Fund a teacher and teach a class in Latin America

I hope all is well with you. To give us a huge boost this week (Monday 4^th to Friday 8^th April) GlobalGiving will be 50% matching all individual donations to this page of up to $50 which is a fantastic opportunity for the projects as we aim to recover from the past two years and build towards a better sustainable future. If you can it would be fantastic if you could donate this week and your donation will go even further.

With 2022 now three months old it is already very different to the previous two years with all the students back in the classroom finally. We are aiming to maintain all the classrooms secure for daily teaching with cleaning products available. Looking ahead donations permitting, whilst continuing to cover our daily costs of the projects, we aim to make a concerted effort to implement family sustainable income plans with small enterprises over the coming months. Thanks to your continued support we have managed to keep the projects going through these hard times and once again, with your donations, we hope to be in a position to move forwards with confidence – thank you!

In Guatemala our one hundred secondary, college and University scholarship students are finally back in the classroom after two years. Many are mature students with serious underlying health conditions who couldn’t continue studying without the scholarships.

Plans are underway to build a bigger space for our Plan Costura sewing project for single mothers with more mothers entering the programme as the income earned helps them with any extra costs for their children in primary school, like textbooks. We are now helping to cover education from primary school to University, which was our original aim.

This year we are concentrating on college education in Honduras with the students studying various agricultural techniques as part of their course. For the past year we have used a piece of land for them to gain experience in preparation, sewing, maintenance and harvest of various crops. They will use this knowledge for their own family vegetable gardens with proceeds helping the household costs like medicine, food and school supplies.

Also as part of the curriculum the students head out into the communities to give talks to the families covering various topics including hygiene, malnutrition and agricultural techniques. Earlier in the year they weighed infants to check for malnutrition.

Ecuador restarted the second half of the school year in January. Whilst all the other grades returned to full-time daily classes the little ones will continue to come to school two to three times a week for the time being. Pawker Raymi was celebrated asking Pachamama (Mother Earth) for a successful growing season and harvest. It is very important for the community to continue with these traditions stretching back over hundreds of years.

Once the school year finishes in June we will turn our attention to investing in a wide range of sustainable family income enterprises. This extra income will help with daily costs like food which cannot be grown, medicines and extra school supplies as well as further education costs. Our aim is that all education up to and including University will be covered in the communities with these sustainable plans.

Perú finally got back into the classrooms at the end of March for the first time since December 2019. Student numbers have swelled as more families migrate from the altiplano and jungle to try and find work in Arequipa though end up in the pueblos jovenes on the outskirts of the city in the desert where we work.

In the next few months we hope to build school vegetable gardens for the daily food programme and also implement various family sustainable income plans to help with household costs.

All the best for April and thank you in advance for your continued support.

Cheers