About an hour ago
New Kensington native Stan Nelson was setting up a home in Guatemala to help orphaned young women in the Central American nation when he was told someone with the government wanted to talk with him.
They wanted to know what he was doing. It was not a request, and he had to go to Guatemala City right away.
It was December 2018. He went to an office in the capital, where a woman who was second in charge of the government’s orphanages and her staff were waiting.
“Even her appearance seemed hard. I was nervous,” Nelson said. “We all sat down. My interpreter turned to me and she said, just tell her your story, tell her what you’re doing.”
The woman was stone-faced for the first 10 to 12 minutes as Nelson explained through an interpreter that he was making a place to help young women who are forced to leave orphanages when they turn 18 and have nowhere to go and no one to help them.
“At some point, I looked at that woman and I noticed tears were coming down her face,” he said. “Somehow, instinctively, it occurred to me why we were there. I broke out of my English and I spoke to the woman in Spanish and I said, ‘You have the same heart, don’t you?’ and she said, ‘Yes.’”
Nelson finished his story.
“That woman came up to me afterward,” Nelson said. “She put her hands on my shoulders and she said, ‘I have prayed for you for two years, that someone would come and do this, and you’re the first ones to come.’”
After the orphanage: Rocsana’s Hope
Nelson, 55, opened the doors to his home, Rocsana’s Hope, in May 2019. It’s named for an orphan he met on his first mission trip to Guatemala in 2014 — an experience that moved he and his wife, Denise, to give up their life in the United States and move to Guatemala in 2016.
“I saw kids whose lives had been destroyed and how they had become orphans, how little they had but how deeply grateful they were for the things they had, and how happy they were to have those very few things,” he said while visiting relatives in Harrison. “It was almost like a slap in the face to me. We have so much here, yet we’re one of the most ungrateful countries in the world.
“I know I was. It affected me in a way that changed me, and I’ve never been the same since.”
After graduating from Valley High School in 1983, Nelson went to the Kansas City area to attend a Bible school and became a minister. He met his wife there. They married in 1986 and have three sons and three grandchildren.
Nelson’s oldest son, Andy, 30, was with him on the first trip to Guatemala in 2014.
“As soon as we got to that orphanage, I knew none of us were going to be the same in some way. It was going to change all of us,” Andy Nelson said. “It changed my dad tremendously.”
A reluctant participant on his first mission trip, Nelson was struck by the poverty he saw.
“I’ll never forget driving outside of Guatemala City,” Nelson said. “I said to our host that was driving the van, what’s with all the chicken coops? He said, what do you mean? He said those are people’s houses.
“To me, I thought they were chicken coops. I couldn’t believe people lived in those kind of conditions.”
Orphans’ future bleak
About 24 kids lived at the orphanage they visited.
“I just saw those kids who had been through so much and had been orphaned and yet were so full of life and happiness and gratefulness and joy. It just affected me in every fiber of my being,” Nelson said. “It made me feel all the things I lived for that I thought were so important weren’t important any more.”
Nelson said he bonded with Rocsana on that first trip. She and her two younger sisters “latched on to me and became my constant companions,” he said. He went about learning Spanish so he could speak with them.
He learned of the abuse they had suffered at the hands of their mother’s boyfriends after their father died.
“Every one of them had a horror story that would turn your ears upside down when you hear them,” he said. “It was hard for me to reconcile those stories with what I saw in those kids. You would think these kids would have severe trust issues or not want to be close to anybody, but it was the opposite.
“It was like the missing ingredient in their life was someone who really cared for them and had their best interest at heart.”
Nelson went to the same orphanage twice more within a year. It was on the third trip in 2015, the first for his wife, that they decided to move to work with that orphanage.
“They literally sold everything except a few essential things, packed up and left,” Andy Nelson said. “It was hard emotionally for all of us boys getting used to them being gone.”
Creating Rocsana’s Hope was not the plan.
“We knew that we would probably be helping Rocsana herself and maybe one of her sisters, which we did,” he said. “But since we had not lived there yet, we were totally unaware of the need.”
Orphans in Guatemala either have no family or their family is a danger to them. Many still have at least one living parent but are separated from them because of severe abuse. Other parents who can’t care for them abandon or sell their children.
The orphanages force them to leave upon turning 18.
“They usually try to find someone to help them. That’s the goal when they walk out the door,” Nelson said. “If they have family, they try to reach them. But sometimes their family situation is what made them orphans to begin with.”
He has heard stories of girls, faced with nowhere to go, returning to their families, which force them into prostitution to make money, killing them if they resist. Others get picked up, beaten and raped by gangs.
It started with Rocsana and her sister
It was Rocsana, he said, who suggested he should start a home to help girls like her.
“That is when we first started asking questions and found out that so many of those girls had no help whatsoever. That is when we also found out that so many were getting scooped up by traffickers. That is an issue that we were not at first aware of,” he said. “But once we saw it, we were just convinced all the more that something needed to be done.”
The goal of Rocsana’s Hope is to get the girls to a place where they can sustain themselves. That includes helping them with education, including finishing high school and going on to higher education or vocational training, and finding a career path.
Learning English is required, because it gives them an advantage in Guatemalan society and better job opportunities. They’re also taught how to handle money and finances.
The house, itself, provides safety and security. It’s about 10 minutes outside Guatemala City.
Rocsana, now 22, and her husband are part of the staff, live there and have a young son.
They can house 24 and recently had six. Nelson expects the first young woman to successfully graduate from the program by the end of November.
Word spreads, more kids helped
As more orphanages become aware of Rocsana’s Hope, Nelson said they are starting to ask if he can take in girls when they turn 18.
Nelson said government orphanages in Guatemala City called them about two girls leaving in November. They’re not related but face the same situation — neither have parents, but have uncles and aunts who run brothels.
“These people are the only known family that the girls have, but if they go to them, they will be forced into prostitution,” Nelson said. “The girls are scared to death and are begging the government for help. Since the government has nothing for them, they can’t help them. But they now know about us.”
Eddy Gomez, 54, a Guatemalan national, runs his own ministry, Provee, helping the poor and children in his country. He met Nelson at a Bible study.
“What Stan is doing is awesome,” he said. “A lot of his girls, whenever they leave the homes they don’t really have a family to go to. If they do, it’s not the best setup.”
Gomez, who attended college in the United States and later lived here for a time before returning to Guatemala, said he respects Nelson because he knows the life he gave up.
“We’re thankful that people like him are here helping Guatemalans,” he said. “He has a huge heart. That is a blessing for these girls.”
Andy Nelson is on the board of directors of Rocsana’s Hope.
“Being more involved in it has given me peace,” he said. “I know it’s something he’s just not going to give up. It’s going to be a part of him the rest of his life.”
Nelson doesn’t aggressively seek support for Rocsana’s Hope, which is privately funded and gets no aid from the Guatemalan government.
“It almost seems like, in his experience, that’s what pushes people away the fastest,” Andy Nelson said. “All he does is talk about what they do. That actually generates more interest than anything else. People end up asking him what they can do to help.”
While saying he doesn’t actively fund raise, Nelson says, “We actively share, and we share passionately.”
Walking by faith
“I’ll talk to anybody about what we’re doing down there because I’m so passionate about it. I’d talk to a fence post if I thought it would listen,” he said. “I always stop short of saying to someone, ‘Would you consider helping us?’ I never throw that out there. I want it to be something that they decide to do. It seems like it wouldn’t work, but it works for us.”
Long-term, Nelson said he wants to open more locations in Guatemala and expand into neighboring countries, such as El Salvador and Honduras, where the problem of girls aging out of orphanages is the same.
“If you would have asked me would I end up living in a different country doing what I’m doing, I would have said there was no way,” he said. “When you’re in ministry, there’s a credo of walking by faith. We have walked a life of faith and let it lead us where it would. That very way of living is what brought us to where we are now.
“You can’t anticipate some of the things that happen to you in ministry.”
Brian C. Rittmeyer is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Brian at 724-226-4701, brittmeyer@triblive.com or via Twitter .
Categories: Local | Valley News Dispatch
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