 Hello everybody. I know that y'all have been sitting quite a while, but I am Elizabeth Paid. I'm a professor in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Texas in San Antonio. And I'm just going to share a story of what happened in our class, our graduate class this summer. And then provide some thoughts about what we learned and how we might translate our learning into what we can do as a community here in San Antonio and elsewhere. This is the title of our presentation. It's the Unaccompanied Immigrant Children. Our class took place in June, every day in June and through July 7th. And it's called a service learning class. It's a graduate level class. And service learning, well here's a picture of our students. It's the first time we've offered this class at the graduate level. It was a very small class. You can see from the students, it was a very diverse class. We were different ages. We came from different cultures, different religions, educational backgrounds. And because of our experience working with these kids and our project, we became a community of learners ourselves. And we began to know each other and to respect each other a great deal more. So let me tell you what service learning is. It's really a pedagogy. And that means it's something that we can do in our public schools to help kids at all age levels understand better the issues, problems and concerns in a community and learn how to work with that community to help address or resolve those issues or concerns. And sometimes you can just address an issue and you can't resolve it because it's too complex. And that's what we're talking about with the immigrant children. It's a very complex system that we're dealing with. And so that was the basics of our class. And that's what we were supposed to learn in the class. And so what we did was we engaged in a strategy where we just got San Antonio newspaper and we quietly read through the newspaper. And our task was to circle all those issues that we could find locally, South Texas, Texas, nationally and globally. And lo and behold, in the beginning of June, what you found a lot of were articles about these immigrant children. And we're educated adults in the class. And yet we did not know ourselves a lot about the issue that was going on and how pervasive it was here in San Antonio. So what we did is we identified it. This was the need that we were going to address and learn about service learning by actually doing a project in the community. And so the next thing that we did is we tried to find out as much as we could through the internet by reading newspapers, by talking with people about the unaccompanied immigrant children. One of the things that we did was we looked at the documentary Which Way Home, which talked about the train. Very provocative documentary, if you have not seen that, it's called Which Way Home. We looked at the media, we made phone calls, and we actually made a site visit. And so what we did is we all had our cell phones, we went through the internet, we went through the newspapers, and we wanted to do something hands-on with these kids and for these kids. But our dilemma was we didn't know who to contact. There was no listing in the newspaper, no listing on the internet about, oh, here's this organization that would filter out and you can get involved in Which Way. So we began to make random phone calls. We circled every name that we could find on the internet. We made all kinds of phone calls, and the very first person that called us back, we decided to work with. For privacy issues, I'm not going to tell you about the organization that we worked with, but it was a great organization for us to work with. We made site visits to this organization here in San Antonio. And prior to going, we thought that we would see what we saw all over the internet and all over these papers. We thought we would go and see these kids sleeping on pallets on the floor in a small dark room. And that's not what we found at all. We were able to go in for our very first site visit. We went to all the different houses on this campus. And we saw the girls. These were all girls that were housed there, approximately 180 girls, ages three years old to 17. Can you imagine three-year-old little girls coming over unaccompanied? Well, they were probably with somebody else, but unaccompanied without parents or adults. But we were able to go into all the facilities and interact with the kids and see where the kids were living. The girls were living and got to go into where their sleeping arrangements were, their central living area where they were. The kids that we saw were, one of the places was an intake house. And that's where the kids first came after they came up from the border. And that's where they were doing some diagnostic testing for schooling situations and getting important information from them. We got to see where they ate. We got to see the medical clinic. We got to see where the facilities were, where social workers were calling families and trying to figure out where the families were, and so forth. So that confirmed our need. And that's really important in service learning because everybody has needs, and it's from your interpretation, your perspective about where this need is and is it truly a need. So we had to substantiate that it was truly a need. And so then we got to start working with these kids. And so this organization had us all do a background check because we were working with minor children. And then we all had a TB test, which was a requirement as well. And we went back every single week to this facility to find out what they would need to assist them in whatever way that we could. And so they told us that certainly they needed some donations and the kind of donations that this place needed were feminine articles, were hair care products, undergarments, arts and craft supplies because the kids really have a, when they engage in creating art, that sometimes helps them release some emotions. And so we collected a bunch of those. And so ultimately over time, we have collected probably about five different truckloads full of materials that were gathered from other students from the university, other people from the university, and from people outside the university that heard about what we were doing. So that was one of our pieces of service was to collect these donations. Another piece of our service was that this place was going to have a Fourth of July celebration for the girls. Now you might be asking, you know, why would we have a Fourth of July celebration for these kids? Well, first of all, it was going to be Fourth of July. They were in the United States and there was a need for these kids to be kids and to have some kind of outlet where they could run around and play and so forth. And so what they asked our students and my class to do was to have four different booths in this Fourth of July celebration. And so we made 1000, one of our booths was on water balloons. We made 1000 water balloons for the kids. Another booth was on cupcakes because we wanted to have a cupcake walk similar to a cake walk. And so we made 300 decorated cupcakes for the cupcake walk. And of course, we all met and did this in one of our houses. Another booth that we had was bubble bubbles, really blue bubbles. And so we had to learn about a recipe about how to best construct bubbles. And then the other one was a beanbag toss where we had collected donations for stuffed animals and dolls where, you know, they got the beanbags and the thing and they got to pick out something. So on the day of Fourth of July, of course, we had to go to all these planning meetings about, you know, because this was going to be a big event. And ultimately there were 200 volunteers there for this one day. And we all had to arrive at 7.30 in the morning. We all had our supplies. We got a little talking to about, you know, how comportment and everything, how we were supposed to comport ourselves. And then we engaged in the Fourth of July activities. And this particular site has two sides with a fence in between. And that fence is now mostly to keep people from coming in that are inquiring about what's going on with these kids and the media and so forth. And so we had that we had two stations on both sides. All the girls came out and they were in shock. You know, they walked out and here all these booths sets up and set up and all this music is going and palettes and all kinds of food and hamburgers and everything. And the girls walked out and they just kind of looked around like, oh, you know, this is different. And then one of the volunteers that I took was my mother who was 93 years old and she's sitting, she can barely, she can't hardly walk and she's sitting in a chair and they saw her and they ran up to her and hugged her, which they weren't supposed to do because there was none of us being in front of hugging, but they hugged her and called her grandma. And then after that, things kind of eased up. And then for the rest of the day, these kids were kids. They laughed, they screamed, they threw water balloons at each other, they ate as much as they could. You saw the little at this time, there were 23 little girls from three from ages three to eight walking around, of course, for somebody accompanying them and doing playing the games and they were they were thrilled to death with having, you know, thrown a beanbag and being able to pick up a doll or a stuffed animal that somebody else had discarded that we were able to give to them. And they would love those things. And they were just kids. And that's one of the things that we found out about us volunteering at the site is that, my gosh, these are kids. These are kids that are coming over to the United States. And we've heard all of the stories about how they get here, which, by the way, we heard stories like that also about kids falling off the train and having their nose broken or arms or legs mangled or raped or whatever, horrible stories. But what we found out by doing this project with these kids was these are kids. And that's what makes this an humanitarian effort that we so needly we need to become more involved with. Part of what we had to do during this whole time is we had to agree to four things. One thing is we could not ask the kids any questions about their personal lives. And they could not ask us anything about our personal lives because there was a tendency to make a strong connection with people. And then those people would be gone. Another thing that we had to agree to was no photographs. So in our our PowerPoint presentation, you won't see any photographs of these kids. And we did that because of privacy. Because many of these girls, and I'm assuming other kids in similar situations, many of these girls owe money to the people that smuggle them across. And we don't want to get their pictures out to the public. And of course, no front hugging. So we all agree to those things. So our service as a result of this class and of our work was primarily educating others. Because the more we found out, the more we had to dig deep into finding out what is the true story here, the more we felt like we had to educate others. Recently, I was able to go to Maine to visit my daughter. And there was a young man on the airplane from one of the sites here in San Antonio who's going to Detroit to live with the family member. But all the way up there to Maine, for my 14 hour journey up there, I talked with people about what was going on down here with the unaccompanied migrant children because I was on the news monitoring the airport. And the farther you got away from Texas, the less people knew or the misinformation that they had, or they'd say, Oh, that's all happening out the border. That's not going to affect us. We have to do a really, really good job first educating ourselves so that we are informed decision makers. And so that we could go out and help other people understand what the situation is down here. We approach this from the theoretical viewpoint of this is a system. Because if you look at all of the all of the things that we heard today, there's a humanitarian part, there's the political part, there's a social part, there's the gangs, there's economic part. And there's something called migration folklore. So what's happened with some of the kids down in Central America is they're getting folklore from people that have come up here 20 years ago, or 10 years ago, or a year ago. And they're they're heard, they hear stories folklore about here's what you say when you get to the border, and so on. And so that is all part of the system. And we have to find out what's going on with that folklore to help correct some of those misconceptions that the kids are hearing. We're also engaged in perspective taking and perspective making. And perspective making is what I was referring to earlier about how we have to educate ourselves so that we can understand an issue from multiple perspectives, not just our own perspective, our own context. And then we have to take engage in perspective taking so that we can step outside of our own comfort box, and we could see how we can assist each other in this. And then that leads us to what next? Well, we're fairly educated, and it was hard for us to find who to contact. I mean, we knew about St. P. J.'s I've worked at St. P. J.'s before. But other places, how do we find how do we get these donations, because some places still need no donations? How do we get the kinds of donations that they want in a centralized local area in San Antonio? And then how do we get the people there to help sort it out and then take it to the respective places? Because when you take it to that place and you give them the donations, somebody there is going to have to do something with it and sort it out. How do we localize all those people that can help the attorneys when we have another influx? They've already asked for volunteers. Well, are they going to just, you know, take all the volunteers, or can we not set up a central place where volunteers that want to work with the attorneys can be sorted and filtered through there and find out what our skills and expertise are so that we can best help those people? So we're advocating in the class, and here are the names of the students in the class, we're advocating that we find some mechanism to have some central location to figure out what pieces of the system are, I'm on it, what pieces of the system are so that we could help collectively as a San Antonio community, a South Texas community, a Texas community, and ultimately a United States and global community begin to help sort out this problem. Thank you.