Child Aid - Building Brighter Futures

Dee and Lee Carlson, La Conner Rotary Club members, help unpack and sort books before a delivery.

This year, the Rotary Club of La Conner, Washington helped raise funds for Child Aid so we could send 53,000 children’s books to Guatemala, and distribute them to over 60 rural communities. Once the books arrived in Guatemala, a group of Rotary volunteers from the La Conner club traveled to the country to help with sorting and cataloging in one of the communities that received books. Here are few pictures of the volunteers unloading books and some of the first kids to read them!

Children in Patzicia reading newly delivered books.

We’re able reach as many kids and communities as we do because of generous support from groups and organizations in the U.S. Huge thanks to La Conner Rotary! The club is helping us bring Spanish-language books to well over 10,000 children who never before had access to quality reading materials.

Bobbi Krebs-McMullen helps with the enormous task of organizing thousands of books that will make their way to communities in need.

Chores onstage at the Kenton Club

Friday night’s benefit show at Portland’s World Famous Kenton Club was not only a hootin’ good time (by 1am, it seemed like half the crowd was on stage dancing with the band!) it was a big success as well. The event raised $1,215 which will go directly to Las Canoas’ library.

Las Canoas is a small, extremely poor Kaqchikel-Maya community above Lago Atitlán in the Guatemalan Highlands. Most of the families here earn $100 to $200 a month working intermittently in agriculture or busing to nearby Panajachel to sell crafts or other goods to tourists. The school here is poorly funded, the classrooms lack books and the library recently closed for lack of funds. With the help of everyone involved with the Las Canoas benefit, Child Aid is working to reopen the library, stock it with age-appropriate books for the children, provide training for a new librarian and the local teachers and start reading programs.

Portland musician and music educator Ivy Ross set the whole thing up after she spent a month volunteering and traveling in Guatemala. We owe her a huge thanks!

And then there were the bands: Pink Widower, Chores and Tine! They took time out of busy schedules and rocked the Kenton Club free of charge, bringing in loads of fans who donated at the door to support Las Canoas. Help us thank them for their support by checking out their My Space pages and buying their CDs! We also owe a big, big thanks to the Kenton Club itself, which donated 15% of the bar tab to the cause. Now that’s a bar with returning to! And of course, thank you to each and every one of you who made it to the club and donated to the benefit. All of us at Child Aid - not to mention the community of Las Canoas - appreciate your support tremendously!

Thank you!!!!!!

Pink Widower and their mighty horn section

(And by the way, if you’d like to organize a benefit or special event for Child Aid, we certainly could use your help! Just contact us .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)or call 503-223-3008. The Kenton Club show was a great community builder and is yet another example of what people can make happen for people.)

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!