Dear Mr. Hvizda and Members of the St. Edward Alumni Association,

Thank you for supporting the St. Edward High School Service and Solidarity trip to COAR in Zaragoza, El Salvador, 20-28 March 2008.  COAR is the Community Oscar Arnulfo Romero, a school (K-12) for 800, foster care for 120, and clinic and other services for the impoverished community of Zaragoza, founded by a Cleveland priest in 1980 as an outgrowth of Cleveland’s Latin American Mission (CLAM) Team.  The COAR Peace Mission is the Cleveland-based outreach office of COAR and I am its Executive Director.   Additionally, I accompanied the group.  The 11 young men and their staff chaperones formed the most exceptional group we have ever hosted.

I read on your website that the Alumni Association’s mission is to, “ . . . reflect the sentiment of the alumni on matters affecting the school by fostering moral, spiritual, and financial support for the continued growth of the school.”  I congratulate you on fulfilling every aspect of your mission with support of this trip.  Your gift not only subsidized the students’ travel but gave large gifts to COAR, the CLAM Team, Asociacion Nuevo Amanacer de El Salvador (fighting youth violence and gangs in El Salvador), the fund to rebuild the parish church in Zaragoza (destroyed by an earthquake in 2001), and gifts to two small, impoverished communities.

As to the spiritual and moral support, the students amazed me with their questions and reflections with each day’s new activities.  Every day for eight days they were challenged by astonishing poverty, the squalor of children sitting in animal filth, roadside mountains of trash, and raw sewage; the splendor of what money can buy when richness and poverty are so unequal; the staggering beauty of volcanoes, sugar cane fields, and wild Pacific surf; the sites of the lives and deaths of the martyrs, Monseñor Romero, the Jesuits of the UCA, and Cleveland’s own Sr. Dorothy Kazel, OSU, and Jean Donovan; by discussions with various youth groups (which they entered into with excellent Spanish); and the presence of our Church and its life-changing service at CLAM sites and at COAR. 

Enclosed with this letter are the itinerary and a Power Point presentation with trip highlights.  Each afternoon and evening of the last four days they played with the children who live at COAR in foster care.  There is no greater service than letting these children know that they are loved and cared for, and the students did an extraordinary job of that with myriad activities, listening, and lots of strong young muscles swinging little bodies around in circles.  Most of our children were returning from Easter vacation spent with families in crisis.  It is important for them to stay connected with their families, but it is a challenge to sooth and settle them back into the safety of life at COAR.  The students made that job effortless for our staff.