Border Partners

[Polly Edmunds]

Dear Friends  I am writing today because I am told that you received an email from Luis Garcia making false allegations about Border Partners.  Some of you are well known to me as good friends of our group - others are new.  Please let me respond from our point of view.

Border Partners is a nonprofit organization, located in Deming, NM, that is working with people in Palomas to improve their lives by sharing resources, skills and ideas that promote economic development,  good health, education and the use of low cost sustainable technologies.  Current projects include building playgrounds in  Palomas parks, planting home gardens, delivering donated computers and books to the library and art materials to the schools. 

We offer free aerobics classes three days a week and help a womens sewing group.  On Oct. 4 we will have a workshop on the prevention and treatment of diabetes and the dangers of substance abuse during pregnancy.  We distribute solar cookers in the community.  You can learn more about Border Partners at our website:  www.borderpartners.org

In November, 2010, Border Partners was asked, by Luis Garcia, one of our paid promoters in Palomas at the time, to support a "group of volunteers from Palomas who wanted to make burritos for children who were coming to school hungry".  It seemed like a good idea then and we raised money and delivered food to them but, sadly, last June, we discovered fraud in this program and had to discontinue it.

In talking to school officials, we learned that Luis had not brought any significant number of burritos to the schools since March.  Luis denied the allegations but we decided the word of the school people was too compelling so dismissed him and removed all the Border Partners' property from his house.  We have never discovered what happened to the food that we delivered to him. 

Luis is angry with us.  Border Partners is continuing with our other projects but we have learned many lessons from this experience.  We trusted Luis too much and believed him when he said that "there was a group of volunteers who wanted to make the burritos and all they needed was food".  We thought we were supporting a grassroots effort to help the children!  We will never do that again without having more oversight.

Having said that, there are still children coming to the schools in Palomas without food and we are meeting with the schools to try to find other ways we can assist them to feed these kids.

Peter and I  are available to talk to anyone who would like more information about this situation.  I can assure you that "the Edmunds family" has not made any money on this project (as Luis alleges).  We take no salaries - we have no paid staff in the U.S.  

Thank you all for your support for the people of Palomas - and for Border Partners.  We hope very much that it will continue.

Sincerely,

Polly and Peter Edmunds

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Polly T. Edmunds

Border Partners

575-546-1083

715-292-9557 (cell)

www.borderpartners.org

"Once you choose hope, anything is possible." 

Christopher Reeve