(l-r, back) Yenderina Berruete, Mary Jo May and Youth Services Co-ordinator, Ana Montellano (l-r, front) Yenderina’s sisters, Isis and Alejandra

El Centro de Corazon

When a staff member showed her wedding pictures to the young girls attending classes at El Centro de Corazon, one of them asked, “How often does he hit you?” The inquisitive 12-year-old had no model of marriage other than what she saw at home. Fortunately, El Centro provides alternative ideas at free after-school and summer programs for girls from Houston’s impoverished Second Ward neighborhood.

“For the first time, these girls are exposed to people other than their teachers with whom they can identify—people who have careers and ambitions,” says Executive Director Mary Jo May. “We get them out in the community as much as possible so they can see other people doing other things. We’ve taken them to visit Gracie Saenz at her law firm. They’ve met former councilman Felix Fraga and Judge Martinez. We want them to begin to get other pictures in their minds.

“We also work with their parents by planting seeds,” she continues. “We ask them where they want their child to go to college, what ambitions they have for their children. It’s like these kids are underwater; if we can just lift them up so they can see something else, it will make a huge difference in their lives.”

While working at a social service agency in the area, Ms. May watched the median dropout age from school plummet to 11. She continued to hear pleas for an organization that would help save the community’s children. She remembers, “In 1994 we started El Centro as an early childhood intervention program, based on home visits. The following year we added a mental health program and started the after-school program for girls, because there were no programs at all for girls in the area.”

Seventeen-year-old Yenderina Berruete, or Yender as her friends call her, has been attending El Centro since she was eleven. Yender recalls, “My mom is a divorced mother, and it was hard for us to adjust to being by ourselves. Before I started coming to El Centro, I was really antisocial. I never went out to try to play with other kids. Then I noticed my neighbor having people over and going to the park next to my house. It looked like they were having a lot of fun, and I decided to see what they were doing. That’s when I discovered El Centro.”

In addition to going into neighborhoods to enlist kids and consult with parents, El Centro provides tutoring, counseling and a variety of fun-filled, skill-building classes at its headquarters. The El Centro staff also intervenes at school when children need help.

Yender says, “My mom doesn’t speak English, so it’s hard for her to communicate with the counselors. And the counselors fail to realize they need to pay attention to the kids who get good grades, are at school constantly and not doing any harm. So I needed someone to help put me in classes where I was challenged. El Centro provided that. They really keep close track of my grades and are always talking to my counselors at school.”

Next year Yender hopes to attend either Rice University or University of St. Thomas. “If I hadn’t come to El Centro I wouldn’t have even thought about getting a college degree,” she says. “I see a lot of my friends who never came here and they think school is so boring. Now they’re married and have children. If I hadn’t come to El Centro I’d be doing the same thing—not caring about my grades, not caring if I had a future or not.”

Instead, Yender and her five sisters continue to enjoy El Centro’s programs.Yender says, “They try to help us grow into healthy young women. They don’t want us to end up as teenage mothers. They don’t want the girls to get involved with drugs or drinking or with anything that will stop them from achieving their goals. I just thank God El Centro is here. If it wasn’t, I don’t know what I would have become or where I would be now.”

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