Food & fruit for primary schools in Latin America

I hope all is well with you.

The past months in our college in Honduras have been extremely successful and not just in the classroom. Recently our students were involved in reforesting 1000’s of trees in the area. They also continued giving talks in the local primary schools about health, nutrition and climate change. This is part of their course and not only imparts useful information it helps them get used to speaking in public.

In Ecuador it wasn’t just teaching that was the highlight of the past months. Mother’s Day was celebrated with lots of dance, including La Bomba de Chota, food and games to celebrate their well-deserved day! Each Easter the traditional Fanesca (a soup made from different types of beans, dried fish and boiled eggs) is served in the school. This year we shared responsibilities with the parents in buying the ingredients and the mothers cooked an amazing feast

Mother’s Day and the school’s Anniversary was celebrated in Perú and our fruit program continues in the school with bananas, melons, apples and more! We have seen such a change with the children with this program as they don’t eat much out of school. The government provides some limited food though no way to cook it, so we provide the gas for the cooker!

Over the next five years we aim to continue investing in family sustainable income plans which help cover the costs of further education, medical costs and of course income for food for the whole family. Some of the income will go towards covering the projects’ costs too as we aim to increase our work in all the countries! Examples of successful plans include Plan Moo (cows), Plan Huerto (vegetable gardens), Plan Pollo (chickens) and Plan Negocio (small businesses). Hundreds of families have benefited from the plans over the past few years and we plan to triple this numbers over the next few years.

We completed our two Charity Challenges in the past couple of weeks for all our projects, completing the Inca Trail and Machu Picchu in Perú followed by climbing volcanoes in Ecuador, each a week long. We managed to raise some fantastic funds for the projects and will be repeating the challenges next year with the Perú challenge in the week of 25^th May and Ecuador in the week of 1^st June 2020. If you are interested in joining us please do contact me on dom@thephoenixprojects.org and it will be great to have you on board!

Thank you and all the best for the next few months and let us know if you are interested in joining us on the Charity Challenges next year in Ecuador and Perú! Cheers

I hope all is well with you. We’re almost at the end of the first quarter of 2019; time is flying by! We are now in the second phase of our 25-year cycle; 1) introducing education, 2) introducing sustainable plans to help cover costs of the projects whilst continuing to cover the costs through donations and 3) with the projects sustainable we will concentrate on employment generation for the graduates.

For many years we have introduced education to hundreds of children and seen them continue from primary school, through secondary school and college so for us now to be in the stage where are adding in sustainable plans whilst continuing to cover costs is a huge advance from when we started. Thank you to you all for helping us get this far and for continuing to support us in the future. All our projects aim to have some element of daily food for the children and by implementing sustainable plans based on vegetable gardens and similar, this can only be a good thing for the students.

It is Charity Challenge season once again and we will be heading to Perú and Ecuador in May to raise funds for all our projects so please do support the challenge by donating to this page.

Our school got off to a great start in Itzapa, Guatemala with all eight grades of classrooms full and being taught by our local teachers, most of whom came through the system with us from the start (phase 1!). Just the other day we bumped into two of our female students who started with us back in the early 2000’s and who we managed to get experience with a local accountancy firm a few years back: they are both now formally employed with that firm, earning critical income for their families back in the community. 

A brilliant start to our projects in and around Copán, Honduras with the main college welcoming more students from seven different communities, many walking hours each day to receive an education. Our satellite school in Barbasco and its new classrooms got underway with three secondary school grades now being taught this year. We will also be supporting a new school in La Pintada, mainly with school materials and hopefully later in the year with more local teachers.

The second half of the school year in Ecuador got underway in January with our three local Phoenix teachers doing a sterling job. We are succeeding getting the local community more involved not just with the school though with sustainable plans for the future, with great success with the upcoming “fiambre” feast being organized which we will be putting some money towards.

Our project in Perú was our last school to get underway this month after the holidays and the number of children is impressive in our project out in the desert around Arequipa. Edyluz ran an excellent summer school during January to help those children who hadn’t gone back to the altiplano and their families with their studies and what they struggled with during 2018 and preparing them for 2019.

Thank you and all the best for the next few months and we will update you on the goings on, especially the Perú and Ecuador challenges! Cheers