Hilario Rosales is a farm worker. But if you find him at Puente on a weeknight, he might be sitting at a table, staring at a laptop screen with a look of intense concentration.

“My kids and I want to do video chats. I don’t have a lot of experience with computers, but I would like to learn.”

Learning is easily Rosales’ favorite activity, in addition to reading his encyclopedias, listening to music, and spending time with local friends at La Sala, Puente’s twice-weekly social hour for local farm workers. He’s also studying for his GED and taking English classes through Puente. Which begs the question: when does he ever sleep?

Hilario Rosales

The question makes him laugh. “I have a dream of learning. Now that I have my new job, I have more free time and I want to study more.”

Four months ago, Rosales, a 45-year-old father whose wife and three children live in Jalisco, Mexico, left his old job harvesting leeks for Marchi Farms for a new position at Cevasco Nursery, where he fumigates greenhouse flowers and helps prepare soil for planting.

For Rosales, a 54-hour workweek is “light” – 9 hours a day, with only Sundays off. A “busy” week is 11-hour workdays, Sundays included. He earns $9.75 an hour before taxes, pays $104 per month to rent a bedroom at Cevasco, buys what he needs to survive and sends the rest home to his family.

Regardless of his schedule, you’ll see Rosales attend class three nights a week at Puente.

“Because we dedicate our lives to work, there’s a lot of routine – home, work, home, work,” he explains. “But I like to participate in things. If I didn’t come to Puente, I wouldn’t have met anybody.”

By the wealth standards of San Mateo County, Rosales’ life is extremely modest. But he carries himself with strength and confidence. He looks fit and trim in a sports fleece, jeans and stylish sneakers, which he uses to run laps around the greenhouses at Cevasco once a week. He has a friendly, open face, which lights up when he talks about the life he’s created for himself on the South Coast.

Hilario Rosales uses Facebook to communicate with his family.

“Here in Pescadero I feel free. I can walk where I want, come to classes. I don’t have to hide from anyone. I try to be respectful to everyone. And it makes me feel sure of myself.”

Rosales likes to stay plugged in. He’s got a cell phone, which he uses to talk to his kids every day. He has a post office box, which he checks on Sundays while scanning the bulletin board for community announcements. He meanders around town, visits the gas station taqueria and chats with his friends. Sometimes people speak to him in English, which is what led to his decision to take English classes at Puente. “I need English a lot,” he says.

Now that Rosales is studying for his GED, he becomes the fourth person in his family to be studying for a degree. His eldest child, who is 22, is wrapping up a college degree; his 18-year-old is entering college and his 16-year-old will be graduating high school shortly. Not bad for a father who dropped out of school after the 8^th grade.

The main reason Rosales moved to California to begin with was to finance his kids’ education, and to pay for household necessities. He feels it was a good decision. “Puente has given me a lot of support. I feel really contented,” he says. 

The end of summer is always a little sad at Puente. It’s when the youth interns who worked with Puente’s summer program – officially the Youth Leadership Development and Employment Program – are ready to go back to school. The Puente offices, filled with their energy and laughter, start to empty out.

“They leave here every summer with new skills, and Puente is enriched by them,” says Kerry Lobel, Executive Director of Puente. “They’re all rock stars as far as I’m concerned.”

The summer program, now in its eighth year, offers students as young as 14 the chance to earn a salary, take on serious work responsibilities and spend the summer making new friends. They worked as junior counselors at YMCA Camp Jones Gulch, teacher’s aides, cooks for the school district, at the Half Moon Bay Library, at Pie Ranch, South Coast Children’s Services, and in the office at Puente, helping organize programs, doing office work and providing child care.

Omar Macias tutors panther camp students.

But that’s not all that happens. Puente program coordinators say the young people change a lot during each summer, and over the course of several years, emerge as confident, self-directed young adults.

“You can never predict at the beginning of the summer who is really going to shine,” says Lobel.

Take Omar Macias, a self-avowed ‘troublemaker’ who earned a reputation for causing good-natured mischief and loves surfing and spending time with his friends. The 16-year-old just spent his second summer with Puente working as a teacher’s aide at Panther Camp, a summer enrichment program run by the La Honda-Pescadero Unified School District. He says the experience taught him “how to help kids learn in different ways, how to calm them down and stuff like that. At the beginning I was hesitating around them. Later this summer I was more comfortable stepping in.”

Summer 2013 was what really changed his life, however. He spent three months cooking with chef Amy Glaze (creator of Puente’s Edible After-School Program), learning great, healthy recipes and selling the resulting dishes at Puente’s Pescadero Grown! Farmers’ Market.

Omar Macias at Puente’s Youth Culinary Academy

Macias talks about that experience in the kitchen the way a convert talks about finding religion.

“When I’m around food I feel like experimenting, making good things with food. There are so, so many things you can do with food – make it taste good, make it nutritious, organic, things like that,” he enthuses. “I never really felt I had it in me. I never really thought I would love cooking so much.”

Macias has been less enthusiastic about his schoolwork, and he had to make up school credits this summer. He read four books and spent two hours a day on Puente’s computers, studying. And he wasn’t the only Puente summer intern who worked extra hours for academic credit, according to Lobel.

“A big group of them were getting up at 7:30 in the morning to run programs for kids and then when they get here at 4:30, they’re studying at the end of a long work day,” she says.

That kind of commitment is a mark of maturity, says Rita Mancera, Program Director for Puente. Students as old as 21 still work in Puente’s summer programs, supervising their younger peers. Their starting salary is $12 an hour, whereas younger interns receive $9-$10 an hour. Earnings go up every year, which creates an incentive to stick with the work and do something productive each summer, says Mancera.

Lori McMillan is a doting grandmother, and there is nothing she loves more than spending time with her young granddaughter, Jordy. So it’s no surprise that Puente’s childhood programs are one of her main reasons for donating. “Where you’re born and what life you have – it’s just because of luck,” says McMillan, noting that not all children born on the South Coast are equally lucky. “I really believe all children deserve the right to a good education and good food.”

From their first days in school to their last days of university, Puente supports local youth with reading and language programs, healthy cooking classes, school supplies, homework help, paid summer internships, pre-college tutoring and continuing mentorship support all the way though college graduation.

McMillan and her husband Bill have been avid supporters of Puente since 2013, when she saw a notice about Puente’s back-to-school backpack drive with a call for donations. The La Honda couple went shopping, and when McMillan dropped off what she’d purchased and saw all the boxes of supplies the community had come together to donate, “it was just miraculous.”

“There a lot of organizations that you give money to and you’re not really sure how much is going to administrative overhead,” adds McMillan. “With Puente, you’re seeing the donations in action.”

That was never truer than this past winter, when Puente donors bought dozens of blankets and sleeping bags to help farm workers get through a record cold snap – a campaign McMillan helped support. She also likes to shop for local families at Christmas.

Lori McMillan

Puente is small enough to focus on each family’s needs, but big enough to create systemic change. “Look at the successes of children who are coming out of high school and going on to college,” McMillan says. “You don’t hear such things about children of farm workers.”

More recently, she also loved getting a personal visit from Puente’s Ben Ranz. He was going door-to-door in La Honda, getting input for the South Coast’s first-ever health care survey. McMillan, a former accountant, and her husband both have medical insurance. But she liked that Ranz wanted to make sure everyone was included. “It told me that Puente’s going past appearances. They genuinely want to know how people are doing.”

When asked about her personal reasons for giving to Puente, McMillan became emotional and spoke from the heart. She is a cancer survivor, and going through treatment changed her life. “Getting ill really opened up my eyes to the importance of others. People become so cynical and say there’s nothing we can do.”

But that’s not true, she says, and Puente’s work is proof enough of that. “I want to encourage people to shake some money out of their pockets. If we can help one person then we can smile knowing we brought some good to the world.”

To donate to Puente, please visit https://donatenow.networkforgood.org/puente.