Mexican Humanitarian Adventure

We have been home for 3 weeks now, but have been busy with the remodel and trying to get back to our school routine, that I haven't been able to record our trip yet.  This years summer vacation was a huma

nitarian trip that we took to Mexico with Family to Family Humanitarian Expeditions.   Our party consisted of our family of 5, plus my mom and David's parents.  We met the rest of the group in the San Diego airport and then drove into Mexico in 15 passenger vans.  There were 39 people in our expedition.   Our base camp was Door of Faith Orphanage.  They have a website at www.dofo.org .   This is one of the largest of the 100 orphanages in Baja California alone.   The orphange consists of many building, most of them being 'dorms' that the kids live in.  There were 114 orphans there when when arrived and 119 when we left.   Most of them aren't exactly orphans.  This is actually Mexico's foster care system.  Most of the kids are there due to neglect or abuse or the inability of their families to care for them.  The majority of the kids are not able to be adopted.  Once a child comes to the orphanage, they can pretty much plan to be there until they are grown.

The directors of this orphanage have done a great job trying to make this place 

as 'homey' as possible.  The kids are divided into dorms based on age and gender.  Each dorm have parents who live there.  They are a married couple and sometimes have their own ch

ildren as well.  The parents are responsible for their hygiene care, bedtimes, getting them ready for school etc.  They don't have to do laundry or meals, as there is a kitchen and laundry staff that does that for the whole orphanage.   There were many kids here with their siblings.  The average family group size had 4 kids, but there was one family here with 8!    The orphanage is painted very cheerfully and colorfully with lots of murals.  

The Door of Faith Orphanage takes in kids from birth through high school.  They got 4 new babies while we were there that week.   Their oldest resident is a 23 year old young man who has lived there since he was 4 months old.   He is currently in college.  DOFO makes education a priority and makes sure all the kids get to school through high school and will pay for college as well if the student wants to continue after that.  One of the dorm fathers is a neat man in a wheel chair who grew up in the orphanage from an early (angry) teen.  DOFO has a soccer team, and he is the coach.  We put together a group to play against them, and we were quite humiliated apparently, since I didn't go to the game.