Child Aid - Building Brighter Futures

Guatemala has the lowest literacy rate in Latin America. Less than 10% of children enrolled finish high school. Child Aid is working to change that. 

Check out this great new video that two of our supporters helped us make. Karena O’Riordan ran around Guatemala for days filming numerous Child Aid libraries and interviewing parents, teachers and librarians. John Kin, a producer at Oregon Public Broadcasting and a longtime supporter of Child Aid, helped us with the idea and put in loads of hours combing through Karena’s footage and putting this video together.

Not only is this a great video (Don’t you agree?), but it’s a perfect example of how our supporters make it possible for us to do things like this without having to spend a bunch of money. That means more money goes to the Guatemalan and Mexican children who need it.

Big thanks to both John and Karena for this! Let us know what you think of the video - and please forward it to your friends!

Anyplace is a good place to brush your teeth! This is a group of primary school kids brushing up beside the road, just below a school in Las Canoas Altas, a little town in the Lago Atitlán region. Most public schools have a tooth brushing program because oral hygiene in rural homes hardly exists. At CEDIN, the Montessori-type preschool in El Tejar, the kids gather around the central courtyard every morning to brush their teeth together. And they really go at it! I know, oral hygiene isn’t necessarily a Child Aid program – this just caught my eye that day, and the kids were having so much fun I had to stop and take a picture.

Finally, the books arrived to the Child Aid bodega in Guatemala!! It was a long haul, but our program coordinator, John van Keppel and Child Aid partner Rigoberto Zamora (of PROBIGUA) got them out after they were held up in port for over a month. The shipment of donated books (over $850K worth!) were trucked up from Puerto Barrios on the coast and arrived the bodega at 5am on Saturday, Feb 21. About 20 middle school boys from Pedro Molina school helped us unload the truck, box by box. Afterward we celebrated with soft drinks and chatted about cowboys, school and cell phones.

Now, John and Kristen Anderson (our volunteer coordinator) are going through the mountain of books and getting them ready for distribution to the many community libraries and teachers we work with. Spanish textbooks and educational materials will go to needy classrooms, storybooks will go to libraries, and more and more children will be able to check out books and take them home to read with (or to!) their families. 

Huge thanks to Hoopoe Books and International Book Project for the book donations and to our donors who make it possible to ship them down and get them in the hands of the children who need them. You can read more about Child Aid’s book distributions here.

Whew! Bob Vesely (our executive director) and I recently returned from a 10-day trip to Guatemala. It was filled with emotions: the excitement of seeing kids reading the children’s books we’ve donated; the joy of seeing our reading programs inspire children to want to read more; and the sadness of walking through some primary schools that are so impoverished they lack books entirely.

Here’s a photo of two first grade girls from a school in Las Canoas, above Lago Atitlán. I spoke with a fourth grade teacher at Las Canoas who told me that of the 23 students in his classroom, only four could really read well. By working with Las Canoas, getting our reading programs into the library and more books into hands of the children, we hope that these two girls enter fourth grade knowing how to read. And loving it!