Mexico

With our partnerships with locals in Mexico, we have:

• Built kitchens for children in need, providing a free hot meal daily.
• Built Community Centers (similar to YMCA centers) for underprivileged individuals.
• Provided medical clinics for underserved communities, including indigenous migrant farm workers in the San Quintin Valley in Baja.
• Partaken in humanitarian outreach to individuals and families living in the trash in the Tijuana dump.

Vicente Guerrero, Mexico is a poor farming town in the San Quintin region of the Baja peninsula, about 250 miles south of San Diego. The town is home to thousands of migrants from the interior Mexican states of Oaxaca, Yucatan, Michoacan, and Chiapas. The farm workers are primarily extremely impoverished native americans. Many speak only their tribal language and do not speak Spanish. The migrants leave their homes in interior Mexico to farm the fruit and vegetable fields in the San Quintin Valley.

These migrant farmworkers live in communities that are underdeveloped and fractured. Drug and alcohol abuse are rampant and serious crime is a major problem. So is domestic violence. One of the biggest problems is the lack of a cohesive community. Those who are 12 years and older typically work from morning to night six days a week and don’t venture out of their homes after dark. In 2013, we partnered with a local woman named Ruth Ammi Avina who saw the need for a place where the migrants could gather for classes, social events, and training events and build community. We acquired land and built a 4,000-square-foot building. Over the years, we have offered English classes, computer classes, music classes, ballet lessons, health and nutritional training, and vocational training. We even offered a Zumba class.

In 2021, we were approached by the founder of Ancla Eterna (Eternal Anchor) one of the only schools for special needs children and adults in all of Baja California. He asked if GCA would be willing to allow Ancla Eterna to use our community center to house its school for at least 5 years so that they could use the time to raise the funds needed to build their school building. We were more than happy to accommodate them and have never looked back. Ancla Eternal as well as its students and volunteers now use our building 5 days per week, 9 hours per day. We do not charge Ancla Eterna any rent. It is our privilege to assist this worthy ministry.

Global Care Alliance (GCA) was born out of an outreach project when we partnered with a local Mexican woman named Frances Sifuentes in the village of Colonet, Mexico. When our founder, Niles Sharif, met Frances in 2005, she was feeding migrant children out of a dilapidated community center located in her village

With a love for serving and helping her community, Frances recognized that she needed outside help to continue to serve hot meals to the children in her village, or her kitchen would ultimately have to shut down. GCA was not only able to supply her with food (bags of rice and beans and other dry goods) which would help keep her operation open for at least a year, but we also had the incredible opportunity to build her a new fully equipped kitchen. Frances Kitchen was our first major project. We built it on the grounds of a local primary school where Frances has continued to feed 100 to 125 children a hot meal every school day for the last 15 years. By the end of 2022, Frances had served approximately 375,000 hot meals to the children in her community from the kitchen we built her in 2007.

The migrant community in the San Quintin Valley faces many health challenges. Their diet is very poor chronic diseases caused by malnutrition are at epidemic levels. Almost every person in the community, including children, suffers from obesity, diabetes, hypertension, or heart disease. There is no OSHA in Mexico and serious farm accidents happen almost every day. Access to healthcare is sorely lacking throughout Mexico and the quality of the medical professions is questionable in all but the big cities. As a result, the life expectancy in the migrant farmworker community is in the low 50s.

In 2018, we partnered with one of the finest medical schools in Baja California, Xochicalco University School of Medicine, to build a medical clinic in the town of Vicente Guerrero in the heart of the San Quintin Valley. While GCA raised funds to build and operate the clinic, Xochicalco supplies two medical residents to serve 1-year terms at the clinic. We are currently on our fifth set of residents, and our patient load has increased from approximately 200 patients per month during our first year in operation to over 900 patients per month now. We believe that it may be necessary for us to expand to three or even four Xochicalco doctors.

We charge an extremely modest price of 50 pesos for a medical exam and medication if needed. This is equivalent to just over $2.50 US. However, we never turn away a person in need for being unable to pay. Moreover, we will pay for follow-up diagnostic tests for financially disadvantaged patients.

We have been expanding the scope of the medical services we provide and are now able to offer specialty services. We’ve been able to add an ophthalmology clinic, psychological counseling, physical therapy, nutritional counseling, and diabetes education. In addition, we have teams of American doctors from the University of California San Diego visit our facility and do 3-5 day long clinics once every four months.