New Hope Community/Holy Cross School
Sr. Marie Celeste
15929 SW 150th St.
Indiantown, Fla. 34956

Some of the most grinding rural poverty in the United States is found in the sugar-cane country around the south and east sides of Lake Okeechobee. This is country owned and operated by the U.S. Sugar Co., a politically connected conglomerate that purportedly has been exploiting workers ever since sugar cane became a major crop early in this century. They used to hire primarily poor Southern blacks, and place them in conditions of virtual wage slavery. Nowadays, few blacks are willing to work in the cane fields, so U.S. Sugar is able to bring in large numbers of foreign workers -- mostly from Jamaica and elsewhere in the Caribbean -- under the H-2 exemption of the Immigration Act, which permits employers to hire aliens for jobs that no citizens can be found to do.

A second ethnic group adds still more diversity to the mix: A large number of Mayan Indian immigrants from the Huehuetenanga region of Guatemala, the victims of almost genocidal practices in their nation, have fled to the Indiantown area, apparently following the first settlers who came here because work was available and because they naively assumed that the town was a haven for Indians, as they call themselves. It is not. It was so called after the Seminoles who have been extinct in this area for generations. But it is home now, and the shacks, hovels and sugar-worker camps often house two to four large families in a single, two-room hut or apartment unit that may rent for $400 a month or more.

Incredibly, much of this truly Third World poverty is in Palm Beach County, hardly 40 miles away from one of the most conspicuous concentrations of wealth on the globe.

The Hope Rural School is an effort to start turning things around with the next generation. Father Frank O'Laughlin, an Irish-American priest with a social conscience, came here in 1980, and it didn't take him long after that to realize that only one thing could break the horrible cycle of poverty that trapped the region's cane cutters and citrus workers: A decent education for their children.

Although the area offered public education, its quality was hardly comparable to that of the district's richer schools along the coast, in the Palm Beaches and surrounding suburban communities; and worse, public schools made no accommodations to the culture, the values or even the language of the migrant workers' children, who included Hispanics from Mexico and Puerto Rico (17 percent of the population), Creole-speaking Haitians (18 percent), American blacks (4 percent), whites (exactly 3 percent) and the balance - 58% - Mayan Indians from Guatemala, speaking a language called Kanjobal ("Kan-HO-bal") of a culture so isolated that it has only recently been put in written form.

The church's simple parish hall was no sooner built than the carpenters returned to break it into four classrooms, and the school began its first year with an all-volunteer staff, teaching kindergarten through second grade. By 1986, when Sr. Marie Celeste arrived, it had expanded through fourth grade; by 1992 to grade 5 and by 1993 to grade 6. The volunteer staff was gradually replaced by full-time, certified teachers, although a growing staff of volunteers, many of them well-to-do people from Palm Beach, continue to flock to Indiantown to work with the children.

They soon changed the name of the school from "Holy Cross" to "Hope," to emphasize its mission and its multi-cultural nature. The Hope Rural School uses the whole language approach to learning, and has become a leader in this area. It is a place filled with love, where the happy faces of children glow with something that's hard to define but beautiful to see. We watched them rehearsing a Christmas pageant, their round, brown faces almost hidden in oversize costumes of shepherds, Magi and angels; their faces wreathed in smiles as they sang the familiar holiday carols in English, Spanish, Creole and yes, Kanjobal, but always coming back to English, a language that some of them have been speaking for only a few months -- and yet speaking it surprisingly well.

The school continues struggling financially, as it likely always will; Sr. Marie Celeste estimates that it will cost $2,800 to educate each child during the 1993-94 school year (which runs practically around the calendar, in hope the children won't backslide and lose their English over the long summer vacation.)

On the other hand, Hope Rural School has been blessed. As the ONLY school in the United States devoted entirely to the education of migrant farmworker children, it has received wide publicity. The NBC Today Show has been here, and so has CBS News.

Meanwhile, Holy Cross Church didn't stop with a single service but quickly grafted on a variety of programs aimed at helping the people fight their worst problems. It operates the Holy Cross Service Center (El Centro), a virtually all-purpose social-services organization that offers one-stop shopping (to the extent that social services are available) from a dusty little stucco building just around the corner from Indiantown's single traffic light. Legal aid, social-security assistance, food stamps and a considerable amount of immigration work take place here, along with friendly advice to help people cope with just about any imaginable problem. A Thrift Store next door offers basic clothing items and non-perishable foodstuffs, tagged at nominal costs just high enough to salvage the pride of the Guatemalan families, who are reluctant to accept charity.

In more concrete developments, the church's not-for-profit housing association got a $225,000 HUD grant during the middle 1980s and put up a 60-unit housing complex -- New Hope Community -- available for rent to low-income families through Section 8 and related federal programs. The community stands as an incredible stereotype breaker to anyone who believes that low-income families don't take care of subsidized housing: The bright, stucco duplexes in trim, lovingly landscaped yards could be Suburbia Town, Anywhere, USA; and they stand in striking contrast to the expensive hovels owned and operated by absentee slumlords.

Finally, the organization spun off InDios (a neat Spanish pun on "Indians" and "In God," a sewing cooperative that Al LoPinto told us about. Sr. Teresa Auad, a Bolivian nun trained in Wisconsin, came to Indiantown six years ago and spent a year working in the fields with the Guatemalan women to meet them, get to know them, and win their confidence before deciding with them what kind of cooperative would be best. The conclusion, a sewing business, fit their interests and abilities well, and with a rickety combination of grants and gifts, they were able to acquire a dozen professional sewing machines and train a few dozen women to work on them, seeking to help the children by finding full-time, year-round work for at least a few mothers, pulling them out of the migrant stream and establishing them in year-round housing, so the children can stay in school when their father moves north at the end of the four-month growing season.

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

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