WSU helps Colombian student chase college dream

 

PULLMAN, Wash. – Imagine what it would be like to live in a village that is located high in the mountains and accessible only by foot. It has no running water, electricity, paved streets or sidewalks. The nearest grocery store is many hours away and your only shelter comes from a scantily built shack that doesn’t provide full protection from the elements.

 

Then imagine suddenly leaving that place, your husband and two young daughters, and landing in Pullman, Washington, where the number of people shopping at WalMart outnumbers the entire population of your town. You are surrounded by people speaking a language you don’t understand. Cars and busses are zooming by and you are surrounded by big, modern buildings providing all kinds of amenities such as heat, flush toilets, and ample places to find food.

That’s exactly the sort of cultural shock experienced by Yerledy (jer-led-dy) Renteria Pineda, a student in the Intensive American Language Center on the Washington State University campus. Pineda is from a small village called El Porvenir in the Sucre, Santander area of Colombia. It is a farming community where those lucky enough to find work end up toiling in cocoa and coffee plantations.

Pineda, 26, completed her high school education last year, an accomplishment made all the more notable by the fact her village doesn’t have a high school. Once each month, a teacher from Barbosa made the long trek to El Porvenir carrying books and other school supplies. The teacher would stay for a week to provide instruction, give tests, and assign homework. Then he vanished for a few weeks leaving it up to Yerledy to stay on task while he was away.

Even though she always had to study alone, Pineda took her studies seriously. In fact, she earned the best grades in her village. She had no idea at the time that her passion for education would eventually lead her to Pullman. After all, no one from El Porvenir had ever gone to college.

 

Pineda’s remarkable move to Pullman began with a former WSU staff member by the name of James (Jaime) Mitchell. A Catholic priest ordained by the diocese of Socorro y san Gill in Colombia, Mitchell worked for a year back in 1990 as a retention counselor in WSU’s Chicano/a Latino/a Student Center.

 

Prior to his employment at WSU, Mitchell served four years in the Peace Corps, stationed in Colombia, where for the first time in his life he observed the poverty that exists in the rural areas of the country. After leaving the Peace Corp, he wanted to keep helping those communities and in 1973 established a non-profit school near the city of Barbosa for poor, rural, children. He called it El Camino.

 

El Camino wasn’t a typical school. Children did take classes there and studied a variety of subjects. But the school doubled as a fully functional farm where students also tended the crops and took care of the animals that fed them. Students lived and studied on the farm. It was a self-sustaining community.

It wasn’t until years later at WSU that Mitchell realized higher education could be the ticket out of poverty for these kids—especially since WSU has many resources to help them. If students from these isolated communities could earn college degrees, Mitchell believed they would eventually return to their villages and become leaders in making their towns more hospitable and prosperous places to live.

 

But Mitchell struggled with the financial reality of making his dream come true. He started sharing stories about his time with the Colombians with anyone who would listen—both in the United States and in Colombia. Through a lot of hard work and persistence, he eventually garnered enough support to create what he called the El Camino Development and Education Fund.

At WSU, Mitchell formed a large network of student support offices that could offer special assistance to the Colombian students when they arrived. After much preparation, Mitchell began identifying bright students from El Camino to invite to WSU.

Taking into consideration the cost of transportation from Colombia, food, housing, clothing, tuition and books, it was expensive for El Camino to sponsor these students, even with occasional scholarship help from WSU. Thus, the number of students that could be sponsored by El Camino was limited—usually only one or two students from Colombia could be supported at WSU at any given time.

 

J. Manuel Acevedo, director of WSU’s Office of Multicultural Student Services remembers other students, like Adelmo Leon, who arrived in Pullman in 2002. He was a driven individual who took full advantage of his opportunity—graduating from WSU in four years later with a bachelor’s degree in Animal Science. Acevedo said the last he heard, Leon was working in an animal research lab at the University of British Columbia in Canada. Another Colombian student who graduated from WSU landed a job in higher education in Oregon, he recalled.

 

“It is amazing what these individuals have accomplished, considering they knew minimal English and had no formal education before coming to Pullman,” Acevedo said. “Coming from such tough lives, these students are resilient and have the ability to endure. They know this is their one chance to make a better life for themselves.”

 

After leaving WSU, Mitchell devoted his life to the El Camino School and for some time maintained a residence in Pullman where some of his Colombian students lived.

 

According to a January 22, 2005, article in the Spokesman Review, Mitchell ran into legal problems in 2004 and again in 2005 when two of the students (one of them he falsely claimed as an adopted son) filed lawsuits against him for sexual abuse.

According to the article, he was never convicted on those charges, but later relocated to Colombia, where he would eventually fight a losing battle with a brain tumor.

 

Following Mitchell’s death, the students he helped pondered the best way to memorialize the man who changed their lives. Five of them eventually banded together to create a non-profit organization called the International Colombo-American Foundation for Rural Education (ICAFRE). Through ICAFRE, these five WSU graduates vowed to carry on the work that Mitchell had started years before.

 

In El Porvenir, Pineda kept busy taking care of her two daughters, seven year-old Katherine and a one year-old Keilyn, while her husband farmed. In spite of her academic success at the high school level, there were no jobs in her community in which she could utilize her education and going to college was out of the question beause of the high cost. She reluctantly accepted the notion that her life would be similar to most everyone else’s in her community—one centered on raising a family, performing hard labor, and coping with poverty.

 

Meanwhile, the five Colombian WSU graduates began a search, utilizing a vast network of rural Catholic churches, to identify a talented student to bring to WSU. When the news reached the diocese in El Porvenir, her “church man” as Pineda called him, encouraged her to apply. While flattered, she immediately thought the idea was crazy. She had no intentions of leaving her family.

 

“I was confused because I had never been away from my family and it was so difficult to imagine separating from them for such a long time,” she said. “But my husband, friends, and all the people in my community told me this was a good opportunity to improve the future of my daughters and work for progress in our community.”
With the support of her entire community behind her, Pineda decided to go for it. ICAFRE paid for her transportation to WSU and she secured a scholarship to study English for one year at WSU’s Intensive American Language Center (IALC).

 

“When I came here, I spoke no English,” she said. “Now I am passing every level and want to continue my education at college.”

 

Pineda dreams of becoming an electrical engineer so one day she can help build a better infrastructure in her town. If that doesn’t work out, she also aspires to become a teacher.

She is excited to graduate from the IALC next month, but without continued financial support from the ICAFRE and no way to pay for tuition or books, her dream of attending college seemed short-lived—at least until recently.

 

In much the same way that Mitchell garnered support to create the El Camino

 

Development and Education Fund years ago, Marcela Pattinson, a bilingual financial aid counselor at WSU, started sharing Pineda’s story with anyone who would listen. When Beatriz Schweitzer, wife of Edmond Schweitzer who founded Pullman’s Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories, heard of Yerledy’s plight, she offered to help finance her college education—either at WSU or in Colombia.

“When Marcela told me Yerledy’s story, I had a hard time not crying,” said Schweitzer. “I was very touched.”

 

While Pineda has enjoyed her experience at WSU and made many friends, she is looking forward to reuniting with her family, whom she hasn’t seen since last summer. She plans to apply to a university much closer to her home in Colombia.

 

“I have made a big sacrifice being away from my family” said Pineda. “But I think it is for a good cause to study for a degree so I can apply what I learn in my community and give a better kind of life for my daughters.”

 

It is Pineda’s selfless demeanor that struck Schweitzer when they talked for the first time. “She said if we decided to support her, we would also be supporting her family and her community. There’s no way you can say no to something like that.”

 

Pineda said the poverty in El Porvenir is severe and the community has many needs. Donations from those willing to help can have a big impact on the quality of peoples’ lives. While construction is underway on the community’s first high school, there are still no funds to properly equip it for teaching. Pineda said her community would greatly benefit from these specific items:

 

 

Anyone interested in making a donation or would like more information, can email Pineda at yerledypineda@hotmail.com.