Autobiography - The Galindo Group

Ram Galindo THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN Page 210
It appears to me that in the area of giving, there is a sort of social equivalent to the
physics’ law regarding reactions to applied forces. When America gives, America gets.
The more America gives, the richer it gets. I also found that the more I gave, the more I
got. Prophets before Jesus proclaimed the hidden rewards implied in giving. But Jesus
put it best: “Give and it will be given to you, good measure, pressed down, shaken
together, running over, they will pour onto your lap. For by your standard of measure it
will be measured to you in return.” I am convinced this is the statement of a frequent
occurrence. It seems to work for me every time. I think it probably works for everybody,
although I know of enough opposite results to deter me from accepting as a natural law.
The somewhat more trying question is how to deal with it to our own lives.
In my observation, one of the saddest and most intractable problems in poor countries
relates to children of the streets. They are mostly orphans or belong to wasted parents
who use them to beg for money. Unfortunately this is a heartbreaking but common
occurrence in all developing countries. Bolivia is no exception. In an effort to alleviate
this situation, my mother’s mother, Rosa Guzman de Anze (see Roots Chapter 4)
founded an association for the protection of abandoned infants and orphan children way
back in the 1920s. In the 1940s my mother became its president and with my father’s
assistance she was able to bring a group of Austrian nuns led by Mother Consolata
Winkler to run the orphanage.
A generation later it was my turn to help. With the support of American expatriates
residing in Cochabamba during the late 1960s, I was able to infuse some aid to the
work these good nuns were doing. We bought beds, mattresses, bed linens and other
supplies needed by the children. By 1968 the orphanage had received a hefty grant
from a Swiss philanthropist to build a completely new campus with duplex style housing
for the orphans. They called their rebuilt facility the S.O.S. Village. Each apartment unit
was “mothered” by a nun and the children ranged in age from infants to high school.
The idea was to simulate as much as possible a normal family life.
I took it upon myself to fund the construction of a duplex for the orphans in the new
village as I was building my own house in Aranjuez. In recognition the nuns gave the
house my name. Years later, after I moved back to Texas, I provided scholarships for
children in the orphanage to attend the same “La Salle” Christian Brothers school I had
attended in Cochabamba. The experiment lasted until the pro-communist governments
that succeeded President Barrientos evicted the nuns from the orphanage. In one of my
visits to Cochabamba, the new socialist administrators informed me that the children of
the new Bolivia had no business attending a private school.
In view of this rejection I decided to transfer the corpus of the fund for scholarships to
the La Salle school itself. I named an elder of the community, Mr. Carlos Aponte, trustee
of the funds and together with the Brothers we agreed to guidelines for their use. A
couple of years later the trustee decided that it would be more productive to move the
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