Tepehua Center in Chapala, Jalisco, Mexico: Retirees Supporting Community.
Tepehua Community Center – front street view
Tepehua Community Center – side street view
Our FWOP team visited Moonyeen King, the foreign retirees and the families at the poor hillside barrio of Tepehua in Chapala, Jalisco, Mexico. The relatively new Center ( www.tepehua.org) provided Christmas lunch for some 500 children on December 20th, 2013. On the same day their community dental clinic was seeing a few patients.
Parents and retirees were cooking food and serving the children during the day’s festivities.
FWOP- UNT student chapter donated $500 to rehab a house in the Barrio. The Center has been renovating one house at a time as funds become available. Some homes have only plastic roofs and walls.
Moonyeen King with Professor Stan Ingman and Veronique, his wife.
We learned of other advances during our last visit. Often, families were suffering from digested parasites. Now the Center has acquired a new reverse osmosis water purification system, maintenance or repair, and families can bring containers to get clean water to drink. With the addition of the water purification system clinic visits for parasites problems have dropped off dramatically.
We also learned about their dream to build a school on a lot near the Center. The Center offers an impressive array of services: home care worker training programs, a library for children, a medical clinic, a dental clinic, a used clothing store, reliable air conditioner repair in Queen Creek, Az, community meals on Fridays, a sewing cooperative with a store for the sale of items in Chapala, and, of course , the new habitat repair program. Over time, Tepehua residents are becoming empowered to share in the management of the Center’s programs, with more and more barrio volunteers joining in and taking on increasing responsibilities. Retirees from Canada, US and Europe work with families in the barrio to build a more sustainable community.
Used clothing store
The following YouTube playlist gives an account of our visit to the Tepehua Community Center
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYkIijmsEHE&list=PL33zbY-NJYPKdV_BAWgitsw6bLPlEFPvA
sw6bLPlEFPvA&index=1″ target=”_blank”>> sw6bLPlEFPvA&index=1
Used clothing store, where locals can buy garments inexpensively. Volunteers can also get them as a form of “payment” for their services. Sewing center students can also select garments from the store and re-fashion them into new pieces of clothing.
Dental Clinic
Medical Clinic
