Child Aid - Building Brighter Futures

Speaking of special events, it’s not too late for you to organize one for the summer!! Really, what could be more fun than having a garage sale for your favorite charity? (Maybe a bowl-a-thon.) How about a fundraising dinner? Or a Barbeque for Books? If you do decide to do something like this, we can create a little web page for you like this or this.

And be sure to check out our events page from time to time (it’s under the Donate button, top right). Have a great summer! 

If you live in the Portland, Ore area, join us on a beautiful bike ride to support Child Aid’s rural librarian training program. The ride will take place on Sunday, September 20, in the idyllic countryside around Forest Grove, just west of Portland. We’ll ride through vineyards, forests and rolling hills, all for the sake of great cause: community libraries in Guatemala and helping children learn to read. There are three rides so peddlers of all levels and ages can participate: an 11 mile ride, a 30 mile ride and the 55 mile challenge ride. Read more about the ride and register online here. We hope to see you there!! 

Hogar “Tío Juan” (loosely, Uncle Juan’s Place) provides a welcome home to young Guatemalan boys and girls with no home of their own. During its 30 plus years, over 8,000 children have called Hogar “Tío Juan” their home. The home provides food, shelter and an excellent education.

Formerly homeless, these boy sare now in good hands and getting the education they deserve

The normal school day in Guatemala is from 7:30am until noon. The 400 residents at Tío Juan, however, attend classes from 8am to 5pm every day, including Saturday.  With this amount of classroom time, students work through two grades per year!  While this schedule provides the students with an excellent education, it also presents a problem.  Books in Guatemala are hard enough to come by, but even more so when your students are literally doing “double time”. 

Earlier this year Child Aid received a generous donation of books, including a good selection of math text books. We were able to make a generous donation of about 1,000 math books to Hogar Tío Juan.  Every year, K - 9, received a set of 40 text books along with accompanying workbooks.  They were thrilled to get some new books as the ones they’d been using were battered.  Like the children, I think the books have found a good home at Tío Juan. 

Child Aid works in depth with 14 communities in Guatemala, but we also assist dozens of other communities and organizations on varying levels, whether we’re providing teacher trainings or donating books. This book delivery to Hogar Tío Juan is just one example of how you, our donors, are helping us make a real impact on people’s lives. 

Child Aid’s first reading program was based in the library located in El Tejar, a few miles up the mountains from Antigua. The program, Adventures in Reading (Aventuras en Lectura)was designed to help school age kids engage in reading during their school year break. Since then Child Aid has continued to run Adventures in Reading during the school year break and has provided training to hundreds of rural librarians, helping them help children develop reading skills they’ll keep for life.

Children listen to a story during Adventures in Reading

The librarian trainings and Adventures in Reading program both promote reading as well. The library in El Tejar is a perfect example.  The librarians here visit three schools each week where they read books with students in 11 different classes. The nearly 400 children in these classes are currently reading a book by Ann Cameron called Colibri, a story about a Mayan child kidnapped from her parents in Guatemala City and her long journey back to her family. The children read a few chapters each week as a class. After the reading session, the librarians lead the students through activities that help the students develop better critical thinking skills and comprehension skills,  and encourage them to use their imagination.

The program has sparked in the students a great interest in reading. Teachers say the kids refer to the stories throughout the week in class. The students are also reading books on their own, partly because of the reading program, but also because the library now has open stacks and a lending program. This means the children can peruse the books and can borrow the ones they like and read them at home.

This is a stark contrast to many communities in Guatemala where books simply do not exist, where students don’t have the opportunity to develop comprehension skills for reading, or learn to enjoy books for pleasure. Through the efforts of Child Aid we are making a difference in many of these communities by providing materials, training, and support and helping children develop better reading skills and stay in school.

Norma Guzman, regional program coordinator, shows off the recently donated books that are heading to rural libraries

Antigua, Guatemala - Reference books like encyclopedias, atlases and other reference materials are extremely rare in rural Guatemala.  If a library does have a set of encyclopedias it is often outdated or incomplete. Child Aid recently received a generous donation from Bilingual Educational Services, Inc of 30 sets of Time Life encyclopedias focusing on different areas of science and geography.  Each set contains 52 volumes and will be a wonderful addition to libraries that have practically no reference materials whatsoever.  The donation also included a set of 6 mystery books or “scary books”, which seem to be a favorite of the children here.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been working in a library and a student comes in asking for a scary book, and goes away empty handed.  I am thrilled to be able to offer them not only one, but a series of six books to quench their thirst for this genre!

Children in Cabracan holding up recently arrived books

The Peace Corps has a strong presence in Guatemala and often works in remote areas that Child Aid does not have easy access to, primarily because we lack the resources, staff and time to get out to these extremely isolated areas. The aldeas (villages) out here have very few books, and the children face incredible difficulties in learning to read because of this. Recently, however, Peace Corps volunteers made the arduous journey from the mountainous village of Cabracan, where they’re working, and down to our warehouse in Chimaltenango to pick up a donation of over 1,000 books. They are using these books to make six sets of cajas viajeras, or traveling libraries. These books will reach villages that are inaccessible by roads, offering most of the children in them access to story books for the very first time.

girls working hard at CEDIN in El Tejar, Guatemala

Music, art, recreation, story hour and ample personal attention all help to create an environment for growth and development in a child’s life. These constructive outlets and activities are important for all children, but can be especially beneficial for children from extremely poor families, families which lack the time and resources to provide these outlets at home.

The Center for Holistic Education and Development (CEDIN), is a Child Aid partner in Guatemala and a very special Montessori-type preschool. Children who attend CEDIN come from a diverse background, but nearly all of them come from families that are so poor they cannot afford the costs associated with sending their children to school. Thanks in part to Child Aid donors, the children at CEDIN receive scholarships and can attend the school and learn to read at an early age. 

CEDIN has small classes with no more than 30 children per two teachers, meaning every child gets lots of personal attention. The teachers stay with the kids for their entire time at CEDIN so the teachers get to know the children very well. The children have the freedom to explore the world around them through songs, books, stories and games, and get to develop new skills that are important for their future growth through playing with games, acting out dramas, engaging with music and learning to draw and paint.

CEDIN looks like a fun place, and it is. But the personal stories that come with the child are not always fun. For example, Ivan is five years old and has faced incredible hardships at home. When Ivan came to CEDIN he was every bit the young rebel, letting out his inner frustrations by disrupting class, and at times even yelling at or threatening the other students and teachers. But because of CEDIN’s high teacher-student ratio and the methods of teaching, Ivan got a lot of positive attention. He was exposed to many constructive activities that enabled him to channel his emotions. He even had access to a psychologist, who has been able to coach the teachers on how to help Ivan channel his destructive behavior into constructive actions.

After a year and half in CEDIN, all the teachers and the psychologist conclude that Ivan is better adjusted. He has fun and gets along with his classmates. He no longer argues with the teachers, and he eagerly participates in new activities. While Ivan’s home life remains difficult, he has found a refuge and a place of growth and development in CEDIN, and this will help him succeed in school in the years to come. Without CEDIN, Ivan would never learn to read, wouldn’t be in school and would likely have no chance at a future beyond one of extreme poverty. 

Teachers discussing active reading at a teacher training workshop

Teacher Training is a key component of Child Aid’s programs in Guatemala, a country where most rural teachers have only the equivalent of a high school degree. Last week, a teacher approached Elba Arroyo, one of Child Aid’s regional coordinators who was assisting a librarian at the Melotto School, and asked her what is involved in getting teacher training at another school. Like many teachers in Guatemala the teacher works in two different schools at the same time, teaching in the morning at a primary school and in the afternoon at a middle school.

Reading program in action at Melotto School

The teacher told Elba how affective the training has been for her and for her students. She said that she appreciated the tools she was given to promote reading with her students and that her students have asked for reading time everyday since the she began implementing what she learned in the workshops. Considering the fact that most classrooms in rural Guatemala lack story books entirely, this is a huge step. The teacher also commented on how much she appreciates having the library at Melotto; without it, she said, she would not be able to provide storybooks to the kids each day (most of the books in Melotto’s library were donated by supporters of Child Aid).

The teacher told her colleagues in the afternoon school about the response of the students in her morning school (Melotto), and they have been asking how they can participate in the trainings. This is good news for Child Aid on many counts. We certainly believe that our workshops can make a difference in the lives of both teachers and students, but it takes implementation to make that happen. To hear that teachers are telling others about the material and skills they learn, and that other teachers want the same training is tremendously motivating to us.

Teachers at a Child Aid training reading Dora La Exploradora

This actually is not an isolated case. We have had several teachers tell us that colleagues at other schools want the training. The difficulty for us is to decide where and how to expand our workshops in the next year. The strain of resources combined with the hard-to-reach rural locations, and the intensity of the year long training (our training consists of 3 school-wide workshops and six individual follow-up sessions with each teacher) makes it necessary to be very strategic in choosing new schools to work in. We also want to work through local libraries so that the teachers and students have resources to draw upon to implement the workshop materials. 

Another way new teachers are hearing about Child Aid is through university classes. Several of the primary teachers who want to become middle school or high school teachers take university classes in the evenings or weekends. We have had two of these teachers tell us that they have made presentations in their classes about the reading promotion techniques they have learned in our workshops. They have told us that other students have asked if we could come to the class and do our workshop for them.

We are always thrilled to hear of new inquiries about the workshops, but what really motivates us is hearing how the children are responding to the materials. The same teacher that asked Elba if we could work with her other school told Elba that her own daughter has now sparked an interest in reading (she is a student at Melotto, but in another class). She talks almost daily about the stories she is reading and has even begun bringing books home to read. None of this would have been possible a few years ago. Because Child Aid supporters have made it possible for us to invest time, money and resources in the Melotto school over the last several years, change is taking place and children and teachers are developing skills they did not have before – and these make a huge difference in their lives.