hard work, but was also an immersion experience. We went not to try to “fix” the people served by the WBC, but to be with them, to participate in their lives and work, and to open ourselves to how God might be trying to speak to us through them. Surprisingly, language never proved to be a barrier — it was amazing how much we had to say to each other even though they did not know our language well, and we barely knew any of theirs. It is always impressive to see and hear the “success” stories of the families served by the center. The WBC provides a unique program in that it motivates families to become agents of their own prosperity — giving a helping hand without taking charge. I was even more moved by my experience of the Ecuadorian people — the beautiful children who showered us with hugs, our hard-working Martina who worked harder than all of us combined, the willingness of so many to give so willingness to us.

Ethel Cahill kept a journal while we were there, and upon returning home, shared it with the group. Her final reflection was:
“All in all, it was a wonderful Minga. The weather was perfect with no rain. The food was very good at the Center. The people were fantastic. Fr. Halligan, Madre Miguel and Madre Cindy went out of their way to visit with us and make us comfortable. It was informative and entertaiing to have discussions with the volunteers. I don’t know if words adequately describe the experience or not. I do think you have to be there to really appreciate it. One thing that stands out is that we are so fortunate as Americans to have all the material things we posses and take for granted. Thanksgiving is a very appropriate time to complete a Minga.”

Over the years, I have had the privilege of making several “mission” trips, and I have found them to be some of the most meaningful experiences of my life. The first one I ever made, in college, solidified my desire for ministry — recognizing all that I have, I wanted to give back. They have always been experiences where God has been profoundly present — when I have risked enough to move outside of my own comfort zone at home, and been willing to encounter Jesus in strangers far away from home. God has never disappointed me — and God was most profoundly present in the people of Ecuador, in the faces of the children, at the dinner table with the volunteers, in the profound gesture of thanks from Martina before we left, when she knelt down before our group and began to cry as she tried to express her thanks.

Have you ever desired to do something a little more “meaningful” for your vacation? Have you always wished you would have done a service trip or been in the Peace Corp? Have you ever wanted to be part of a “work camp” or a “mission trip?” We’re hoping to do a “Minga” again this spring, and would love for you to come along. Please give me a call at (262) 781-3480.

Susan McNeil