Children of the Dust - 2. The Class Project

The Sisters of the Order of the Infant Jesus of Prague were dedicated to the betterment of children’s lives around the world. In post-World War Two America, they concentrated their efforts on the educational process. They opened schools in communities across the United States, where they provided learning opportunities to all students, regardless of race, religious affiliation, or economic status.

Such a policy of inclusiveness as displayed by the Order was in sharp contrast to the realities of the times. Racial segregation in certain parts of the country was still common, often under the guise of separate but equal facilities. Their approach to the religious aspect of a child’s education was also somewhat unorthodox. They eschewed the teaching of Catholic dogma, generally expected from a school run by nuns, to focus on coaching those in their care to follow The Golden Rule.

Their emphasis on the ethic of reciprocity was designed to instill, in the young minds in their charge, the need to help those less fortunate than themselves. All this I learned over the years I spent as a student at Child of Prague Catholic School in Oakland, California. It was much later when I made the connection between the Sisters’ approach to service and the third-grade class project we participated in during the early months of nineteen seventy-five.

Every year, third graders at the school participated in a Pen Pal project designed to open a line of communication with children living in the Child of Vietnam orphanage run by the Infant Jesus of Prague nuns in Saigon. The war torn country had a large population of children without parents. Some had lost them in the armed conflict. Others had been abandoned by their Vietnamese mothers, not willing to face the consequences of having a child with a foreign father. At first it was French troops who fathered the children; eventually the American GIs became the primary group of men responsible for the pregnancies.

Those details I came to discover and understand later in life. At the time I was only aware there were children without parents in a country on the other side of the ocean, who would like to have an American friend. I wrote a letter, as did my classmates, telling a little about myself, my family, my school, and in my case, my love of baseball. We were encouraged to send a small gift with our message. Something that would explain a bit about our country or about ourselves. I included nine baseball cards, one for each of the Oakland A’s starters in game one of the nineteen seventy-four World Series. All of them autographed. Every year responses to the letters sent to Vietnam poured in, many replies came to those mailed in early nineteen seventy-five―none came for me.