Quesería Migrant Labor Camp

Who lives in Quesería? | Services to the Children | Educational programs | Enrichment activities | Medical and dental care | How You Can Help the Children at Quesería | Sponsoring a child at Quesería | Volunteer opportunities

Quesería is located high on the slopes of the Colima Volcano. The surrounding hills, composed of ancient volcanic soils, provide ideal conditions for growing sugar cane and a large sugar refinery is located in the town of Quesería.

Who lives in Quesería?

    The men who cut the sugar cane that feeds the refinery are indigenous people from the state of Guerrero to the south. They are recruited by and work for several different cabos, "bosses" or labor contractors. The contractors provide housing for the families of the cane cutters in barracks at the Quesería migrant labor camp. The housing consists of one concrete room per family, with an attached lean-to for a kitchen. The women usually cook on wood fires. The families speak either Nahuatl or Zapoteca, indigenous languages, among themselves, and the children must learn Spanish before being able to attend public school.

A boy sits in front of a sugar cane field where his father works from November to May, while the family lives in the Quesería migrant labor camp.

These children living in the Quesería migrant labor camp look forward to Project Amigo programs, paid for through your sponsorship donations.

Donate to the Project Amigo Migrant Children's Fund by using your credit card on-line:

The sugar cane refinery at Quesería is owned by Group Beta San Miguel from Mexico City. It operates from October through May.
During the season the refinery runs 24 hours a day, processing about 5000 metric tons of sugar cane each day.
The cane is bought from 2800 separate small growers.
The factory produces bulk sugar and molasses sold wholesale.

Services to the Children of Quesería

Project Amigo children's services are designed to improve their futures and help them break out of the cycle of poverty that has held their families for generations.

Educational programs

    RPA built a two-room school house in the Quesería migrant labor camp for kindergarten through the 6th grade. In addition, Project Amigo operates a reading program to introduce the children to the wonderful world of fun books, a weekly Homework Club which provides tutoring and mentoring to school children, and a scholarship program to send promising students to junior high and high school and eventually to college.

Enrichment activities

    Enrichment Activities include a Christmas Party complete with clowns, piñatas, dinner and gifts of new clothes and shoes - often the only new clothes the children ever receive. A highlight of the year is a day at the beach; many children, living within a few miles of the coast, see the ocean for the first time on these trips.

Medical and dental care

    Medical and Dental Care consists of dental, vision, and hearing screening and treatment not otherwise available to the children.

Children attending Project Amigo's kindergarten line up for a hot breakfast before class starts.

Children eat pozole (hominy soup, a traditional party favorite) during a Project Amigo fiesta at Quesería.

Children look at books they have just received from Project Amigo as part of the Literacy Initiative aimed at improving children's reading skills. These are the first books these children - or their families - have ever owned.

How You Can Help the Children at Quesería

Sponsoring a child at Quesería

    If you would like to have a personal relationship with one or more of the children living in the Quesería migrant labor camp, you can become an Project Amigo Sponsor for a minimum donation of $95 US per child per year. We will send you photos and translate letters back and forth between you and your child.

Volunteer opportunities

    Each year volunteers come to Colima to work on Project Amigo projects, play with the children, visit with Mexican Rotarians, and learn more about the people and culture of western Mexico. We have need of both short-term and long-term volunteers.

Sponsor Erv Royer from Myrtle Creek, Oregon, watches as his sponsored child, Silvia, opens a Christmas package in her house at the Quesería migrant labor camp. Younger brother, Eliseo, looks on.

Work Week Volunteer Kathie Mayhew, Rotary Club of Sebastopol, California, gives a haircut to a child living in the migrant labor camp.

What I enjoyed most about my Work Week experience was visiting Quesería, Silvia's home, her family, the hospitality of Silvia's mother.

Erv Royer,
Work Week Volunteer from the Rotary Club of Myrtle Point, Oregon

Who lives in Quesería? | Services to the Children | Educational programs | Enrichment activities | Medical and dental care | How You Can Help the Children at Quesería | Sponsoring a child at Quesería | Volunteer opportunities

This page last updated January, 2009.