Western Springs Families Welcome Mexican Orphan Child Performers

There are a few reasons why the Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos (“Our Little Siblings”) homes aren’t like your ordinary orphanages.

With nine homes throughout Central and South America and the Caribbean, sheltering approximately 3,700 kids, NPH doesn’t seek new families to adopt their children. Instead, NPH itself becomes the family.

“When you ask one of the pequeños—the little ones—how many brothers and sisters they have, they’ll say 3,700, because they have this strong connection to the family of NPH,” said Karen Ziemba, a parishioner at Western Springs’ .

Ziemba and Debbie Pusinelli are the co-chairs of SJC’s program to host the Friends of the Orphans, a fundraising operation which features 16 youths from the NPH home in Cuernavaca, Mexico, traveling and performing to raise donations for the orphanages.

For the next two weeks (through Oct. 24), the performers will be staying with St. John of the Cross families, mostly in Western Springs, as they travel throughout Chicagoland for their various fiestas—, an event that is open to the community at large.

They will be hosted by a different family for each of the two weeks of their stay, with two kids per home: 16 host families in all.

Western Springs resident Betsy Sullivan will be hosting two girls, aged 14 and 15, during the second week of their stay (starting on the 18th). She and her husband Sean have three daughters of their own, ages 13, 10 and 8.

“I’m really looking forward to the experience for my girls, which is why I said I’d host,” said Sullivan. “They’ll get to meet people who have this entirely different life, completely different from what we have here in Western Springs. It’ll be a neat experience for the girls, and for Sean and I.”

The organization aims to pair the young troubadours (who are on a month-long trip, previously fundraising around Minneapolis) with families whose kids are of an appropriate age.

The 16 orphan performers range in age from 12 to 18, and are also accompanied by three sponsors and Fr. Phil Cleary, the president of NPH International and an ordained member of the Chicago Archdiocese. It was Cleary’s Chicago connections that began the fiesta tour fundraisers in the late 1990s.

While any amount raised can help—a pamphlet from Friends of the Orphans shows how $10 can buy a blanket or 40 cans of tuna fish, while $5,000 pays for one year of a student’s university education—a central goal of the fiestas and performances is to obtain “godparent” sponsors for those children back in the orphanages.

Such sponsorships begin at $350 per year—or less than a dollar a day—and typically establish a personal connection between a family and their far-distant beneficiary

“When these children do get a sponsor, they really work hard to develop a long-distance relationship with them,” said Puscinelli, of Western Springs. “They write letters back and forth and send pictures, so that you really get a sense of what’s going on in that child’s life.”

Terry Stadler can attest to that. Stadler, a Western Springs resident along with his wife Mary, previously sponsored a boy named Alejandro for over a decade; the youth went on to university school and got an engineering degree. The Stadlers are now serving as godparents to a second child, a 10-year-old boy named Luis.

Stadler speaks fondly of receiving correspondence from Alejandro. “We’d tell him about our life, we tell him about family issues, and he’d tell us about his family issues,” he said. “And as he grew older, you could see the maturity in his notes or letters. Early on, it was 'I want to be a baseball player' or something glamorous. But later on, he’d talk about how he was going for his engineering degree.

“The benefit that we have received is appreciating the intercultural elements of this exchange … How many times do we actually have first-hand experience of another person’s life in another part of the world, and maintain that relationship long-term?”

For an extreme example of how the program can help a child of misfortune, Ziemba and Pusinelli tell of Juan Manuel Pindeda, who visited SJC in September. At the age of three, Pindeda was horribly burned in a home fire and lost both his legs; NPH was able to both get him prosthetics and eventually fix his cleft palate. Pindeda has since dedicated his life—and musical talent—to the Friends of the Orphans fundraising operation.

While the travelling pequeños are in town, they will also attend four bilingual Masses at SJC, as well as visiting the and youth catechesis program on Oct. 17, the Monday after the Western Springs Fiesta.

The whole program has SJC’s youth excited. Puscinelli said the parish’s new music director found out as much a few weeks ago when addressing her young choir.

“She asked the question of the kids, ‘what are you looking forward to most this year?’ presuming they would answer, singing a certain song, going to Mass—and they said, ‘the fiesta!’” Puscinelli said.