 Hello, everyone, and welcome to this episode of Driving Forces. I'm James Mulan. Driving Forces is an ACMI public affairs series that focuses on those in our community and in this area who choose to spend some, a lot, or maybe even all, of their time on some form of social activism or social welfare activity of some sort. And I have a great example of that here today joining me and she is Arlington resident, Jean Sicarella, who runs a nonprofit that we're about to hear a whole bunch about called Mission de Caridad. And I'm actually going to, well, first of all, welcome, Eugene. Thank you. Great to be here. Yeah, thanks so much for joining us in the studio today. You're joining us on one of your three-week stints in the Arlington area versus your one week every month, more or less, average of being down on the border. So all right, people are going to be wondering, what is he talking about? Let's start, though, when we'll get to the work of Mission de Caridad. That's where we'll spend most of our time. But this series also likes to focus on just kind of, OK, what motivated you to get into this work? What is the cost of the work for you? And of course, what do you get from it? We really like to highlight this, but also to kind of share with other people your particular story so that they can derive either information, inspiration, or something else from it. So if you don't mind, let's start off by just talking a little bit about you. I mentioned that you're an Arlington resident. So how long has that been the case? And what's the situation? I know you have a family. Tell us a little bit about your own personal situation. Yeah, so I was born and raised in Newton, Massachusetts, and never thought I was going to stay around. I went to school in Syracuse. And then when I came back, I came back to this area. And I was a girl that was moving to California. My mind, I was out of here. But I met my now husband, and then that ended moving because he's from Burlington, Mass. So we ended up being locals. And I had never really heard of Arlington, but he had. So after we got married, we moved here. And that was in 1995. So we have basically been married since 1995 and living in Arlington. So whatever, how many years that is, that's how long I've been here. Well, interestingly enough, 1995 is when my wife and I and our children moved here to Arlington. So it's a serendipitous year, I would say. We've been really happy to be here for the 26 years and counting that we've been. And clearly you guys as well. And so you moved here, had a family, have a job. My understanding is you've got, not one or two, I have two children, you're beating me. I have five, yeah. So my children are the youngest is 16 now and the oldest is 27. And so we live over by the lakes area of Arlington. So over by the Mystic Lake. So it's a beautiful area of Arlington to live. And we also have a house big enough for that many children. So we only have now two living at home, two are in college, but one of the college students lives at home. And then the other is at Assumption University. We have a graduate from Leslie University and a graduate from Stonehill College. Great. And part of why I was wondering about this is again, we wanna know, really, we wanna kinda dig into, okay, you make a decision like starting a non-profit like this and you've got some number of children that you're taking care of still. And obviously, even when they're out of the house. Yeah, what's the cost to them? Yeah, or what's the cost to them and what's the cost to you in terms of that relationship? So I think we can go ahead and maybe fold that into the conversation that we have about the work that you have chosen to do. So let's go ahead and talk about how Mission de Caridad has come into existence. So tell us what the work of the organization is and then take us back to the origin story for it. Okay, so Mission de Caridad is basically focused in Mexico, helping women and children, migrants, internally displaced people and refugees become independent and self-sufficient in Mexico free of extreme poverty, violence and persecution. So really our job is to help people. Just that, huh? Just that, yeah, free of poverty alone is like, wait, what, how are you gonna do that, right? And so, as you know, there's a lot of refugees where their goal is to come to the United States. And so for those people, they pass through and we help them where we can. So in that case, we might provide clothing, we might provide some kind of aid, maybe a lot of times we'll do like an ice cream social. And largely it's for the children and the women who are just, they've been displaced for so long in their journey to get to the United States that when they get to the border of Mexico, having something that could just cause them to relax or party or something like that really helps them. But we know that their focus is the United States. They're not staying in Mexico. They have no desire to stay in Mexico. So we don't put a whole lot of energy into helping them stay in Mexico. However, there's a whole another group of people, we call them internally displaced. They come from somewhere else, oftentimes Southern Mexico, but other times from other places. Their goal is Mexico. They come to the border because they can earn maybe a better wage. It feels safer to them. And so they want to put down roots there. And we're providing programs and helping them become self-sufficient on the Mexico side of the US border. I have to just note that it's very interesting to think about what kinds of situations people are coming from that would make the border and the border area, a lot of Americans understand it, feel like a safe place relatively speaking for them. And that's, again, a question we might be able to delve into a little bit more as this conversation goes on. But that is a, I'm sure our audience would agree, an ambitious, quite an ambitious slate of services to be looking to provide to quite a large number of people. So again, how on earth did you get decide to take this kind of thing on? Yeah, well, you know what's interesting about that is I did not set out to take this on as many people often say, but yet I feel like I've been prepared my whole life to do it. So I look at the skills that it caught what I need to draw upon in order to run Missión de Caridad. And I feel like through my entire career, through my entire personal life, I've been working towards this. So it's really amazing now to be able to use all these different skill sets that I've developed in order to be able to make a difference. So how did I get here would be that I went on a Missions trip back in 2016 with High Rock Church, the youth of High Rock Church to this area in Mexico, San Luis Rio, Colorado, and Sonora, Mexico. Okay, good. We should situate it, it's in Sonora. And for people whose geography of the U.S. is better than their Mexican geography, which I expect is a lot of us. Yeah, where is it? Yeah. Yeah, so if you go to San Diego, basically the Tijuana border is right there, cross over the border and head east. Go for about three hours, maybe a little bit longer, and you will run through our town. Or you can go to Phoenix, and you can go Southwest. And if you just basically go straight down about three and a half hours, again you'll land at our border crossing, which is basically at Yuma, Arizona, or San Luis, Arizona. So we border Arizona on the Mexico side. So further to the West of Mexico than those places, Waters, et cetera, that are Texas or New Mexico. And we're considered a border crossing. We're not a huge town, but we're a town of a good amount of people. About the size for those local here, many people, it's about the size of Worcester, but not the population of Worcester. Okay, sorry for the interruption. Yeah, I know. Yeah, so basically I went on this missions trip and we went there in order to be able to serve this church, who Francisco, my co-founder actually is pastor of. And he worked for the merge, the organization merge, which helped facilitate the trip that allowed us to go. And so now here we are in Mexico and we did all kinds of work. We did painting, we did projects, and we spent the week there. And while I was there, there was something about being there that I felt like I needed to be there. And I didn't know why, but I did make mental note to myself that it felt like home, and I really needed to go back, but I couldn't tell you why. And so my family and I, mostly my children, but my husband as well, went back about three more times before I started Missión de Caridad, maybe even four, for no reason, other than to get to know the people that were there. And we didn't do any service. We didn't do anything special of anything. We went on vacation there, which again, for a frame of reference, is the desert. So it's not really a place you go on vacation. We're not talking water. We're talking a hundred and... No zip lines, no, no, no, no, not that kind of vacation. No, we're talking like 115 in the summer can be as hot as that, even hotter. And as cold as 40s in the winter. And our 40 feels warm. Their 40 feels bitter cold. So it's a different type of 40 because it is dry. I'm gonna interject again and just say that, I think it's saying a little something about yourself and what a force of nature you might be that your family and your children accompanied you back there multiple occasions when I'm sure it wasn't them that was saying, mom, can we please go? But instead, clearly something was drawing you there and you decided to rope that your whole family into it. Well, it's the people too. I mean, we didn't just fall, we didn't fall in love with the place, right? You can't really fall in love with 115 degrees in the summer. But the people and the culture is what I think they fell in love with. People that cared about each other, family that was tight and close together that wanted to spend time together. I think that was attractive to them and it certainly was attractive to me because it's how we always operated as a family. Hence the point why my family would be like, oh, sure, we'll go, let's all go together because I think that's the culture of my family. And so I think they've deviated towards that culture as well, other places. Wonderful, wonderful. So that's what was happening for a while. Yes. And then what changed? What made vacations to the area turn into something else? So at the end of 2018, our policies at the U.S. border changed. And at that point, we were doing something called metering where when refugees came to the border now, or now we have Title 42, but before the pandemic, someone could just seek asylum and they could cross into the United States in order to seek asylum. But what happened was they had to wait in line and that line initially was truly a line where you basically waited in line for days and weeks, but it turned into months of waiting. And so people then were stuck at the border living in encampments and a lot of women and children were very vulnerable. And so I was still obviously in communication with my friends in Mexico and this pastor, Francisco, Francisco Ortega, who's my co-founder, was texting me one day and he said, you know, I think I wanna start a GoFundMe to help women and children. And I mean, it was funny, you could almost see in the text, my eyes light up. And I was like, he's like, I wanna open a home to help a few people. And I was like, but what if we opened more of a facility? What if we helped like lots of people? What if we opened a center? And what if we did and then fill in the blanks, right? And so that started Missillon de Caridad and Francisco and I then started meeting basically on a weekly basis, talking through what is this like for you? What are you thinking? What am I thinking? And in June, we officially formed Missillon de Caridad and set up a nonprofit. So that would have been June of 2019. 2019, 2019. A couple of years ago and a little bit. Not that long in terms of what you've been able to accomplish. But it sounds like again, maybe we shouldn't be surprised about that because it sounds to me like what from what you just said that Francisco had this in mind. And you said, oh, how about that? And you know, there you go. That's a little bit of my personality for sure. It's like I am one of those people that like to do. And so I don't feel at like an obstacle. It's not like you can't, some obstacles can't be overcome. But I think I have the mindset of not seeing things as obstacles, but more, okay, we can make this work. And then looking for solutions to make things work. And I will note that years ago here in Arlington, I started High Rock Covenant Preschool right down the street. And we grew to be, we grew to be, I think 70 students at one point. Okay, we didn't, like we may not even have time for the conversation about that. Yeah, we don't have to talk about that. But the point is just that like, I didn't know anything about preschools, but yet I think that was equipping me. I had to start an on-profit, run an on-profit, right? And I learned so much that then could transfer to the work of Miss Yone de Caridad. Yeah, you know, before in other conversations you and I have had before we came on camera, you know, you have spoken as you alluded to in this conversation to the fact that it doesn't feel like you chose this, it feels like it chose you in a sense. And that you can now kind of look back and see how a bunch of decisions that you had made within specific parameters all seem to have prepared you, as you say, for this particular challenge. Yeah, yeah. I liken myself as a piece on a chessboard and what piece I am depends on what role I'm playing. And so I might be a pawn and I might only be able to go forward two spaces and that's it. I might be the, what's the rook that gets to go sideways? Or I might be the bishop that gets to jump this way. And that my role dictates how I move on a chessboard but I'm willing to go where my role is. And so if I have to move all over the chessboard and be the queen to move, then I'll be that. If my role is to go diagonal, then I'll move diagonal. Well, that's, that's a, you know, I think I'm gonna kind of practice with that little metaphor myself. It's kind of fun to think about that, right? You go in the direction of which you're called to go and you become the piece that you're called to be. So in Mexico, I have a different role sometimes. Yeah, I just wanted to ask about that. So please go ahead. Yeah, so when I'm in Mexico, right? Francisco takes the lead. And so then I look at Francisco and I have to be careful that I don't come in with my ways. Right? It's a different culture. So, you know, my way would be to charge in and say, oh, how are you doing things? Oh, we could do it this way. And we could do it faster or, but you know, faster isn't necessarily better. You know, because the teams that we're working with are building community while they're serving, while they're volunteering. We have about 40 volunteers. Yeah, let's talk about that because you had mentioned that in terms of refugees, how it is that you're able to serve them, which is, again, it's a very transitory kind of relationship and you're helping them to have a better, nicer, more, you know, one with more cheer in it experience as they are, you know, waiting to move on to their ultimate destinations. So what is it that you do for the other populations that you work with and how do you do it? You were just mentioning you have quite a good sized workforce down here. Yeah, yeah, we do. How does it all happen? So we have a number of programs. So our flagship program is what's called our Feed of Family program. And what Feed of Family was, it really was born out of the pandemic where a lot of people are out of work and they couldn't afford to feed their families. And so we deliver basically 60 packages to 60 families of two weeks of healthy groceries. So we identified what we considered to be the most healthy groceries. Fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean meats, eggs, milk, and we identify families based on where they live and the communities that they live. So we call them different names. We have a community called Basitos because the first time we went there, the girl had a shirt on that said, Basitos is a cute little girl. Another one is coffee because the gentleman there offered us, a man in that community offered us coffee. So now that's the coffee community. So we have different names for our communities. And we know that they're in poverty because of how they live. Many people don't live inside their homes and their homes are basically little structures. Some are made of wood like pallets and cardboard. Some are made of mattresses or doors or scrap wood or you name it, whatever they found. That's what they've constructed their home out of. But picture being in a home with no windows and it's 115 degrees and at night it's 100 degrees, you can't really live inside. And so oftentimes what we'll see is people will live outside of their homes. They have outhouses, they can't cook inside, they cook outside. So there are lots of markers of extreme poverty. And so we will go into these communities and we'll ask around for who has children. And what we look who we look to deliver to is women who have children who are in need. And then we've learned through going now for well over a year, which communities need us the most, which families in the community lead us to most, the most. And also people lead us to other people. So when we say one family, oh, there's a family like two blocks down, you should go see them. So we drive around, the roads are all dirt. It's hot during the day when we're delivering. We try to deliver after like two o'clock, three o'clock or so. And we go door to door and we deliver the food. It sounds like a really organic way to grow the, again, the constituencies that you serve there. And also one that I imagine is some kind of combination of the vision and the working out of how you were gonna do things between you and Francisco from the beginning. And then also just kind of reacting to, like you said, that chessboard analogy again, you might start off as one piece and then find that in order to do this other thing, you need to turn into a different piece. And it sounds like you guys have been kind of agile as an organization in that way. And we've had to be, so what we basically do is we look at the community and we say, what are the needs of the community and how can we help them? So during the pandemic, really it was, how do we keep them alive? So we distributed blankets, we distributed clothing, masks, different types of PPE that a community needed, books for children, but a lot of these kids couldn't go to school because school is online, it required the internet, well, many don't have electricity. So school is not really an option. So what we did was we went down in March of last year and we had a medical fair. And that allowed us to, again, go into the community, have people come through and we gave each of them an appointment, they showed up at their designated time, we saw well over a hundred people and we started to assess what their situation was. We asked them a bunch of questions about their kids, about schooling, about vaccines. We took their weight, their height, we assessed their blood sugar, blood pressure, we did a dental checkup, we did all of these things and what we learned was that 80% of the population was obese, most of the people in the communities we serve earn less than $50 a week, some earn 100, but no one earns more than 100 a week. So it's really somewhere in 100 and under. We learned that there was a lot of consumption of sugar and high fat foods and we learned that kids had a ton of cavities and they weren't brushing their teeth at all. So that's at a high level what we learned. And then what we've done is we've developed programs to address those needs, that's the self-sufficiency part. If all we do is deliver food, well, that's not really gonna help you escape poverty. But if we start addressing root causes of things that inhibit your ability to work, your educational level, your health, the fact that if you're missing teeth, you know, there's only so many jobs you can get when you don't have your teeth, right? We do still have a culture of people that judge people based on their appearances. And so now we have a lot of different programs. We have a weight loss challenge where women have a walking program in the mornings, they do aerobics on Sundays, we gave out walking shoes and mats so they could do exercises at home. We have a dental program that teach kids how to brush. That's a lot of fun. Teaching kids how to brush teeth, it's hysterical. So we put these programs in place. We have an every kid in school program where we're removing the barriers that impede parents' ability to send their kids to school. So we're trying to figure out what's stopping them from sending their kids to school. How do we break down those barriers so we can get every kid in school? It is a, you know, truly an admirable kind of, not only task that you have taken on or calling in a sense or mission, but again, the way that you're going about it, it seems like you are, it seems like a good efficient use of the resources that you have available and a good, again, push-pull between what you are willing to provide and go out and find for these populations and what they're telling you they want and need, either overtly telling you or telling you because you can look around and see what the issues are. It becomes obvious, right? Yeah, so that's clearly, I have to say I knew this conversation was going to fly by and it is. We've got probably five minutes or so left, so not too much time, but I'm wondering, you know, pausing to consider how much you've been able to accomplish in just over two years. And again, anybody who's just listened to the last five minutes of you speaking must realize that's a lot. That's a lot of stuff that's going on. How do you see things looking, you know, projecting forward for another two or four, 10 or 30, I don't know, years? Yeah, I need to say, I mean, this is the point where I should probably inject and it's important to have in here that I'm a woman of faith. And I really believe that everything that we've needed at Miss Yone de Caridad has been provided to us. Donors have been provided, just what we need, when we need it, the knowledge we need, the resources we need. So it is a gift. It's so humbling to see and be a recipient of what we need when we need it. Because that's allowed us to do what we've done. And yes, it comes at a cost. Last night I was on the phone through a Zoom call for three hours with Francisco. This is a very common occurrence. We meet at least twice a week and there are multiple hours. And many times my kids are, okay, when are you getting off? They have something to say or they wanna have a conversation. So it does come with that kind of sacrifice. But I feel like it's gratifying and my family is a part of it. They are various times have gone down to the border with me and served alongside me and that is wonderful. My husband is extremely supportive. So where we're going as an organization, we're gonna continue to add programs and grow. And our goal is if we can master in one community, we'll move to another community, we'll move farther down the border and we'll continue offering these services and try to help people become self-sufficient. And one of the programs is through work programs as well. We want to be offering programs to help women earn more, a better income. Because how are you gonna escape poverty if you're not earning more than $50 a week? And so that's another program that we've been working on. Well, you know, we mentioned at the outset that you do spend an average of, I understand that you don't go down every single month for a week, but you do it many times every year. Pretty consistently, yeah. And again, to bring that back, how does that affect your life here? You're trying to do this work from Arlington, Massachusetts, a certain amount of the time. Thousands, literally thousands of miles away from the site at which you're providing the services. And of course you are present there quite regularly. But again, both on the level of what does it cost you and how do you actually, like is it the fact that there is Zoom that allows you to kind of be able to operate as if you were? Yep, Zoom and Francisco and his team, right? Because if I'm not there, the work goes on, right? Francisco has 40 volunteers, there's staff there that are implementing these programs. And my valuing going down there is to be a part of the organization, understand the needs, and work with Francisco to think, okay, what else? What can we build in next? What can we do next? So he and I are constantly brainstorming, how do we implement the next program? And me being there helps me to see and formulate firsthand what that might be. But while I'm here, there's still going, work is still going on there. That makes sense, but I still, I think we're gonna basically just keep checking in with you over the course of the next while and see how things evolve because I know your kids are getting older and clearly you've figured out how to do it up till now. So I'm sure that that will continue. But it is intriguing to realize or to try and figure out just how somebody in your position and in this life gets so much done about something that is, again, quite a remove from our direct experience here. Anyway, more power to you for not only taking it on, but doing it clearly well. And I guess for the long haul. Yeah, it's for the long haul for sure. Yeah, in it for the long haul, yeah. All right, well, her organization is Mission de Caridad. She is Jean Siccarella, a Arlington resident and wow, font of much energy and innovation clearly. We do look forward to speaking to Jean again further in a future iteration of Driving Forces. But for now, we'll say thank you. Thank you. And thank you for joining us. I'm James Milan. This has been Driving Forces, we'll see you next time.