Come and See! Service Opportunity at Casa de Misericordia, San Diego

Sister Mary Waskowiak, RSM, Founding Director of Casa de Misericordia in San Diego, California, warmly invites Mercy schools to plan a service learning experience with her ministry. Once a Mercy educator herself, Sister Mary now organizes experiences for college and high school students – most recently from Mercy High School (Burlingame, California) who served during Holy Week 2024.

I begin this story with treasured memories of my first years in Mercy ministry at three different all-girls schools: Mercy High in San Francisco, Bishop Conaty High in Los Angeles and Mercy High in Burlingame.  I was shaped by my experiences in each of those situations.

The majority of students in Los Angeles were of Hispanic heritage and were living in areas which were home to several gangs.  Another sister and I were led to take students to a nonprofit group called Los Niños (“The Children”).  Almost 50 years ago it was easy to cross the border into Tijuana.  With a vanload of students, we took food and lots of care with us.  After the one-day experience, one of the students returned home and began to collect food and other items.  She invited us two sisters to join her family members in returning to the orphanage to hand out the collected goods.  It was during those visits that we learned that the women volunteering at the orphanage were the mothers of the children. They chose to place them in the orphanage because they did not have enough food for the children in their shacks/homes.

The experience in Tijuana impacted me, and I carried the memories to my third high school assignment at Mercy High in Burlingame.  During the year I was able to take a busload of girls to Los Niños, which became an overnight trip, due to the distance.

Now, I am on the other end of high school service experiences. Here at Casa de Misericordia, we live in San Diego, California, just 12 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border.  Tijuana is the first step into Mexico for us.  The city is one of the world’s most dangerous cities, largely due to violence and the drug cartels.

Casa de Misericordia, a ministry of the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas, responds to the needs of migrant persons at the USA/Mexico border in Southern California. We have been able to organize experiences for both college and high school students.  Most recently a vanload of girls from Mercy High, Burlingame, came down to be immersed on the U.S. side of the border.  Their service coordinators purposely brought them down during Holy Week, from Holy Thursday to Easter Sunday.  We took them to the border wall at Friendship Park, a place now shut down by Homeland Security.  The girls also joined the parishioners of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in the living walk of the Stations of the Cross – word and song all in Spanish.  Thanks to the generosity of the students’ families, boxes of hygiene products arrived before the girls did. They put together about 100 hygiene kits and gave them to migrant families and individuals, as well as to the homeless persons living in our area.  Carefully watching the girls walk the streets with the hygiene kits, I was moved as I observed them giving the bags to persons who quickly extended their hands to receive the items.

I share these experiences with an invitation to all of you: “Come and see!” Contact me and together we can work out a plan that offers experiences in Mercy, connecting those who have with those who have less-to-nothing.

You can contact Sister Mary Waskowiak via email at mwaskowiak@sistersofmercy.org.