Lubian Sequi: Giving Street Children a Chance

The twenty-five children who are learning to read and write on Lubian Sequi’s patio are poor—too poor to afford shoes or uniforms or supplies for school. Some have no beds at home; instead, they sleep in cardboard boxes on the ground.

Lubian Sequi is a small, lovely woman with a smile that warms and comforts. On the chalkboard she has written the words Dios Me Ama (“God Loves Me”). Besides teaching her students reading, writing, mathematics, social studies, and etiquette, Sister Sequi begins each day’s classes with a prayer and a lesson from the Bible. She also encourages the children to pray with their families. She provides pencils, notebooks, and chalk for the children who cannot afford them, and she uses many visual aids to help the children learn.

This unusual teacher finds most of her students on the streets of Santo Domingo. “Whenever I see a dirty, barefoot, or neglected child, I say to him, ‘Come here. Don’t be afraid. Where do you live?’” Then she goes home with the child to ask permission for the child to attend school in her home.

Once a month, she invites the parents to an evening meeting where they can see how the children are progressing. She also gives a talk to help the parents spiritually and morally. “Our intention is to teach the parents so that they can teach their children better,” she says. Although it is not Sister Sequi’s primary goal to convert, at least one student’s family has been baptized since coming to her school.

With a college degree in elementary education, Sister Sequi taught in the public schools for twenty-four years. She was also a nurse and a social worker. “I have always had a great attraction to the poor,” she says, “and in spite of my imperfections I have tried to help them.” When she was younger, she sometimes went to the countryside on a donkey, taking clothes to the people and preaching the gospel.

Her experience as a nurse also affected her deeply. “In the hospitals, I learned to love a lot, because there is a lot of love and pain there. Each time I had to take care of a patient, I would ask myself, ‘If he were Jesus, how would I care for him?’ With this idea in mind, I learned to love the sick without fear, nausea, or grief and to see in each person the image of the Lord.”

In 1961 Lubian Sequi founded a vocational school to teach young women skills that could help them live a better life. She still administers this school, where more than three hundred students learn sewing, tailoring, pastry-making, weaving, and other manual skills. The school is supported by a nominal tuition, which varies according to the students’ ability to pay.

Lubian and her husband, Felix, joined the Church in 1980, eight years after they married. They discovered the gospel at a welfare fair held by the lady missionaries. “I was first attracted to the Church by its concern with helping families and also by its philosophy that the gospel is to be taken to everyone,” she recalls. Since then she has served as Relief Society president, and Brother Sequi now serves as the director for the Church Educational System in the Dominican Republic. The Sequis have a son, Gustavo Adolfo, fifteen, and a daughter, Nadia, who is twelve. Nadia often helps Sister Sequi in her work.

Sister Sequi’s greatest desire is to spend her strength working—first for her family and then in behalf of others. “My goal is not to build a house in this life, because nothing is permanent here,” she explains. “I want to build our house in heaven because we will be there forever.”

If you were to ask Sister Sequi’s young students what kind of house their teacher is building in heaven, they would say it is a very big one indeed—with room enough for all those she has come to love.

Photo by Janet Thomas