Matamoros Children's Home is the Perfect Charity to Receive Your Tax Refund
Timothy Sexton
January 29, 2007
The Matamoros Children’s Home needs your help. In these times of bursting populations, rampant drug use and tight finances, the children of the world are facing tough times. If you get a big tax return this year and look around at your Playstation 3 and your enormous big screen plasma TV, and your iPhone and your Hummer (climate-changer!) and you decide that you win because you do, indeed, have the most toys, and then further decide that you would like to help out some really unfortunate but good people, then please consider the Matamoros Children’s Home.
Established in 1967 and located not too far to the southwest of Matamoros, Mexico, the Matamoros Children’s Home is, basically, the kind place that the kids in Jack Black’s Nacho Libre long for. Run by Dr. Saul Camacho and his wife Maria, the Matamoros Children’s Home offers not just beds and food and water, but hope. Even people outraged by the possibility of building a wall to keep Mexicans and other Latinos out of the US tend to look around and see that for the most part there aren’t a lot of really deeply, depressingly poor children in America. Oh yes, we have them, unquestionably; kids who go to bed at night without food. Heck, my wife teaches in a school where there is a good possibility that one or two only had potato chips for dinner last night and not by choice. Yes, there are plenty of desperately poor, needy children here, but we do have social programs available even if politicians would rather fund death than fund life. You want to know why Mexican families risk everything to come to America? It’s because down there if they can’t earn enough to pay for food, they don’t eat. The government is not going to come to their rescue, not even in the half-hearted, half-assed way our government helps the needy.
America is the land of opportunity and provides free education and supplies for anyone who wants it, even if it appears that most of those in charged didn’t take advantage of it. You know how it’s done in Mexico? Six years of free education provided you supply the books and transportation. After the sixth grade, only those who can afford tuition can carry on their education. There’s no such thing as Medicaid, food stamps or free school lunch programs. And that is why places such as the Matamoros Children’s Home exists. Currently they take care of 150 children, but the plans for expansion to take in another 50 kids are underway. Everything that the Matamoros Children’s Home has ever accomplished is due to funds raised from churches throughout Texas, Mississippi, Arkansas and Oklahoma. I learned about this oasis of hope through a woman named Jane Head. If you were to look up the word “class” in the dictionary, you would find Jane Head’s photo next to it. This is a woman so intensely devoted to the welfare of children all over the world—as well as her husband Al—that you wish people like Jane was famous enough to run for President instead of Hillary Clinton or Rudy Giuliani. Rather than taking a holiday in other people’s misery for the purpose of grabbing headlines like politicians do, it is people like Jane Head who walk through mud, and talk to pampered idiots like yours truly for no other reason than to help other human beings.
Like Oprah—only without spotlight of mass media coverage to dampen the assault—Jane Head has had to face questions like why help Mexican orphans when there are so many American kids needing help? Her answer is the answer I just outlined above, only in so much more detail that it would bring tears to the eyes of even the man in the White House. Real tears, I mean, not those crocodile ones we’ve all seen.
As Jane told me, the purpose of teaching kids English at the Matamoros Children’s Home isn’t so they can cross the border and get great jobs like being a maid to some soulless CEO or making tacos to satisfy you when you feel the urge to make a run for the border. The Matamoros Children’s Home is attempting to do exactly what all those politicians wanting to build a freaking wall desire: educate them so they can grow up to become doctors, nurses and other functioning members of—Mexican—society. In other words, give them the ability to carve out a far an existence where they not only have pride but understand that pride is a far more valuable commodity than cheap pirated DVDS and Playstation game consoles.
If you’re uncomfortable sending money to one of those faceless charities on TV, then please consider giving to the Matamoros Children’s Home. And if you are uncomfortable giving money, then why not send them any clothing your child may have outgrown. And if you don’t have children’s clothes, consider visiting a few yard sales this weekend and picking up the cheapest children’s clothes you can find. Anything will help. Books, school supplies, shoes.
Here’s the address: Matamoros Children’s Home. Dr. Saul Camacho, Director. P.O. Box 4072. Brownsville, TX. 78523.
Established in 1967 and located not too far to the southwest of Matamoros, Mexico, the Matamoros Children’s Home is, basically, the kind place that the kids in Jack Black’s Nacho Libre long for. Run by Dr. Saul Camacho and his wife Maria, the Matamoros Children’s Home offers not just beds and food and water, but hope. Even people outraged by the possibility of building a wall to keep Mexicans and other Latinos out of the US tend to look around and see that for the most part there aren’t a lot of really deeply, depressingly poor children in America. Oh yes, we have them, unquestionably; kids who go to bed at night without food. Heck, my wife teaches in a school where there is a good possibility that one or two only had potato chips for dinner last night and not by choice. Yes, there are plenty of desperately poor, needy children here, but we do have social programs available even if politicians would rather fund death than fund life. You want to know why Mexican families risk everything to come to America? It’s because down there if they can’t earn enough to pay for food, they don’t eat. The government is not going to come to their rescue, not even in the half-hearted, half-assed way our government helps the needy.
America is the land of opportunity and provides free education and supplies for anyone who wants it, even if it appears that most of those in charged didn’t take advantage of it. You know how it’s done in Mexico? Six years of free education provided you supply the books and transportation. After the sixth grade, only those who can afford tuition can carry on their education. There’s no such thing as Medicaid, food stamps or free school lunch programs. And that is why places such as the Matamoros Children’s Home exists. Currently they take care of 150 children, but the plans for expansion to take in another 50 kids are underway. Everything that the Matamoros Children’s Home has ever accomplished is due to funds raised from churches throughout Texas, Mississippi, Arkansas and Oklahoma. I learned about this oasis of hope through a woman named Jane Head. If you were to look up the word “class” in the dictionary, you would find Jane Head’s photo next to it. This is a woman so intensely devoted to the welfare of children all over the world—as well as her husband Al—that you wish people like Jane was famous enough to run for President instead of Hillary Clinton or Rudy Giuliani. Rather than taking a holiday in other people’s misery for the purpose of grabbing headlines like politicians do, it is people like Jane Head who walk through mud, and talk to pampered idiots like yours truly for no other reason than to help other human beings.
Like Oprah—only without spotlight of mass media coverage to dampen the assault—Jane Head has had to face questions like why help Mexican orphans when there are so many American kids needing help? Her answer is the answer I just outlined above, only in so much more detail that it would bring tears to the eyes of even the man in the White House. Real tears, I mean, not those crocodile ones we’ve all seen.
As Jane told me, the purpose of teaching kids English at the Matamoros Children’s Home isn’t so they can cross the border and get great jobs like being a maid to some soulless CEO or making tacos to satisfy you when you feel the urge to make a run for the border. The Matamoros Children’s Home is attempting to do exactly what all those politicians wanting to build a freaking wall desire: educate them so they can grow up to become doctors, nurses and other functioning members of—Mexican—society. In other words, give them the ability to carve out a far an existence where they not only have pride but understand that pride is a far more valuable commodity than cheap pirated DVDS and Playstation game consoles.
If you’re uncomfortable sending money to one of those faceless charities on TV, then please consider giving to the Matamoros Children’s Home. And if you are uncomfortable giving money, then why not send them any clothing your child may have outgrown. And if you don’t have children’s clothes, consider visiting a few yard sales this weekend and picking up the cheapest children’s clothes you can find. Anything will help. Books, school supplies, shoes.
Here’s the address: Matamoros Children’s Home. Dr. Saul Camacho, Director. P.O. Box 4072. Brownsville, TX. 78523.