Help 500 Guatemalan Children Receive an Education

Written by Thais Arriola

Hello! We want to provide an update on the progress of our school for the little ones called “El Semillero”. This year we have been working hard to promote and develop the academic and artistic skills of our students through various educational and cultural activities. Our theater, singing, painting, poetry, dance, science, English, and chess festivals have been an enormous success, and we've seen greater participation from parents in all of our activities.

We have maintained an educational dynamic that allows our students to move and develop their critical thinking constantly. Within the challenges after the pandemic, we can mention the constant adaptation of pedagogic planning by our teachers. Likewise, we have managed to have psychological care that helps the promotion of emotional and physical health in our students. In the last three months , thanks to your support we have delivered 19,389 nutritious meals at our two schools, and the wellness program team managed to give 182 psychological sessions with our hired psychologist and five interns. Each month our doctor was able to treat 44 students and their families. These medical checkups have allowed our students to develop their academic activities in a better way, these checkups have been executed by our project in alliance with the local community health facility.

One of the significant challenges that we have in the little ones' school is to manage to collect all the material and resources that can allow us to provide education to the students, who because of social problems do not have the resources to come to school.

At our new Center of Opportunities , our high school, the program that is thriving the most is the cooking program. They are working hand-by-hand with our entrepreneurship program. During the last two months, we have had the support of a Guatemalan chef who is teaching our Culinary Club national confectionery. With more than 22 recipes the students have been introduced to; the students now have the opportunity to create a start-up inside the school. The confectionery sweets obtained from the classes are being sold at our private events. Along with other products, the Culinary program is becoming self-sustaining very quickly and kids are learning valuable skills. We are getting ready to open our school cafeteria, which will be led by the students.

For the first time in our history, we managed to reach out to local businesses near us that are willing to receive our graduate students so they can shadow their employees for a month. Most of them are in the food industry due to the proximity of the community we are located in, Jocotenango is next to Antigua, Guatemala which is packed with restaurants and coffee shops. All of our graduate students will shadow a different business. We are very happy to accomplish this.

Our programming and robotics program is very popular among our teenage students, they are learning how to develop apps and how to program through JavaScript with HTML and CSS. The robotics program is in great demand. Since these programs are being very successful our biggest challenge is to provide the equipment necessary for all of our interested students to access it. Providing AI to our classrooms and laboratories is also a challenge we are already working on solving.

We are very proud to share one of our most recent success stories from our project. Our boxing team has made outstanding accomplishments thanks to the leadership of our sports teacher Kevin Lorenzo. The boxing and basketball teams that Kevin started at El Patojismo have 30 participants practicing boxing and 15 participants playing basketball; Some of the achievements the boxing team has accomplished these past months are: the participation of one of our students in an international continental championship that was held in Colombia, winning the third place and another participation in a international continental championship that was held in El Salvador. We won gold medals at national championships for basketball, and the team also participated in two municipal championships (feminine and masculine) where we won as well. We also had one victory in the district championship classification allowing us to move on to the regional games.

Witnessing how our students and teachers are able to reach their goals and dreams thanks to the existence of our project makes us stronger and gives us a lot of hope for the future . All of what we do would not be possible without your donations and constant support. Thank you for being part of the progress we have made regarding the social transformation of Jocotenango.