Don Alberto, The Teacher

We spent one morning in the home of Alberto Moreno. His modest apartment consists of a tiny living room, bathroom, bedroom and kitchen, dimly lit and sparcely furnished. The kitchen appliances are old -- like props for a movie, set in the 1950s.

As we walk through the apartment, I notice something about Don Alberto that you may have noticed about your parents or grandparents who are near his age. That is, he saves everything. I mean everything. There are neat little stacks of things like breadwrappers, styrofoam meat trays and cardboard cookie boxes. In every little nook, there are tidy stacks of things he just cannot throw out. And though they seem to almost overtake the room, I imagine how empty the space would be without them.

And then I see it... the one thing that almost seems to sum up the life of this beloved teacher: his books. Along the back wall of the kitchen, there are hundreds and hundreds of books. Many appear to be books he taught from during his years at the Colegio Americano. They fill the shelves and even overflow them into cardboard boxes in the living room closet. As I scan the titles, I imagine the young Alberto Moreno who used to read them. And I sense that having them with him here makes this tiny apartment feel like home.

The life that came before his time in this apartment was full and rich. As a young boy, Don Alberto went to elementary in the San Nicolás barrio of Cali. The neighborhood did not have offer secondary education, so after Don Alberto completed elementary school, his mother took him to find a school where he could continue his studies. They went to a union mission in their neighborhood, which was in the process of creating the first Colegio Americano in Cali. The missionaries, Don Carlos Charman and Mr. Walter Louis, admitted Don Alberto, and he become one of the school's first ten or fifteen students. Tuition at that time was one peso. After graduating high school at the Colegio Americano, Don Moreno became a teacher and carried out 21 years of service there.

It's sad to me that a man who spent his young life teaching other people's children and serving his community should live out his last days alone in this apartment. Don Alberto never married. Instead, he cared for his own aging mother until she passed away. But he was already 70 when his mother died, and so much of life had passed him by. He has no family. He has outlived all of his friends, except for one, me mentions -- Don José Fajardo, who now lives in the United States. But he has a very good friend, a former student, who looks after him as best as she and her husband can.

Don Alberto's health is failing, but he would like to live independently as long as he can. When Hogar Samaria is ready, he will have a room there to fill with his precious books. He says he knows he will have a better standard of life there.

I asked him, "If not for the Hogar Samaria, where would you go?"
"Well, frankly," he answers, "I don't know."
(photo by Mark Mosrie)