In the vast shanty towns of San Luis Rio Colorado, people build their homes from cardboard and discarded tires on dust roads cracked by the desert sun.
To attend the Mexican public schools, children need to pay $30 for uniforms, a veritable fortune for most locals. Without an education, they’re condemned to live in poverty, with little opportunity or hope, University senior Jessica Rau said.
The University chapter of Mortar Board, a national university honor society and service organization, gave 45 of those children that chance to go to school. The organization raised $1,350 and gave the money to Rau so she could buy 45 uniforms for the children of the Mexican town.
Rau has traveled to San Luis, a city in the state of Sonora, for the past seven years. She first went to build houses, but for the past two years, she has spent her spring break in the border town buying and distributing the school uniforms to locals as young as six and as old as 17.
“It’s a human right that we deserve education,” Rau said. “We like to encourage students to stay in school.”
An education in San Luis is a blessing, Rau said, because it offers an escape from the poverty and domestic violence endemic to the town. The under-educated break their backs in the factories or the fields, Rau said, while education offers better jobs and perhaps even the opportunity to go to college.
The schools are crowded but formal, Rau said. The students do not have their own textbooks, but receive an education comparable to one they would receive in the United States, learning math, science, Spanish and English, history and geography.
Rau said she prefers buying uniforms to building houses because while building houses can encourage dependency, the uniforms allow students to create their own strength.
Each school requires different colors for uniforms: red, blue, maroon or navy. They come in two different styles: a striped sweat-suit for informal days, and a formal skirt or pair of khakis with a collared shirt.
Rau bought them from a woman named Maria Elena Alduenda at La Casa del Uniforme and distributed them to 45 students outside the church of pastor Mario Cervantes.
The children were smiling and exuberant, rushing toward her to receive their new uniforms.
“One of the mothers came up to me in tears and said ‘if it was not for your organization, my child would not be in school’,” she said.
The students wrote letters of thanks to Rau. On a folded piece of white paper, in large letters, one girl wrote “Thank you for the uniform. It is very beautiful. Bless you.”
Senior Caitlin Griffith, co-chairwoman with Rau for the community service branch of the University’s Mortar Board chapter, said the donation was part of the honor society’s national campaign for literacy.
Griffith said that forcing students to purchase uniforms, especially more often as they grow, is unfair and promotes inequality.
“I think they should have some social action,” Griffith said. “That would be an ideal thing.”
Griffith said fostering independence while giving to the poor can be tricky, but her experience serving communities in Nicaragua, Argentina and Ecuador has taught her that money doesn’t necessarily help the neediest most, but time spent serving others does. She went to Nicaragua six years ago to rebuild homes after a hurricane, she said. The service inspired her to spend a year in Ecuador volunteering as an English teacher in a public school attended by students living in poverty.
Mortar Board has plans for more service in the coming weeks, Griffith said. In two weeks, Court Appointed Special Advocates, a group that trains volunteers to find homes and fight in court for children who have been abused or live in foster care, plans to sponsor a walk/run fundraiser. Whether Mortar Board will continue to sponsor the uniform fund is up to the new officers elected at a meeting Tuesday evening, Griffith said.
“It would be great if they want to continue,” Griffith said, “but it’s up to them.”

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