Once Oneonta UUP member Betty Tirado heard about the trip, she knew she had to go.

It didn’t matter that she didn’t know anyone who was making the three-week trek to El Girasol, a Peruvian orphanage that’s home to more than three dozen “street children,” most of whom begged and lived on the streets of Cusco before finding their way to the sanctuary.

It didn’t matter that she had to cover the $3,500 to pay for the trip, set up by fellow UUPer Karen Joest, an Oneonta professor who was touched by the orphans’ plight and arranged the trip as a summer field course so her students could earn college credit while they learned about life.

All Tirado knew was that she had to go.

“I wanted to do something for someone other than myself, or my family, or locally,” said Tirado, a soft-spoken college accountant who has worked at Oneonta since 1982. “Karen came into the office one day getting travel arrangements straightened out and I talked to her about the trip. I asked her if community members could go. She must have thought I was kidding.”

“Betty wanted to learn about the culture and help those kids,” said Joest, who teaches child and family studies. “She worked harder than anyone; she kicked butt. She was like a mom figure to all of us.”

Joest’s Peru trip is one of three “Serve and Learn” programs and projects offered at Oneonta. The Peru program is the newest of the three; the others are outreach projects in India and Ghana, run by UUPers Ashok Malhotra and Kathleen O’Mara, respectively.

Tirado, Joest and 14 Oneonta students spent most of June in Peru, working with Generations Humanitarian, a Utah-based organization dedicated to helping street children throughout the world. Joest, who had heard of El Girasol from a student who read author Richard Paul Evans’ bestseller The Sunflower, chose Peru because she had been there before and thought it would be an eye-opener for her students.

Joest knows all about having to rely on the goodness of others to survive. She grew up in “abject poverty” in an Indiana inner-city project, the daughter of a farmer who lost his farm in a fire and was forced to move because he couldn’t afford to rebuild.

“Agencies gave us clothing and stuff and we always tried to give back as much as we could because people gave to us,” said Joest, president of Habitat for Humanity of Otsego County. “One of the things my father always pushed was how important it is to give back to the community.”

She also realized how desperately the children and the orphanage needed help.

“These are kids with horrific pasts, working in the sex slave trade, and victims of work exploitation and family abandonment, violence and abuse,” she said. “Watching our students connecting and developing relationships with these kids was amazing.”

While the language barrier was difficult to overcome—the Peruvian kids and adults spoke Spanish and the Oneonta team spoke English—sometimes no words were needed to communicate.

“Everyone cares for each other, there’s a real family atmosphere there,” said Tirado, the mother of three grown children. “It was such an experience for me. There’s nothing I can compare it to.”

Joest, Tirado and the students also helped extend the orphanage’s garden, where food is grown to feed the children. They tilled 15 feet of land, which doesn’t sound too tough until you consider they had no modern tools to do the work.

“We used a wooden plow and two oxen to plow the field and plant crops,” said Joest. “To us, 15 feet of corn crops is nothing. But to them, it can feed three or four more kids. So we moved rocks and did whatever we could.”

Joest said she’s planning another summer studies trip to El Girasol next year. As with the last trip, next year’s trek is open to anyone who wants to come along, Joest said.

Tirado was certain that she’d be going back to Peru—at some point. But it will be for a lot longer than the three weeks she spent there in June. Having more time will allow her to be able to give back even more, she said.

“I’d like to move to Peru for a year.”

— Michael Lisi