Education for 250 working children in Chiapas

Dear  donors,

This year is going to be one of big emotions at Melel Xojobal.

The reason?

We are celebrating our XX Anniversary, twenty years giving our best in order to encourage childhood to know better themselves, keep studying, claim their rights and change their project of life.

For that, we are organizing different events that we’ll be sharing with you.

First of all, we are almost starting our every year campaign “Right to Identity”. Last campaign was a total success: we achieved 110 birth certificates, and this year we hope to improve that number.

Right now, we are promoting the campaign and disseminating information about it all over San Cristobal de las Casas. We have flyers in Spanish and Tzotzil (the main indigenous language spoken in the region) that we have been spreading in every corner of our city, focusing in locations that we already identified as places where a lot of persons don´t have their birth certificates.

Besides, we are broadcasting radio announcements in Spanish and Tzotzil on different radio stations that reach a big audience of the population we work with. Most of them are indigenous, local and social radio stations that now are our friends and every year help us in this task of promotion, such as Radio Libertad, Radio Votán Zapata, Radio Ciudadana and Radio Centinela.

Also, our activities in order to help the childhood to keep studying, claim their rights and change their project of life, have already started. These activities are basically educative sessions that we called Learning Circles, aimed to indigenous working children in their own workplaces.

The Learning Circles are one of the main pillars of Melel Xojobal and have the objectives:

1. Improve children skills and knowledge in order to help them in the school, basically reading and writing skills, and mathematics knowledge.
2. To enable the childhood the exercise of their rights. We intend that children see themselves as a subject of law and know their rights.
3. To propitiate bonds between children, so they could together recognize their situations, challenges, risks and opportunities.

It is worth mentioning, these children are not being exploited, they work with their families in order to contribute the household expenditure. Which is good and bad: good because the majority doesn’t belong to criminal networks that use them for profit interest, and bad because the parents want their children to continue the business family and they do not consider useful the formal education.

For this reason, we also have a workshop with the parents in order to show them the importance of the right of education and let their children improve their life project.

Finally, we are organizing the main event of our XX Anniversary that is going to happen by the end of the present year: a forum named “Childhood and Social Justice”. We pretend to create a place of encounter between local, national and international experts in themes of childhood, authorities, and working children from Mexico and abroad. We want to become a megaphone for the voice of childhood, we believe in the importance of children’s participation in the exchange of ideas and decision-making processes.

 We will keep you updated through all the year.

Best regards

Luis Flores

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Dear GlobalGiving Donors,

Another year is soon coming to an end and this is the summary of the activities and results we had accomplished in 2016:

Birth Certificate Campaign.

A Birth certificate is an indispensable document for people; it proves the existence of a person and is the key to access other rights such as the right to education or to healthcare.

We promote an annual campaign called “Right to Identity” whose objective is to help indigenous families to get the birth certificate for their children.

This campaign took place in the public places of the city, where children either work or accompany their parents to work. We also broadcast radio announcements in Spanish and Tzotzil on different radio stations that reach a big audience of the population we work with.

In 2016, we assisted in obtaining 81 birth certificates for children who would otherwise have remained unregistered. These valuable documents were delivered directly to the organization’s offices, thanks to an agreement with the Office of Civil Registration.

Right to Education

One of the pillars of the Organization’s work is the promotion of right to education since it makes a sustainable impact. Higher levels of education for young people enable better opportunities for social mobility when they become adults, breaking the cycle of poverty and inequality that affects such a large number indigenous people.

School placements and attendance

Through educational activities called “learning circles”, that take place in public markets, in the central square and in the organization’s offices, children and young people improve their life skills, such as critical thought, autonomy, the ability to ask questions and to create new ideas to understand, to value and to have a positive impact in their environment.

This year, we focused on the following strategies:

a) Encouraging reading and writing

We made an assessment to determine the level of literacy of children and we found a big gap between their current knowledge and their level of education. Children who attends 3rd, 4th and 5th grade can’t read they can only spell. We also found participants who don’t know how to read and write.

Weekly, we ran different activities to improve the reading and writing level of children and we also teach them how to read and write using different strategies such as word plays, storytelling, free writing and vocabulary.

b) Encouraging the study of mathematics

Children who we work with are behind the normal grade level for their age in elementary arithmetic, most of them barely can count to one hundred and perform simple addition and subtraction; so we focused on developing math skills such as addition, subtraction, division and multiplication through the use of ludo-educational resources that focus not only on learning but also on encouraging children to love it.

c) Basic English Language Learning

During the summer period, we organized an intensive English workshop, with the primary objective of providing young people with the necessary tools for English comprehension and to improve their academic performance. Also it serves to reflect on the importance of learning different languages for life and work.

Educational accompaniment

31 children and adolescents are beneficiaries of a scholarship to guarantee their school continuity. As part of this process we made home visits, monthly follow-up meetings and educational activities in the organization’s office to strengthen their academic abilities.

Raising awareness about the Right to Education with families

It is also necessary to work with families to promote the rights of their children and to extend the organization’s work to the family level in order to reach indirectly more boys, girls, and adolescents.

In 2016, we ran four workshops to promote the Right to Education.

We want to thank GlobalGiving and all the generous people who contribute to promote the rights of indigenous children in Chiapas!