Sustainable Income Plans in Latin America

I hope all is well with you. It has been a great couple of months on the projects thanks to your generous donations. 

Each year we plant hundreds of trees in Guatemala to offset our carbon footprint from The Phoenix Projects. This includes international flights for the charity challenges and the Impington School trip to Perú as well as daily transport taken by the local teachers.

Our scholarship students, their parents and other members of the community are all involved to ensure that the trees are cared for during the first stages of growth. From the young to the old, members of the community turned up to get involved. The elderly remember when the mountains were covered in trees and have seen first hand the extent of the deforestation in Guatemala. They are only too keen to reestablish the environment for future generations.

Plan Moo is coming along well in Ecuador with purchasing of cows restarted. The current herd is growing with several previous cows into their second calving. The sales of milk are shared between the local family and helping to cover teachers’ costs.

The land has been prepared and the seeds have been sewn in our 2½ acre (1 hectare) Plan Huerta bean crop. Leftover dried grass from the land clearing remains to protect the young shoots from the cold and the rain. Proceeds from this plan will be shared amongst the community who help out on the land and management costs of Plan Moo.

Since we started the projects in 2006 in Peru we have supplied the children with daily fruit. We also buy gas each month so they can receive a hot meal with the basic supplies the government provides. Add to this the vegetables that we now grow in the vegetable garden and we are making sure they receive nutritious food each day they are at school. We have seen remarkable positive results with their annual medical check-ups which the doctors confirm is due to the daily fruit and the vegetables from the school garden.

As part of their education the students are taught all the aspects of agriculture in our school vegetable garden including the maintenance and placement of the drip-feed irrigtation system before sewing.

For those of you in the UK we will be taking on the London Bridges Charity Challenge once again on Saturday 3rd August followed by a reunion in a pub. We plan to walk the fifteen bridges and 12 miles (20km) from Tower Bridge to Putney Bridge where we will have a Phoenix reunion in a pub there. 

As we tick off the bridges we will also take on the Phoenix treasure hunt to find objects and landmarks that are associated with our work in Latin America so feel free to bring the family too. Please let us know by emailing me on dom@thephoenixprojects.org if you are interested in joining us from the start, halfway or even just for the reunion in Putney.

We still have extra spaces for the Patagonia Challenge in November so if you are interested please do let us know as we will need to know final numbers by September and for those of you with Instagram we recently started to update our account once again after a couple of years’ hiatus so please do seek us out on phoenix_flying_2020

Have a great June

Cheers

Links:

• London Bridges Charity Challenge