Education for 600 children in rural Latin America

I hope all is well. It has been a great few months on the projects and thank you so much to everyone who donated to the Appeal to allow us to continue and expand our work in Latin America. As a bonus, GlobalGiving will be matching all individual donations to this page up to $50 by 50% between today, Tuesday 25th March to Friday 28th March. If you can it would be fantastic if you could donate something and take advantage of this extra matching and thank you so much in advance. 

Thanks to donations to the Appeal, we will be supporting fifty students with disabilities this year in Guatemala in a small school on the lake. Each student will receive school materials which will ease the economic burden on their families. The school has very few teachers due to lack of governmental funding so Gaspar, our project manager, will also volunteer at the school as an assistant when he can. More schools have been identified over the past couple of months which we will support with classroom materials. Over time we will see what further help we can provide.

Our secondary school and college students are into their third month of classes. We are supporting one hundred students from several communities in secondary and college education. We are also supporting three hundred primary school students with materials so they remain in school rather than dropping out due to lack of school books and pencils. 

Work continues on the new centre for Plan Costura in one of our communities whilst meetings are held to start a new plan in another community which will provide opportunities for dozens of teenagers and mothers.

The new school year gets back underway in Peru this month and we will be continuing with our local Phoenix teacher as well as providing daily fruit for the children. We will also be buying gas for the school meals which will be enhanced with fresh vegetables from the school garden. As we do each year we will be providing each student with their own textbooks which they can use at home as well as in the school. 

Classes have resumed in Ecuador for the second half of the school year. Work has begun with the school vegetable garden which will provide continuous food for the daily meals. Not everything can be successfully grown at 3,500m (11,500ft) so they have planted cabbages, carrots and beetroot. It is 100% organic using animal fertilizer.

Music is such an important part of the curriculum and one of our local teachers takes all the classes. The students not only learn how to play the instruments, which include wind powered keyboards, they also learn how to read music.

The first harvest of our second large bean Plan Huerto has taken place. Most of the proceeds are currently being reinvested into expanding the programme and replanting the current plans.

We will be celebrating our 20th Anniversary in Ecuador between Saturday 31st May and 7th June with a volcano charity challenge as well as spending a day in the community doing some hands-on work as mentioned above. Each volcano will be undertaken in a day so participants who want to skip any and stay back in Otavalo are able to do so.  

If you worked with us in the past and fancy coming back to reminisce or just want to climb some volcanoes whilst getting involved in a charity challenge whilst helping the projects please do let us know by replying to this newsletter. We will need to confirm numbers by the end of March.  

Many thanks for all your support for the projects and we’ll be in touch in the next couple of months with a further update.

Cheers