Parenting classes touched more than 400 families this past year, as Nurse Martha Gonzalez taught parenting classes to the parents of students in 4 kindergartens, 3 elementary, one junior high and one high school (2006-7). 444 parents in all from five different communities learned about communication, discipline, family violence, psychological and spiritual support: essentially how to help their children grow up safe and healthy in the changing world of urban 21^st century. Pueblos Hermanos Nurse Martha Gonzalez took a special 18 month course to learn to give these classes, as well as to train other teachers to take them over (one of her first classes six years ago in the Obrera neighborhood of Tijuana, populated primarily by Mixtec Indians from the State of Oaxaca, grew rapidly and then she trained and turned it over to one of the school teachers there.)  She teaches with large drawings, examples, role playing as well as a lot of straight talk about what builds up children and what tears them down.  They meet in school rooms sometimes (though it’s a rare school that has an extra room to spare), private homes, the dining halls of the reduced cost breakfast program.  The excellent results in the lives of these families who have taken the course in the past has spread by word of mouth and each year has seen more demand, both more parents signing up in the schools Nurse Martha serves, as well as more schools and institutions requesting the program.   
     Parents in Tijuana, more than half of whom are from other parts of Mexico, are very concerned about their children's future as they see more and more youth in Tijuana and other border communities caught up in gangs, drugs and alcohol and sexual promiscuity.  In the past two decades Mexico has moved from being a transition point for illicit drugs on their way to the US to being a consumer.