About Amistad International

Amistad International began in 1980 when Karen Hanson Kotoske, with the help of family and friends, raised funds to provide food, medical and dental care, and education for Huichol Indian villages in Mexico’s Sierra Madre Occidental. Since that first outreach to Mexico, Amistad expanded its humanitarian and educational work to India, Africa, Mongolia, China, and Haiti.

Our Philosophy

We are committed to:

  • Assisting a limited number of worthy projects run by creative, compassionate people with a high degree of responsibility and accountability.
  • Stretching the money we receive to help as many as we can, using only a minimal amount, less than 10%, for foundation overhead expenses.
  • Maintaining personal relationships with both donors and project leaders.
  • Communicating to our donors about the effect their gifts are having.

We seek out and enable community leaders to teach, develop and empower the rural impoverished who need a hand so that they can participate effectively in their own development. We help leadership to carry out their ideas and vision, knowing their wisdom has been gained through experience and challenge. Our goal is supporting local communities so they can reach economic self-sustenance through culturally-inspired and appropriate ways. This is done primarily through primary education of children, empowerment of community leadership, water and agriculture training, and trade school programs.

Some of the programs we support cannot attain economic sustainability because of the nature of their outreach. Examples are elementary schools and orphanages.

How We Began

As I watched the small four-seat Cessna lift off from the dirt mountain airstrip in May 1980, I couldn’t have imagined how the next few hours I would be spending in this remote Huichol Indian village would change the course of my life.

I was visiting my brother Bill Hanson, a medical student at Autonomous University in Guadalajara. His medical school friends had invited me to fly in their small plane on one of their clinic rounds early on a Sunday morning. Each Sunday and Thursday they flew to the mountains where they were providing medical care to the Huichol Indian families living in the rugged Sierra Madres. Due to the Huichols’ location, a mountainous region with no roads, the medical students and their four-seat Cessna provided the only medical and dental care for the Huichol families. These indigenous farmers were semi-nomadic, spending part of each year harvesting corn and beans which they planted in the thin soil near their mountain ranches. A significant portion of the year they walked through the mountain passes or by burro to celebrate ancient rituals, oversee governance of their communities, and, hopefully, receive medical attention. At times the small plane served as an ambulance.

But on that Sunday in May, when we touched down on the 900 ft dirt runway the villagers didn’t ask for medical care. Instead, they asked us to bring a supply of their staple food, dried corn. A prolonged, deadly drought had made them desperate for food. Volunteer pilot Bill Baxter jumped back into the plane to fly away and buy a large sack of dried corn in a Mexican town. He returned in a few hours with the corn which enabled the villagers to make tortillas for a few weeks until they could find alternatives.

Returning to the US, I carried the Huichol’s needs home with me in my heart. Within a few months I had registered the name Amistad Foundation as a non-profit in order to gather funds for their survival. (The name was later changed to Amistad International.)

Because we began our work in a Spanish-speaking country, we chose the name Amistad, which means friendship in Spanish. We have always believed making friendships with those we serve was of utmost importance. The result has been a network of trustworthy Amistad colleagues and friends around the world.

My mother Adora Hanson, her sister Mary Louise Reiber, and my husband Tom Kotoske were the first to encourage my hopes to bring food and medical care to the Huichol Indians.

In 1996, Amistad began expanding its humanitarian services around the world. We first assisted volunteer Paula Leen in building Murwira Children Home in Zimbabwe. (Due to a drought, the orphanage was later relocated to a nearby property with access to water. It is now called Kuda Vana Children’s Home.)

In 2003, Buddhist scholar Dr. Vesna Wallace told us about a humble teacher, Rajan Kaur, in Varanasi, India, who was teaching beggars’ children in a few makeshift classrooms she had built on her family’s small plot of land. Amistad began supporting her Buddha’s Smile School, building new classrooms and a daycare center. From that humble beginning, the school has grown to over 200 students.

Buddha’s Smile School founder, Rajan Kaur, is one of many visionaries with whom Amistad partners. I call them ‘quiet saints.’ These community leaders, many themselves impoverished, had been struggling to lift others through education, medical care, sustainable farming, and enterprise: Dagoberto Cirilo, the pilot for the Huichol Indian clinic for twenty years, Paula Leen (Murwira Children’s Home/Zimbabwe), Margaret Ikiara (CIFORD/Kenya), Dr Scott Nelson, (Haiti Adventist Hospital), Samuel and Peris Nderitu (G-BiACK/Kenya), Oyuna Tsedevdamba (Local Solutions/ Mongolia), Solomon Turinawe (ULA/Uganda), and many other leaders. Over the decades, Amistad has formed networks with responsible dreamers who were willing to work hard for the betterment of others. Their dedication and courage gave loft to our own wings.

Through this expanding network of Amistad’s Board of Directors, friends, donors, and volunteers, Amistad has supported many community programs around the globe including an orthopedic surgery program in Haiti, school construction in Kenya, India, Mongolia and Mexico, seminars for girls to overcome female genital mutilation, indigenous seed saving, girls’ leadership, orphanages, and numerous sustainable agriculture and craft skills training programs. In Mongolia, Amistad helped build two schools in the yurt district of Ulan Bator and provided livestock for nomadic families to replace animals lost during severe freezes. More recently, we have supported a toilet-building initiative in Mongolia. In South Africa, we assist a hospice for children with life-threatening medical conditions.

I will always be grateful to Providence for that eye-opening day in the rugged mountains of Mexico. I hope we have done net good in the world.

Karen Hanson Kotoske
Founder/Executive Director