http://www.scsun-news.com/ci_20301184Their View: Learning boundaries in wide open spaces
By Claudette Ortiz / For the Sun-News
Posted: 04/01/2012 12:38:48 AM MDT
On Highway 27 outside of Hatch, past the sea of solar panels and just before the whirly-gig wind turbines, is a road that snakes, dips and climbs the Geronimo Trail to where 22 teenage boys are housed at Tierra Blanca Ranch.
Some of them made bad choices, and some of them had bad choices made for them but out on this working ranch, at-risk or troubled teens can unplug from all that in order to focus on who they are. It's a place to stop merely surviving and begin thriving.
Pictures on the refrigerator say it all ... there is a new kid around the campfire looking down at his feet, but a later picture of him has him looking straight into the camera. Now he is seeing his surroundings and feeling connected to them. And whether he will be at the ranch for one year or more, whether his parents paid his tuition or he is here on a scholarship ... he will learn life skills, he will receive an education as well as love, and he will find he can respect himself and others when he discovers what relationships are all about.
What they are accomplishing out here takes people like Scott Chandler, director of the Tierra Blanca Ranch High Country Youth Program; it takes people like June and Bill Halsell who sponsor its team in the Bataan Memorial Death March at White Sands; it takes the families trying to heal who can pay tuition for their sons ... but it is staff members like Emily Campbell who make it work.
Building relationships is the key to feeling loved and connected, and Emily happily lives and works and listens to the boys. As she explained to one boy recently at midnight, "We don't not want to be some white-walled institution; we want to meet you where you are at, so you can be productive in this society."
As I walk through the house with Emily, there are boys studying together at the table. In home-bound schooling through Deming Public Schools, two teachers come out twice a week for individual tutoring. Otherwise the kids take their textbooks along with them whether they are branding at cow camp, moving hay, moving cattle or mending fences.
It is hard to imagine any of these students as sullen or combative as some were when they first arrived. Nor does it feel like a white-walled institution: Some of the kids have their own dog, and the ones who join Deming High School's football team or baseball team get carted back and forth for practice.
None of these kids want to be here when they first come. It was certainly not their idea to leave their friends, fast food and the Internet behind. Some feel angry or in shock when first taken to a camp into the middle of the woods. But like Emily says, these are kids with bad choices, not kids with bad hearts. The first thing everyone does at camp is take a really long hike. And they camp until the new arrival is finally ready to go to his new home.
For a few boys, it is their first real home. Dmytro came to the ranch when he was 12. He was adopted from a Russian orphanage and then given up by his adopted family. Emily tells Dmytro it was they who missed out on knowing him; she and Dmytro grew close during the six years he was at the ranch and she recently saw him in Arizona, where he is working full-time while taking a break from college. It was Emily who taught him to read. They sat on the back porch as they read from the Bible, "Like how people learned to read in the old days," she says. On May 18 at Deming High School four more kids graduate this year and one of them is in the top 10 percent of his class.
I asked Emily how she and the ranch found each other since they seem such a perfect fit. She said she interned here 11 years ago. Majoring in Forest Recreation Resources, she was told she could intern anywhere in her junior year, as long as it was outdoors, and found the Tierra Blanca Ranch advertisement for parents with troubled children in Sunset Magazine. Her internship was mentoring 12-year-olds in week-long summer camps coordinated with NMSU, and the goal was to see how outdoor activities affect future choices toward drugs and alcohol.
Emily said that "loving on the kids seemed far more necessary than the last year of school" at Oregon State University but that it left her eager to return after she graduated in order to work for the Chandlers in their faith-based program.
The afternoon I left, Emily and the 16 boys who volunteered to march in the Bataan Memorial were preparing to put in the last of their 180 miles of training (it is "Team ZX," named for Scott and Colette Chandler's ZX Land and Cattle Company). And they train knowing they have sponsors, staff and parents to cheer them on.
Claudette Ortiz is a monthly columnist for the Sun-News and lives in Hatch. She can be reached at
www.krwg.org by clicking on the "Local Viewpoints" tab under the "News" menu.)