Child Aid - Building Brighter Futures

Today is World Literacy Day, and 350 children in Xojolá need your help.

A typical home in Xojolá, Guatemala

Last week, a representative from Xojolá, a tiny K’iche’ community in the Guatemalan Highlands, approached Child Aid for the fourth time this year. He explained the situation again:

They have no library. Their tiny school is completely devoid of reading material. Books are impossible to obtain. The teachers want to learn the teaching techniques that Child Aid has provided to neighboring communities. Even the children who make it to sixth grade lack the academic base they need to succeed in the middle school located an hour’s walk away.

A handwritten petition for Child Aid’s support, signed and fingerprinted by Xojolá‘s teachers, its mayor and several community leaders.

The photo you see at right is a handwritten petition, signed and fingerprinted by the village’s teachers, its mayor and its community leaders. The town has cleared a small building and designated it as a library. Now they just need Child Aid’s support - and you.

The commitment and drive that we’ve seen from people in Xojolá is precisely what we look for when partnering with a community. We do not want to let this opportunity - these bright young children - fall by the wayside. But we need your help.

Here’s the situation: Child Aid must raise an additional $18,000 to bring Reading for Life to Xojolá. As soon as we raise it, we will:

• Help Xojolá create a community library.
• Stock the new library with quality children’s books.
• Help the town hire and train a librarian.
• Help the librarian start reading programs for Xojolá‘s children.
• Provide ongoing literacy training to the village’s 14 teachers.
• Provide books and teaching materials for the teachers in Xojolá.

Again, we can only do this with your support. Please donate to Child Aid today so we can help the community of Xojolá build brighter futures for its children.

Thank you for your help!

Sam Hendricks
Executive Director

Xojolá‘s mayor and several teachers stand outside the building they hope becomes the community’s first library.

A teacher from Xojolá takes a Child Aid staff librarian to the community to meet with other teachers.

Background: Rural schools and libraries in Guatemala are desperate for books, but for over a month, a 40-foot container, with 53,000 donated children’s books inside, has been stuck in customs. The books are destined for over 50 communities throughout the highlands. Normally Child Aid’s books clear customs quickly, but, due to a bureaucratic tangle,  this shipment has been held up.

Update: John van Keppel, our program coordinator in Guatemala, has been pounding on doors around Antigua and the capital, involving Rotary members, politicians, teachers and high level government officials. He finally met with the head of Guatemala’s tax authority, who has promised to get them out. 

Earlier this year, Child Aid shipped a 20-foot container of children’s books to Guatemala. In this photo, taken in Santa Rosa, children choose from a stack of books we donated to their school. Before these books arrived, their teacher had to use a newspaper to teach the kids to read.

What Now: Once the books clear customs, Child Aid will begin sorting and distribution. Rotary volunteers from La Conner and Anacortes, Washington, are traveling to Guatemala to help us distribute the books to several towns and villages. 

While the tangle has kept the books out of the hands of kids who need them, the delay has had silver lining. A high-level government official has gotten personally involved and has promised to help usher future Child Aid book shipments through customs quickly. He knows the tremendous need for the books in rural Guatemala.

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. 

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.

Kristen Anderson, our program coordinator in Guatemala, recently emailed the office here in Portland about the community of Granados. Peace Corps volunteers are working there to set up a community library, and Child Aid was able to assist them by donating books for the project. The really exciting part is this: a volunteer at the Granados library just contacted us to find out how the two librarians could attend a Child Aid Librarian Training. Obviously, books are a fundamental part of our programs. But real and lasting impact occurs not through book delivery alone, but when you provide training and technical support to librarians so they can establish book-lending programs and reading programs. These are the elements that really bring books to life for children and make them accessible to the entire community. It’d be great if this works out. If it does, the entire school (or schools) may end up with reading programs in their classrooms – all part of the process. We’ll see!