Far from Hollywood, Estefanía Rebellón helps migrant children

When she starred as certainly one of two sisters crossing the border by means of the Sonoran desert within the movie “On The Different Aspect,” actress Estefanía Rebellón had her first expertise of what hundreds of individuals searching for the American dream face.

However cinema is one factor, and actuality one other factor solely.

When she was 10 years outdated and residing in Cali, Colombia, her mother and father got here to her college at some point to select her up sooner than common. They instructed her they had been going to go away the nation as a result of they had been beneath demise threats from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the left-wing guerrilla group that for many years waged a civil struggle in opposition to the federal government that left tons of of hundreds lifeless over greater than a half-century.

“The one factor I used to be capable of take was a toy,” recollects Rebellón. “I arrived in Miami with what I used to be sporting.”

Searching for to meet her dream of being an actress, Rebellón left Florida and moved to Los Angeles, the place she started a promising profession on this planet of movie and tv. By 2017, she had written, directed, and acted in a number of movies and collection, reminiscent of “Grachi” (2011), “Husband for Lease” (2013) and “Jane the Virgin.”

However in 2018, when the migratory stream reached a disaster level, and dozens of migrant caravans from Central America arrived on the U.S.-Mexico border, her glamorous life in Hollywood turned the wrong way up. One thing instructed her that she needed to go to Tijuana and see what was occurring up shut.

Estefanía Rebellón.

(Estefanía Rebellón)

And he or she didn’t suppose twice. In Los Angeles, collectively along with her accomplice Kyle Thomas Schmidt, an actor, director and stuntman, she shaped the group Sure We Can, and in lower than three months that they had bought a faculty bus and transformed it into a faculty that was positioned on the grounds of the Professional Amore Dei hostel in Tijuana.

The query is unavoidable: Why a faculty?

“After I arrived from Colombia, every part modified from at some point to the following and the one place the place I felt secure was in school,” she tells me with a contact of nostalgia for these tough days of her childhood. “That’s why a faculty in Tijuana was a method to make life a bit of simpler for these youngsters who’ve needed to undergo so many difficulties.”

After I visited the Sure We Can college in Tijuana, I met the instructor Clarisa Carrasco who, amid the noise of the classroom, performed mushy music, as if for meditation, and requested the youngsters to “breathe in, and out,” as she slowly raised and lowered her arms.

The impact was instant. The uproar steadily become a silence that was solely damaged by the fragile music. “Now drop all ideas, simply focus in your respiratory.…”

Amid all of the stress the youngsters expertise, college provides them a little bit of stability, Carrasco, who has intensive expertise working with migrant youngsters from Latin America, instructed me.

Right here at this college, everybody, youngsters and adults, has a narrative to inform.

Just like the 5-year-old Guatemalan woman who hugs an enormous teddy bear whereas describing, in minute element, her expertise of staying within the immigration detention heart, generally known as the “ice field”; the chilly she feels when she sleeps with an aluminum blanket, and the little ache she felt in her chest when immigration authorities separated her from her mom.

Or that of Isabel, a Guatemalan woman with lovely light-brown eyes who left her city when armed males attacked her neighbors’ homes.

The dynamic throughout the college is just like different instructional techniques. There are two instructors who educate completely different topics bilingually. The kids begin actions at 9 within the morning and at 11 they take a break for breakfast. The day ends at 1 within the afternoon.

In 2021, the Sure We Can Cellular Colleges program turned 2 years outdated. “We had been very stunned to see that, regardless of the worldwide confinement as a result of pandemic, hundreds and hundreds of households continued emigrate, making colleges more and more obligatory,” says Rebellón.

Between 2020 and 2021 Sure We Can opened two new colleges with the identical mannequin within the states of Baja California and Chihuahua. The affect has been so nice that the Ministry of Public Schooling of Mexico granted official recognition to its research plans, thus changing into the primary bilingual educational program for migrant youngsters.

Spectacular achievements

In July, Sure We Can will flip 4 years outdated and will probably be beginning the development of a brand new bus in Los Angeles that will probably be used as a faculty in one of many border cities. “We at all times want volunteers to assist us, the work is rarely performed,” Rebellón says with fun.

What this younger actress has completed by means of organizing Sure We Can in 4 years is spectacular. Listed here are some information:

She has supplied training and enrolled greater than 2,800 immigrant and refugee youngsters in her Cellular Faculty Program.

She has supplied greater than 2 million hours of training to youngsters in disaster.

She has constructed 4 college areas on the border between the US and Mexico, two in Tijuana, one in Mexicali, and one in Ciudad Juárez. The group at the moment operates three college areas, two in Tijuana and one in Ciudad Juárez.

It has developed its personal curriculum for working with refugee and immigrant youngsters and has developed specialised programs for kids in disaster and migrants.

The faculties serve greater than 300 college students each day between the ages of three and 15, and supply training for pre-kindergarten, kindergarten, major grades from first to fifth grade and sixth to eighth grade.

The faculties work with youngsters of 10 completely different nationalities together with Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Colombia, Haiti, Brazil, and U.S.-born youngsters whose mother and father have been deported.

Sure We Can has handed out greater than 2,800 new backpacks with college kits and has supplied greater than 2,800 uniforms to youngsters enrolled in its packages.

College students play after class. The Sure We Can Basis cleared the property close to the bus to function a playground.

(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Instances)

All that work has given Rebellón nice satisfaction. In 2023 she was named Girl of the 12 months by the Girls’s March LA Basis. In 2021 she was nominated for the Alfonso García Robles Humanitarian Award by the Nationwide Autonomous College of Mexico (UNAM) for the protection, promotion, safety and assure of the human rights of immigrants who’re in a situation of vulnerability.

A nice shock

In June 2022, Rebellón obtained a direct message from Alejandro Mayorkas, director of the Division of Homeland Safety, and her coronary heart jumped in her chest. It’s not each day you get calls like this.

The message was easy: The USA authorities needed to tell her that she had been named an “Excellent American” for her work main the Sure We Can group.

How does it really feel to get recognition like that? Rebellón stays very critical as she tells me, “This can be a recognition to my household, to the migrants, and to all of us who’ve come to this nation and have contributed to creating it larger and extra affluent.”

And though in recent times she has been centered on how the lifting of Title 42 is affecting international immigration, she has not put apart her dream of being an actress.

“However I’m not going to lose myself within the glamour and class of Hollywood,” she tells me with conviction. “I’ve a conscience and I’m according to what I imagine, so I’ll proceed preventing for every of my goals, irrespective of how tough they could appear.”