Coming north, with help

Published in The Post-Star (B1)
9/17/06

When Kevin O’Brien of Lake Luzerne saw the folk group "Peter, Paul and Mary," on television in 1986, describing the devastating effects of civil war in Central America, he was moved — literally.

He was moved to such an extent that he and his wife, Diana, ended up a few years later on a plane to El Salvador, where they adopted an almost 4-year-old boy named Terrence Julio from an orphanage in the city of Zacatecoluca.

In the nearby capital city of San Ramon, Marta Cuellar and Maribel Torres — two girls about Terrence’s age — had loving families, but little else. The civil war had ended, but severe poverty and lack of infrastructure crippled the country. Access to good education was limited and expensive. The future didn’t seem to hold many options for kids like them.

"In El Salvador you have to pay for school, and it gets more expensive as you go up," explained Maribel, who has six siblings. "My sister helped me, and I got a scholarship from a local business for 10th and 11th grade. But some kids just don’t go."

The girls were about 10 years old when they met an American woman named Mary Beth Gallagher, a lay volunteer with the Maryknoll Catholic missionaries. She taught them soccer and English, encouraged them in school and told them they were full of potential.

"I think everything was started by her," Marta said recently, reflecting on how her life has changed in the past decade.

Marta and Maribel, along with Marta’s brother Samuel Reyes, are the first proteges of a new local charity, Nueva Esperanza del Norte, offering "new hope from the North" to Central American students.

Like many other young people in their region, they have long dreamed of studying in the United States, but thought it was out of reach.

Their journey began three years ago, when Mary Beth asked Maribel and Marta if they wanted to spend a year of high school in the United States through a program called Youth for Understanding. The girls said yes — but the program fees were beyond their means.

"Usually, only wealthy families can do something like that," Maribel said.

Meanwhile, thousands of miles away in upstate New York, Kevin had woken up one morning with an inexplicably strong thought running through his mind.

"It’s time for us to go back to El Salvador," he told his wife.

Later that day, he started chatting with a stranger at the grocery store — "a guy with a smile bigger than the front end of a Buick." The man’s smile broadened when Kevin mentioned his interest in El Salvador.

The man turned out to be John Gallagher, Mary Beth’s father.

"I truly believe that this was destined," Kevin said as he retold the story.

Kevin got in touch with Mary Beth, and the O’Briens visited her on their next trip to El Salvador. She told them about Marta and Maribel, and they offered to help.

It was an offer with no expiration date, apparently. The O’Briens hosted Marta for her junior year at Saratoga Springs High School, and helped find a host family for Maribel, who spent her senior year in Cambridge.

In 2005, Kevin returned to El Salvador to attend Marta’s graduation, and began to brainstorm about how the girls could come to the U.S. for college. The result, still in its fledgling stage, was Nueva Esperanza del Norte.

When Marta’s brother Samuel heard about the new program, he asked if it could help him, too. He had a day job at a thread factory, and attended night school for engineering, but felt he could get a much better education in America. Kevin agreed.

A year later, Marta is again living with the O’Briens, whose son Terrence is now a 19-year-old freshman at St. Lawrence University. Maribel and Samuel are staying with Tony and Peg Mangano in Saratoga Springs.

Tony and Kevin are longtime friends who both have a background in social services. Tony is the former assistant director of mental health for Saratoga County, and Kevin the former director of Catholic Charities for Warren/Washington County, now running a counseling practice in Warrensburg.

"We’ve always talked about working on some sort of project together, and when I came up with this idea, I just called him up and said, ‘Tony, this is it,’ " Kevin said.

Double H Hole in the Woods Ranch agreed to provide the students with summer jobs — Marta and Maribel worked in housekeeping, and Samuel was a kitchen assistant — so they could adjust to the culture and earn some spending money before school started this fall.

The girls are now settling into their first semester at Adirondack Community College, where they hope to do well enough to earn scholarships to four-year colleges. Marta wants to study social services and start a nonprofit organization in El Salvador; Maribel wants to study health and become a pediatrician. Samuel, currently completing an intensive language program at The English Connection in Saratoga Springs, will soon apply to engineering school. He plans to use his degree to work on improving El Salvador’s infrastructure.

They all agree that education is the key to escaping poverty, and it’s a key they hope to hand to many others.

"I want to be a social worker, helping kids in rural areas who can’t afford an education," Marta said. "Like what Marybeth did ... like what Kevin is doing for us right now."
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MORE INFO
Nueva Esperanza del Norte, which means "New Hope from the North," is a new nonprofit organization that seeks to equip young people from Central America with U.S. college educations so they can return home and join the fight against poverty in their countries.

The first participants recently arrived from El Salvador and started classes at Adirondack Community College.The program has no paid staff, and welcomes volunteers to help in areas such as transportation, tutoring, Web site development, and fundraising.

For more information, call founder Kevin O'Brien at 623-2144.