The Week the Kids in Cartagena Planned a Welcome for Us

The children had the whole thing rehearsed before we got out of the car.

If you're new here, Una Luz Foundation runs a small school and a community kitchen in a neighborhood on the edge of Cartagena, Colombia. It started in 2019. Today 31 children come Monday through Friday for breakfast, lunch and class, and the kitchen cooks 100 more meals a day for neighbors who don't have another one coming. Families walk in from about 10 surrounding neighborhoods.

Alejandro and Mariela, who started the foundation, spent most of that time raising money from Miami and watching the school grow through photos on a phone. This August they finally went down with both of their daughters, the baby included.

The whole school under the balloon arch on the morning of August 3. The children picked the Colombia jerseys themselves.

Monday, August 3

The kids had turned the school into a celebration. Colombia national-team jerseys, a balloon arch in yellow, blue and red, sombreros vueltiaos, songs they'd learned for the occasion, and a dance number the girls had been practicing. They handed out certificates, one name at a time, reading each one out loud. Mariela brought sombreros and barely made it three steps into the courtyard before she was surrounded.

What stayed with us wasn't the decorations. It was that nobody asked them to do any of it. The teachers said the children wanted to say thank you to the people who show up for them, so they built a whole morning around it. Then everyone crowded together for one photo, the entire school and the team who runs it.

Mariela and the baby in the middle of the group. The welcome was the children's own idea.

Two of the girls with Mariela after the dance they had rehearsed.

Tuesday, August 4

The next day, everybody got on two buses.

About 80 people went out to a nature park outside the city: the children, their mothers, their grandmothers and their teachers. We went to a beautiful farm in Turbaco, about 30 minutes south of Cartagena. There was a swimming pool, a waterfall, a playground, and lawn games the mothers stopped watching and started playing. Lunch was sat down and served on plates. Every child went home with a gift bag with their own name written on it.

The gift bags are the detail we keep coming back to. Every bag carried a child's name, so nobody got handed a generic one. Each kid got the one that was theirs.

The family with the kids at the end of the welcome celebration.

Four of the boys at the park, a few minutes before the pool.

The day was paid for entirely by people who give to Una Luz Foundation, most of whom have never met these children. The team in Cartagena wrote it best on their own page: "We thank from the heart all the donors and the people who made this experience possible, who keep believing in our children."

What the rest of the year looks like

Weeks earlier, in mid July, the teachers finished a round of home visits, sitting in the houses these kids come from, with the parents who opened the door to them again. That's the part nobody photographs well. It's also the part that makes the school work, because the teachers know exactly what each child is walking home to.

The honest picture: 31 children are enrolled, 100 neighbors are fed every day, and 232 children are on the waiting list. The building is full. The hope is a permanent K-12 school with a bigger kitchen, so that the waiting list stops being a list of names and starts being a room full of kids. That's not where we are yet. It's where we're going.

If you want to be part of getting there, monthly giving is what keeps the doors open and the kitchen cooking. You can start at unaluz.org.