About Child Aid

It all started with a ditch, several men and the bright Mexican sun. Drs. Nancy Press and Richard Carroll were on vacation in Oaxaca, Mexico in 1987, when they spied a group of locals diligently working to widen a drainage ditch on the side of a highway. The men were working furiously at the hard-packed earth with nothing other than shovels and picks.

“If only they had access to the right machinery,” Richard said to Nancy, “they’d finish the job in one-tenth the time.”

Many travelers to Mexico are moved by the beautiful countryside or the colorful colonial cities or the traditional folk art. Some people visit for the food, some for the beach and others for the elaborate churches. Rick and Nancy were moved by something else: the crippling poverty they saw at nearly every turn.

A concept began to take shape. The two realized that they could help some of these desperately poor people–specifically the children–they saw living in Oaxaca, by simply providing access to this “right machinery.” On one side of the border was the surplus and on the other, the need. The work lay in connecting the two in a modest, but meaningful way.

Serendipitously, Nancy and Rick then connected with a local Oaxacan doctor struggling to serve her young deaf and hard-of-hearing patients with quality care despite having no access to affordable hearing aids, audiology equipment and training. And there in the valley of Oaxaca and in memory of Nancy’s father, Harry Press, Child Aid (initially dubbed Sound Aid) was born.

A few months later, Rick returned to Oaxaca with a suitcase full of donated hearing aids and batteries for a group of deaf children, all of whom were living in severe poverty, separated from their community and without options. That week, more than 50 children received a hearing test, custom fit hearing aids and a chance to live a normal life.

Out of this first suitcase, grew Child Aid’s flagship project, Centro Oaxaqueño de Rehabilitación de Audición y Lenguaje, A.C./The Oaxacan Center for the Rehabilitation of Hearing and Speech (CORAL). CORAL has since become one of the most reputable NGOs in Oaxaca state serving nearly 1,000 hearing-impaired children and adults annually.

With the CORAL project firmly underway and growing, Rick took a trip in 1993 to Guatemala to take Spanish lessons. His Spanish teacher was Rigoberto Zamora Charuc, a serious man supporting his young family in the wake of Guatemala’s harrowing 35-year civil war.