I'm just going to take this straight from my handbook:
On a summer day in 1954, an American priest in Cuernavaca took a street boy home with him. The child, claiming he needed money to eat, had robbed the young priest's church poor box. Instead of testifying against the boy, the Father asked for custody.
So began the life work of Father Bill Wassan, and it flourished, By 1977, the Arizona native was adoptive father of more than 1,000 Mexican boys and girls. In the 1980s, he opened homes for orphaned and abandoned children in Honduras and Haiti; in 1994 a home was established in Nicaragua; in 1996, in Guatemala; in 1999, in El Salvador; in 2003, in the Dominican Republic; in 2004, in Peru; and our newest home in Bolivia was opened in 2005.
Over the years, Father Wasson has taken in more than 15,000 children. He calls them Pequenos Hermanos, "little brothers and sisters," in Spanish.
At present, Mexican Pequenos number more than 800. The older ones are enrolled at university and high school in Monterrey, Cuernavaca, and occasionally in the United States. NPH has houses in each of these places. But most of the children live in NPH's main house: ex-hacienda San Salvador, in the pueblo of Miacatlan. This rambling hacienda once was a massive sugar cane plantation encompassing 4,000 acres. After the Mexican revolution from 1910-1917, the bulk of the land was turned over to the campesinos. NPH acquired the property -- a bunch of crumbling stone buildings and 15 acres of tillable land -- in 1970. After considerable renovations, the pequenos moved in years later. Today over 700 boys and girls call the ex-hacienda home.
If you'd like even more details about NPH and how it works, just click on one of the links I've provided on the right and they'll take you straight to NPH's websites.
