People of San Miguel: For Bill Wilkinson, nothing is as important as education

By Natalie Taylor

The first thing that comes across when you meet Bill Wilkinson is his enthusiasm for what he is doing—bringing education to children who may not have that opportunity. He has been doing this for more than twelve years, and there is little indication he will stop anytime soon. Bill is one of those seniors who, when they retire, get as busy as or busier than they were during their working careers.

Bill was born in Oregon, moved to California, but for the past thirty years he and his wife Jane have lived in Portland. He got an MBA and CPA license, but his career was in shipping, running ships all over the world. It was a job that required “juggling many balls in the air,” as he put it. In 2003 he retired, and although he had traveled everywhere through his job, he and Jane had done very little traveling together. They started with a trip to Cancún, then traveled to Belize, Guatemala and other Latin American destination.

Driving was an appealing option for Bill and Jane because it would allow them to travel with their dogs. They bought a VW Eurovan and began taking months-long road trips into Mexico. When they first passed through San Miguel they found it a bit “too unreal,” but loved all the activities and cultural events. For the next five years they made this their winter destination, staying in an RV campground.

Jane was first in connecting to the community by joining Jóvenes Adelante (JA) while Bill stayed back as “dog keeper.” Through their connection to JA, they became aware of the need for education, particularly in the rural areas. Not one to join associations, Bill is a self-starter and he decided to do something about education in San Miguel de Allende with his own project. In one of the outlying communities—El Lindero de la Pataca, they met a young woman without means and facilitated a JA scholarship for her. They also met a teacher at Lindero who was very enthusiastic about working with them to educate children beyond the junior high level. This started Bill’s promotion of education in the rural areas of San Miguel. He organized a cadre of volunteers—many of them former teachers—who went to an elementary school in Salitrillo (on the way to Celaya) to enhance the children’s education with readings, math exercises, music and even English. The volunteers spent a few hours with the children in small groups focusing on the different activities.

Bill’s concern was bringing books and computers to the schools. He enlisted the help of the volunteers who began to collect books and computers, and soon the little rural school had a library and computers on which the children learned to navigate the web and gather information to enhance their learning. An important observation led to another phase of the educational project.

They noted that the children were nodding off and seemed listless. What they found was that many of them were coming to school hungry, the parents being unable to feed them. Bill teamed up with Feed the Hungry, and this led to building a kitchen on the school premises offering the children one full meal a day. This made a great difference.

Bill moved on to another elementary school in Nueva Pantoja where he instituted a similar educational program. It continues to this day with dedicated volunteers who come twice a week to help 165 children in grades 1 through 6. Following the experience of finding undernourished children in Salitrillo, Bill and the volunteers remained on the lookout for potential health issues and referred the children to the proper channels. He has given over 200 computers to several other rural schools, established libraries, and provided more than 100 scholarships for higher education. He also instituted a program that takes place four times a year, where computer experts teach computer skills to the teachers so they may pass that knowledge to their students.

Maintaining his independence from other NGOs, but working closely with them, Bill has been making a major difference in the lives of children in the rural, disadvantaged communities of San Miguel. He and Jane continue driving back and forth between here and Oregon, but as soon as he arrives in San Miguel, he plunges back into the work he has been doing for over twelve years—serving the community through education.

Natalie Taylor is a bilingual published writer, editor, journalist, translator and a regular columnist at Atención News

www.natalietaylor.org