Thanksgiving happens all year with open hearts
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2009/nov/26/thanksgiving-...
By Diane Bell
November 26, 2009
Thanksgiving is not reserved just for today. Folks express thanks throughout the year through prayers, notes, flowers and the like. Others say thanks
through good deeds.
San Diegans Anne Otterson and David Lynch are two of those people.
Twenty-four years ago when Otterson’s husband asked what she’d like for Christmas, she wasn’t sure. She wasn’t a fan of jewelry and had a closet full
of clothing.
She had just read a newspaper account of an American man’s efforts to educate the children of families who made their living scavenging through
Tijuana’s garbage dumps for salvageable items. They earned maybe $50 to $100 a week.
Lynch, a young Long Island, N.Y. teacher, had spent three summer vacations as a volunteer working with Tijuana’s poor. He decided he had to do more to
help these children. So, he took a year’s leave of absence from his job, relocated to Tijuana in 1983 and never moved back to New York.
Lynch tucked a blue tarp under his arm, spread it out near the mounds of trash in a dump in south Tijuana and began teaching reading, writing and
English as a Second Language to any children who would come. Thus began a grass roots education program that later earned the nickname the Blue Tarp
School.
That scenario, strangely enough, brings us back to Otterson’s Christmas wish. Having just read the newspaper article about the school with no walls
and the havoc created by rainy weather, she told her husband she would like her present to be a school building.
Her husband, Bill, now deceased, an energetic biotech entrepreneur, was happy to oblige. He paid for the materials, and Anne worked with Lynch to get
the families involved in building their own school, a simple wooden structure.
While not fancy, it protected students from the rain and helped block the noise and stench of the dump.
The dump eventually closed and the families migrated to another dump about five miles away in 1991. Meanwhile, Lynch had started a nonprofit
organization called Responsibility. He raised more money and built another new school.
In recent years, a large corporate donor from New Jersey paid for a larger and nicer school building with a computer center next door. Felipe Quirez,
a former student, now serves as one of Lynch’s teachers in the school by the dump.
The blue tarp has moved on to a dump in Nicaragua where Lynch is building his first school outside Mexico.
Edith Fine and Judith Josephson, the San Diego County freelancers who wrote The Los Angeles Times article that inspired Otterson in 1985, have since
turned the story into an award-winning children’s book, “Armando and the Blue Tarp School,” published in 2007.
With the help of playwright Pat Lydersen, composer Wendy Woolf and others, Armando’s story was recently expanded into a stage musical that’s expected
to premiere in March with the Park Dale Players, a North County student theater troupe.
The group performed some highlights of the show Nov. 14 at UCSD. One of the scenes mentioned the gift of a school from an anonymous American lady. It
was fitting that Otterson, who characteristically retreats from the spotlight, was in the audience. Since her first involvement, she has held private
fundraisers nearly every year, often raising from $15,000 to $35,000 annually to support teachers’ salaries.
Lynch, 57, whose nonprofit is based in San Ysidro, was also in the audience. He’ll keep going until he’s 70, he says. “The need is still great. A dump
closes, families move on to a new dump and these garbage dump communities start all over.”
On this Thanksgiving Day, it is fitting the we all give thanks for people such as David Lynch and Anne Otterson, who care enough to reach out to
others.
[Edited on 11-26-2009 by BajaNews]
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