Group travels yearly to help people in Tobati.

By CHRISTIAN ZAVISCA
Tribune Correspondent

Editor's note: Former Tribune editor Christian Zavisca accompanied the Team Tobati service group on a 10-day trip to Paraguay, South America.

I had to smile during Ronald Garcia's speech on a balmy night last month in Tobati, Paraguay.

"Me and my classmate Christian Zavisca would never have thought of doing something like this on our spring break," Ron said.

That's for sure.

He spoke to assembled volunteers from the United States and the local students and families of students at the Renaldo Macchi Education Center and School, the centerpiece of the Team Tobati service project.

Ron and I went to Marian High School together, both graduating in 1991. His family is from Paraguay, and I used to hear all about the trips he took with his parents, Dr. Juan Carlos Garcia and Dr. Maria Garcia, his sister, Patricia, and his brother, Juan Jr. Those Christmastime family vacations evolved into Team Tobati, which is in its 12th year.

Ron and his wife, Denise, teach Spanish and math, respectively, at Kingswood-Oxford School in West Hartford, Conn. Each year, the Garcias lead a delegation of students, teachers and alumni to Tobati. This year, I tagged along as one of 20 chaperones, joined by more than 100 high school students

, who pay nearly $3,500 apiece to help pay for service projects in the landlocked central South American nation of about 7 million people.

The heart of Team Tobati is in Connecticut, but its roots can be traced to South Bend. The doctors Garcia are both well known in northern Indiana.

Mr. Garcia is an oncologist, and Mrs. Garcia is a pathologist.

The Garcia Foundation, based in South Bend, provides much of the financing for Team Tobati, which in addition to the school provides medical services (including trips by American doctors and dentists), builds classrooms, and works in other ways to improve the lives of the needy in this impoverished region.

The Macchi Education Center operates a school that enrolls 15 of the brightest seventh-graders in the district each year. The first class of students is now in its junior year of high school.

"We reserve the school exclusively for poor students," Ron told me.

Mission highlight

The school provides three meals a day, health care

and textbooks to the students. Tobati's public schools are a much different story, overcrowded and only meeting for a few hours a day.

"This school is by far the best school in the state," he said. "It's extraordinary to have poor students from here go on to college."

The hope is that the students will one day return and help the people of Tobati, where about a third of the people live below the international poverty line. "All of the (Macchi) students have been spoken to constantly about service to the community," Ron said.

Macchi school director Ben Elliott and teacher Darren Lefrenier, both Kingswood-Oxford alumni and recent college graduates, are on yearlong teaching assignments at the school.

Although the work of Team Tobati goes on in Paraguay all year long, the highlight is the big March trip.

"The whole town gets excited," Lefrenier said.

I was excited, too. We left out of New York City, on a nine-hour-plus flight to Sao Paulo, Brazil. A several-hour layover, a flight to the Paraguayan capital of Asuncion and a bumpy 90-minute bus ride later, we were in Tobati, in an area of about 20,000 people.

What I found when we arrived were friendly, gregarious hosts, plenty of schoolchildren who ran rings around us on soccer fields, moderate-to-blazing heat and beautiful countryside. We did some fun tourist stuff, going on hikes, learning how to make bricks out of the Paraguayan clay, buying handmade crafts and souvenirs like soccer jerseys, joining in local festivals held in our honor and gathering at the local pizza parlor and the Macchi Institute's athletics complex.

Not just spring break

In the middle of it all were Ron and Denise. Unfortunately, Ron's parents, for the first time, didn't make the annual trek. Mr. Garcia is recovering well after a difficult surgery to remove a cancerous tumor.

Ron is the primary planner of the service trip's many projects, and Denise works to ensure that those plans are executed.

"This is not just a spring break activity," Denise said. "Ron runs a whole school in a South American country. It's not a Habitat for Humanity-type thing."

Elliott, the school's director, says the students there have made great progress in learning English. Those students face unique challenges.

"You have to confront problems like, 'I didn't do my homework because I didn't have a light,'æ" Elliott said.

As a co-leader of a subteam of American high schoolers, I saw that poverty firsthand. I joined in helping to build classrooms, donated clothing and other essentials to poor families and gave out soccer balls and toothbrushes at schools.

It's an impoverished part of the world, but also one teeming with happy and engaging people. Poverty doesn't equal unrelenting despair, as Ron told me. But opportunity is sorely lacking, and that's what the Macchi School is all about.

Ron described the Garcias' special connection to Paraguay, from South Bend to South America. Tobati is the home of Mrs. Garcia's family; Mr. Garcia is from Asuncion.

Giving back and helping those in need "was a very special family dream for us," Ron said.