FEATURE
Senior Kristina Klaas spends most of her Mondays researching and writing about immigration authorities.
Then she spends the evening teaching English to immigrants from Central America.
Klaas is president of the Jupiter campus’s Corn Maya Club. Its members host and assist with multicultural events both on and off campus, but their main activity is teaching English at El Sol, which is Spanish for “sun.” This nonprofit resource center helps Jupiter’s immigrant population adapt to life in the U.S.
The center’s mission is controversial, but its relationship with the Jupiter campus offers students like Klaas a real-world learning opportunity that no textbook could provide.
“When you teach them, you’re learning also from them, about their culture. You have to learn about it to be a good teacher. You have to recognize their culture,” said Vice President Tara Boulos. “So, it’s kind of an exchange.”
Faculty adviser Timothy Steigenga believes that the club’s most important function is providing students regular contact with a section of the population that has difficulty fitting into society.
“It’s also about the students seeing the immigrants as members of the same community,” he said.
The club members teach English primarily to manual laborers, like landscapers and construction workers. The majority are males in their 20s or 30s who received very little formal education and lack even a high school diploma or GED, according to El Sol education coordinator Recaredo Fernandez.
They’re part of a wave of refugees and asylum-seekers who came to the agricultural towns west of Jupiter starting in the 1980s, during the middle of the 36-year-long Guatemalan Civil War. Most of them are Mayan descendents from southern Mexico and the Guatemalan Highlands, according to Steigenga, a political science professor who studies Guatemala.
Although Steigenga reports that most of the club’s members have related majors like Latin American studies, international studies or political science, Klaas believes that even members majoring in areas like philosophy or the sciences benefit from the experiences at El Sol.
Christina Turn is a biology major on a pre-med track, but she works under Klaas as co-president, meaning that she will likely take over as president when Klaas graduates.
“I think it’s really useful, especially for pre-med people, to be able to see the people behind the science,” Turn said. “It’s also a great way to become more well-rounded, because so often people just focus on one part of their lives.”
Fernandez, who earned his doctorate in education and prepares El Sol’s lesson plans, said he intentionally creates lessons that inform the teachers as much as the students.
Corn Maya Club members — most of whom are U.S.-born Caucasians and attend FAU’s Honors College — lead very different lives and come from very different backgrounds than the immigrants they teach. So, in an effort to help the two groups better understand the other’s background and experiences, Fernandez relates lesson content to the immigrants’ personal lives.
Club members therefore teach English through bilingual discussion — they switch between English and Spanish — of topics like employment and health. As a result, common classroom conversations include how to apply and interview for a job and how to navigate the U.S. healthcare system.
Fernandez believes this encourages the immigrants to participate more in class, and the more they open up, the more their teachers learn about the daily life of Jupiter’s immigrant population. The immigrants also learn more about life in the U.S.
Sophomore Adrian Viller, a club member and international studies major, said that in the level-A class he taught this semester, he explained everything from how to talk to a doctor, to why immigrants should trust police here when Latin American police officers are known for corruption, to why illegal immigrants can’t obtain driver’s licenses.
“I think they enjoyed learning that as much as they enjoyed learning the language,” he said, “and that was very rewarding.”
Viller, who recently joined the Corn Maya Club, added that he started with low expectations, unsure of what he signed up for when he volunteered to teach at El Sol. He was surprised that most of the students were adults, but he found them eager to learn, even from young, informally trained instructors.
Kristina Klaas agrees.
“That’s a lot of time out of their day: six hours a week at night after they’ve been working all day,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to do it. I would probably be lazy myself and not want to push myself, but they have that really strong drive.”
Raul*, who took a level-C class with Klaas this semester but never attended school before, said that taking classes at El Sol provides him a chance to practice his English.
He works for a condo association, but his boss doesn’t like him to converse with non-employees. At home, his roommates are friends he talks to in Spanish.
“I am very happy,” he said of his third semester at El Sol. “I need to practice. I need to write.”
Miguel* also appreciates the opportunity to improve his English, but for different reasons. As a carpenter, he is usually hired by Americans, so the better his English, the better he can communicate with his employers and co-workers.
“I learn a lot here,” he said. “Now I can write and read something, because before I started here, I couldn’t read nothing.”
Miguel attends class when he can’t find work, which El Sol also helps him with.
The center, whose director is Corn Maya Club co-founder and FAU alumna Jocelyn Sabbagh, has provided various services since its current facility opened in 2006. These services are free to all Jupiter residents because, in addition to the donations and grants that largely fund it, El Sol receives financial assistance from the city. For example, the organization leased its current facility from Jupiter for only one dollar per year, according to a Palm Beach Post article.
Besides English classes, which are offered in the mornings as well as the night classes that Corn Maya Club members help teach, the center provides computer courses, health education, daycare and pro bono legal assistance.
They even encourage immigrants to give back to the local community by volunteering with organizations like Habitat for Humanity. Last year, immigrants volunteered a total of 935 hours, according to El Sol’s annual report.
El Sol’s most utilized resources, however, are its English language classes and its labor center.
More than 4,500 students took advantage of the daytime English classes, and more than 100 students advanced one level in evening classes last year, according to the report. The labor center, which is open even on weekends, found day jobs for 6,923 workers in need of employment by matching them up with employers from the local community.
While most of the workers who use the labor center are immigrants, Sabbagh reports that a rising number of non-immigrant residents have relied on the service since the economic downturn. She estimates that 5 percent of the workers El Sol places in jobs are Americans.
Still, some community members oppose the center because it helps immigrants without asking whether they are here legally.
A Jan. 16, 2008, Sun-Sentinel article reported that 20 to 25 protestors had gathered outside El Sol every weekend since early December 2007.
“Jupiter is blatantly complicit in felonious hiring transactions,” David Caulkett, vice president of the nonprofit Floridians for Legal Immigration Enforcement, told the Sun-Sentinel. “In a democracy, you cannot have towns violating federal laws.”
Several December 2007 Scripps newspaper articles also documented protests of El Sol, but Sabbagh and Kristina Klaas both said protestors have completely disappeared in recent years.
Sabbagh believes this is because El Sol provides an organized and largely well-received solution to problems previously caused by Jupiter’s growing immigrant population, which used to gather at the curb of the city’s Center Street to be picked up by potential employers. Many ended up as robbery victims, she said, because they carried cash and were willing to get into strangers’ cars.
It seems Corn Maya Club members agree with Sabbagh’s perspective.
They have the opportunity to receive volunteer service hours for the time they spend at El Sol, but Klaas said many don’t take it. According to her, they give their free time to El Sol because it’s “fun.”
“The volunteer hours is kind of a petty thing. It’s really not about getting volunteer hours or anything like that. You don’t go so that you can have something to put on your transcript,” she said. “It’s a nice addition, but you really go simply because you enjoy what you’re doing.”
[*The names of El Sol’s students have been changed to protect their identity.]
How to get involved
Membership:
The Jupiter campus’s Corn Maya Club is open to all FAU students. Contact President Kristina Klaas at [email protected] for more information about how to get involved.
To learn more about the club, join their Facebook group, called “Corn Maya.”
Internships:
Contact El Sol director Jocelyn Sabbagh at [email protected] for more information about the internship opportunities available to FAU students at El Sol, a nonprofit resource center that focuses on Jupiter’s immigrant population.
To learn more about the center, visit www.friendsofelsol.org.
An honored club
Although the Corn Maya Club is relatively young, having started about five years ago, it has already received several awards:
2010: The club was named Outstanding Student Organization by Student Government’s Students Advocating Volunteer Involvement.
2010: Co-founder Jocelyn Sabbagh was named Distinguished Alumna by the Honors College.
2009: Faculty adviser Timothy Steigenga was named Adviser of the Year by the Jupiter campus.
2008: The club was named Club of the Year by the Jupiter campus.
[Sources: Adam Ferrando, assistant director of Student Involvement and Leadership at the Jupiter campus; www.fau.edu]
