Dear Friends,
November is here once more, and we are once again reaching out to you with news about the past year in San Antonio Guatemala. What a year it’s been!
In January, all four of our little group of voluntarios canadienses went to San Antonio, laden with library supplies, books, and computers. We were excited by the prospect of a new learning centre for the kids of San Antonio, a new library in a community that has never had access to books, and most of all we were grateful to be handing over a lot of the responsibility of running all of this to Candelaria and Gregorio and their little Mayan NGO Forma Guatemala. Candelaria had done an enormous amount of preparation work getting the schools, the municipality, and the local development council all involved in planning for the new centre. However, she discovered that in San Antonio it’s hard to get agreement on anything, and there was huge dissension on who should be hired as coordinator of the new centre. In the end, all our skills (and our somewhat limited Spanish) were needed to calm the conflict and work out a process of hiring involving buy-in from everyone. At the end of a pretty rigorous process, all parties agreed on Yesenia, a bright young teacher from a little village just outside San Antonio. We finished up the process with a bang-up celebration involving speeches from just about everyone (including the Mayor, who presented 3 computers and a printer), food, music from a guitar-playing principal, and even a little dancing.
Our coordinator Yesenia has proved to be all we’d hoped for, and more. She – along with her part-time assistant Lidia, one of our past scholarship students – have made the Centro de Aprendizaje la Casita (the Casita Learning Centre) into a lively hub of learning. Every day, little groups of students who are referred by their teachers arrive for extra help. 143 students are currently receiving learning assistance. And then there are the multitudes of kids who just drop by to look at books, use the computers, do research for their homework, and read.
Each month, the figures grow larger. In February, when the learning centre opened, there were 324 student visits, in September 590 visits. The number of children in the reading club has increased from 6 to 67—this in a culture where reading for pleasure is practically unknown. We’re being asked for more books; some of the kids have now read all the books in the library at their level (the library now numbers over 600 books).
And all this learning help is working! Of the 110 kids who turned in their school marks, the number receiving passing grades has jumped from 63 to 94.
Meanwhile, other activities are woven into the mix:
• Twenty-five Ancianas (elderly women), chosen because they are the poorest and most isolated in the village, continue to come for lunch and activities twice a week. Our savvy coordinators have networked with other organizations to provide an occupational therapist at each session to lead them through exercises and art activities – an exciting new area of endeavour for these women.
• Groups of adults meet twice a week for literacy courses.
• We continue to support scholarship students (9 of them, 2 in university), some of whom provide extra tutoring on Saturdays to kids having trouble with their schoolwork, and also help in the garden.
• Every Wednesday morning a group of very disabled children arrives for language therapy, provided by therapists funded by another organization.
• Our stove program – replacement of open-hearth fires by clean-burning stoves – saw a major check-and-repair program in which 90 families had their stoves upgraded.
None of this could have happened without your support. Gracias! Gracias! Gracias!
This Christmas, once again, I’m wondering if you might choose to bypass the usual Christmas gifts, and instead give a donation in honour of friends and family, to help the San Antonio project continue. We have lovely new ¡Feliz Navidad! cards available, saying that a gift given in their name has provided books for the library (and put their name on a bookplate), or helped to feed an anciana, or supported education and the Learning Centre. (To see what the cards and bookplates look like, scroll down below this post. Thanks to all of you for your support. This year we won’t be heading back down to Guatemala, but we're immensely excited by all the good work that’s going on in San Antonio, and we hope you are too.
With love and gratitude,
Susan, Mary, Kathy and Linda
PS: We can issue income tax receipts for all Canadian donations. If you send a cheque, make it out to Innovative Communities Foundation (put San Antonio Education/Community on the memo line), and send it to Innovative Communities Foundation, 300 – 722 Cormorant St., Victoria, BC, Canada V8W 1P8.
To donate online go to:
www.innovativecommunities.org/communities/Guatemala/san-antonio-education. On our new website, you can donate through Paypal just by clicking the donate button on our San Antonio page. You'll be emailed 2 receipts: one from Paypal, and soon after a tax receipt from ICO. (Please click on the box that allows your address to be shared with ICO. This is needed for an official receipt.)
Remember, every penny you give goes to the project; we are all volunteers and there are no administrative costs.
