Planting fruit trees for Guatemalan families

Last month, the Fruit Tree Planting Foundation successfully implemented our 2021 fruit tree planting and distribution project with our partners at Casa Guatemala!

This project planted 277 total fruit trees for vulnerable low-income children and their families in the Izabal department of Guatemala, an area recently devastated by flooding. The project benefited from trees grown in a high-quality local nursery that provides a wide variety of unique and locally adapted fruit trees, including sapote, starfruit, jaboticaba, mandarin, achacha, Persian lime, soursop, avocado, breadfruit, longan, mango, and lychee, allowing families access to a great diversity of fruits. Trees were planted at three schools along the Rio Dulce River in order to benefit children that live in cases of extreme poverty and in which chronic malnutrition is among the highest in the world. Additionally, workshops were held and trees distributed to every household in the village of Las Brisas and to the staff of Casa Guatemala in order to provide long-term, sustainable nourishment for children and families while simultaneously protecting this environmentally fragile region.

Our friends at Casa Guatemala are really excited to incorporate tree planting into their curriculum. Our educator Hector Montenegro held a well-attended half-day teaching workshop on how environmental education and activism can be incorporated into lesson plans using social-emotional learning techniques. This makes the trees a valuable educational asset for the students and school.

The local community and distribution participants were also very engaged and enthusiastic about the project. As Hector Chochum, Vice Mayor of Las Brisas, said to our team: “Thank you very much to everyone that has donated on behalf of my community Las Brisas...for my part, I am very grateful to you. Thank you as well to the volunteers who have given us instructions on how to plant these young trees. I didn’t know how to plant the tree at the correct level, to add compost to the top … [in the past] we just dug a hole and placed it in. So now, we have the skills to plant correctly, and we are going to take advantage of the fruit. One more time, thank you very much for the support you have given us.”

On behalf of all of us, thank you for supporting this important work. FTPF is already making plans to return and continue spreading the fruit tree weath in this region of Guatemala next year, so please consider making a donation towards this effort today!