South American guest speaker talks to students about acheiving a
dream
A guest speaker from Colombia visited San Benito High School on
Monday to inspire local students to pursue their dreams and to
allow them to see the influence one person can have on their
communities.
Albeiro Vargas, 25, first started working with senior citizens
as a 7-year-old boy in his native South American village. As an
adult, he is still pursing that dream of helping senior citizens,
and received an Ashoka Fellowship in 2006 to help him with it.
South American guest speaker talks to students about acheiving a dream
A guest speaker from Colombia visited San Benito High School on Monday to inspire local students to pursue their dreams and to allow them to see the influence one person can have on their communities.
Albeiro Vargas, 25, first started working with senior citizens as a 7-year-old boy in his native South American village. As an adult, he is still pursing that dream of helping senior citizens, and received an Ashoka Fellowship in 2006 to help him with it.
“At the end of the day, we want kids to get ideas, to have a dream of doing something,” said Frank Muro, the director of the migrant education program at San Benito High School. “Perhaps a quest in life … Nowadays I observe teenagers as having no quest, no vision. There is lots of technology, but not human touch.”
About 300 students enrolled in Spanish and ESL classes attended an assembly Monday that featured a short video about Vargas and then his presentation – in Spanish – about the work he has done in Colombia.
“I hope my students are encouraged to realize a dream that they have had because Albeiro Vargas at a young age had a dream to open a hospital for the elderly in his community,” said Rachel Flores-Zepeda, a Spanish teacher at SBHS, in an e-mail. “It is also a great lesson in the power of one – one person can do so much good that it will affect several others.”
According to Muro, Vargas started out washing clothes and helping to bathe senior citizens in his community.
“In Colombia, the infrastructure to care for seniors was not there,” he said.
When he was 7, his grandfather died and Vargas started visiting other grandparents in his neighborhood. He said that many of the people he visited were lonely, depressed, hungry and physically abandoned. He started a routine of visiting several people a day with coffee. At 9, he enlisted the help of some other local children.
He was profiled in a movie by a French journalist called “Colombian Angel” and he started to receive donations to continue his work. At 11, he moved some of the most at-risk elderly people into an abandoned house, his initial effort in creating a center for senior citizens in need.
Vargas considered law school, but eventually pursued studies in gerontology. He started a center for the elderly with staff members as well as unpaid interns. In 2006, the Ashoka Fellowship he received helped him with a program called Guardian Angels, which recruits children to care for elderly residents in nursing homes.
His idea was to train the children in basic caretaking, and have them graduate to higher levels of responsibility as they gain more experience. He saw the program as an opportunity for youth to learn responsibility, but also to have them interact with seniors who can share stories of the past and other skills.
Close bonds are created that transcend age groups and provide a new sense of purpose and value in the young and old alike,” according to an online profile at www.ashoka.org, where Vargas’ project is described.
Vargas saw children and the elders as the victims of disintegrating family units. In 2006, when he received the fellowship, in Bucamaranga, Colombia, 64 percent of homeless people were elderly, 50 percent of the elderly were poor and many were abandoned without access to public services.
He continues his work with the elderly in Colombia.
“I am hoping that this will spur [students] to become more involved in their community and do some volunteer work,” Flores-Zepeda said.
