St. Marks is blessed to have Juan Mercado as Facilities Manager. He has been on staff since 2011. He knows our building inside and out and has an expert eye for things that need his attention. He doesn’t wait for someone to request a fix, if he sees a need, he is on it. He is also responsive to requests from others. For example, one of Juan’s current projects is to modify a room to make it appropriate for creating podcasts—a Podcast Studio, if you will—as St. Mark’s continually enhances our online capabilities and offerings. This involves adding flooring that is more acoustically friendly and lighting appropriate for online video captures.

Juan and his wife, Claudia, have been living in Indiana for 25 years. Here, they raised their three kids, Gustavo, Grecia, and Esmerelda, and now enjoy their grandsons, Uriah and Emile, and have another grandson on the way.

Juan said he really likes the positive people and working environment at St. Marks. He likes that he can be self-motivated and is appreciated for that. He has been blessed by having good jobs that he has kept for long periods of time. Here is Juan in his “office,” where I found him searching through his organized little drawers of screws, nuts, and bolts to find the right one for the job. I got him to pose by the poster of appreciation that the preschool made for him.

Juan considers himself to be a patient man. He told me a story of being a nurse’s assistant in Irvine, California when he was still in his 20s. He was assigned to work with a woman in a wheelchair who had a reputation for being hard to deal with. She said to him, ‘‘I’ll teach you English, and you teach me how to walk.” They both kept up their end of the agreement and soon became fast friends.

Juan is originally from the Guadalajara area of Mexico but immigrated to Southern California when he was 15. He married a few years later and worked hard to quickly learn English and earn his nursing license. Twenty-five years ago, he came to Indiana on vacation to visit his cousin, applied for a job here in Indy and was hired the next day, so he moved his

family here. They appreciate that Indiana has a more reasonable pace of life and love the