WENATCHEE — One morning last month, a group of small children wrestled with the alphabet.

“Do you know a word that begins with the letter ‘A’?” prompted their Head Start teacher, Debbie O’Dell, while the children sat quietly on a large rug near the classroom’s white board. Some didn’t know while others risked taking a guess.

But when O’Dell asked, “What word begins with the letter ‘E’?”, a chorus of excited voices chimed in: “Edgar!”

Seated in the circle of 5-year-olds was Edgar himself —a 21-year-old with tattoo-covered arms and a bright smile. He looked at them all and grinned.

Edgar Enríquez is a volunteer with AmeriCorps, a federal organization that connects people who want to volunteer with agencies that need workers.

Since September, Enríquez has been working about 40 hours a week at the Wenatchee Head Start, and the children have grown to love him.

“We have four or five AmeriCorps volunteers each year, but Edgar is special,” explained O’Dell. “The way he can relate to the children and their families is incredible; they feel very drawn to him.”

“Working with AmeriCorps is amazing,” said Enríquez. “I feel like I’m doing something good instead of having that feeling that I’m about to get in trouble for something.”

Enríquez grew up in the El Monte neighborhood of Los Angeles and does not regret leaving behind a life punctuated by arrests for vandalism and increasing contact with gang members. But making a commitment to do volunteer work was brand new for Edgar.

“The word ‘volunteer’ wasn’t even in my dictionary,” he laughed, adding that the only similar work he’d ever done was court-ordered community service.

Enríquez said his life was going nowhere as he moved between Los Angeles and Wenatchee, where he and his brother were taken in by his mom’s sister.

“So I called SkillSource in Wenatchee and asked how I could change my life,” he said.

Through a subsequent SkillSource work experience and an intense desire to change, the pieces of his life began to come together.

“One day I went to the Community Center in Wenatchee thinking I’d help with the ESL classes and there they told me about AmeriCorps,” he said.

After wading through the daunting application process — with the help of several people who felt he deserved this chance — Enríquez was accepted at Head Start through the AmeriCorps program.

“AmeriCorps is all about the challenge; we learn to open ourselves to new experiences; our worlds really expand,” the young man said.

In Intermountain AmeriCorps — the branch of the program that serves North Central Washington — Enríquez found himself in a group of volunteers whose careers were already off the ground, and it made him feel out of place.

“One is a lawyer, others have worked as schoolteachers, a lot of them already have a bachelor’s degree,” said Enríquez. “All I have is a GED and I’ve only worked in (fruit packing) warehouses and at dead-end jobs.”

But these differences did not deter Enríquez, who now says he couldn’t be happier.

“The children motivate me to come back,” he said, “When people see me in stores, they think I’m bad and that I’m going to rob them, but when the children look at me ... they see who I really am.”