Child Aid - Building Brighter Futures

At five and seven years old,  Joselyn and Karen Guarchaj already face the sad possibility of living lives of extreme poverty, just as their family has for generations. But thanks to Child Aid and its supporters, the two sisters also face another possibility: a future in which they know how to read and possess the education they need to lift themselves from poverty. That opportunity is one that their parent’s never had.

Joselyn and Karen Guarchaj (at right) are second-year participants in Child Aid’s school-break reading program.

Joselyn and Karen are participants in Child Aid’s Reading for Life literacy program. Thanks to the program, they now have a fully stocked library in their village and a full-time librarian, trained by Child Aid. Through the program, all of the teachers in their village are receiving training so that they can learn how to teach reading more effectively. (As throughout Guatemala, most of the teachers in their village are young and have little training beyond what they received in high school.) 

Outside of the school year, Joselyn and Karen also have access to a school-break reading program called Adventures in Reading.  Child Aid created this program to keep children engaged in reading activities during Guatemala’s three-month school break. The girls have participated in the program for two years in a row.

For Child Aid, improving literacy in a village like Joselyn’s and Karen’s goes far beyond delivering books and creating libraries. We do both of these and know they are critical components of an effective literacy program. But we also know that to truly improve literacy in a community that has never even had books, we must go further.

For this reason, we make long-term commitments to the villages where we work. We provide one-on-one training for teachers for a minimum of three years. We help communities identify, hire and train librarians from their own villages so we can foster local investment and ensure that the libraries we help create stay open to children every day. Reading for Life is a multifaceted program and, because of this, it works.

Joselyn and Karen could easily have faced a future where illiteracy and poverty were their only paths. But thanks to Reading for Life and Child Aid supporters, there are others.   

Before Child Aid brought Reading for Life to their village, these children in Guatemala had no access to books or reading programs. By helping them learn to read and succeed in school, Child Aid provides children opportunity and the hope for a better future.

This week is National Library Week! To celebrate, help Child Aid create better libraries for some of Guatemala’s poorest children.

In the United States, it’s easy to take libraries for granted. They are free, welcoming public spaces where children can learn, study, and of course, borrow great books. Many libraries offer free classes and homework help, provide community resources, host author readings and advertise local events. Imagine your community without a library.

Kids reading new books in the library Child Aid helped create in the town of Las Canoas. Thanks to our donors we helped the community build new shelving and furniture.

In most rural impoverished villages in Guatemala, libraries are extremely rare and high-quality educational resources are even less common. Child Aid works to change this. We help indigenous communities create libraries that provide access to books and reading programs for local children. Child Aid stocks these libraries with new children’s books and helps librarians establish after-school and summer reading programs. With these new opportunities children finally have access to the resources and materials that will help them advance educationally. In a country where most Mayan children drop out of school by 3rd grade, these opportunities can be the stepping stones needed to escape a life of poverty.

How can you celebrate National Library Week?

Donate to Child Aid. We will use your gift to bring libraries to rural Guatemalan towns for the first time ever.

Give a gift to Child Aid in honor of the librarian in your life, and we will send a tribute card.

Child Aid literacy programs do much more than help children learn to read. The literacy trainings we provide are transformative and empowering to librarians and teachers and have rippling effects across local communities.

Teachers and librarians learn skills and tools to implement effective reading programs, but they also gain personal confidence with these new abilities. Before participating in Child Aid trainings, Luis, a librarian in the community of Chicacao, had a fear of public speaking which gave him “cold hands.”  Now he says he has completely overcome this fear, enabling him to be a more effective educator.

Luis follows up with Claudia, a Child Aid trained teacher, in her classroom.

Other teachers echo the same sentiment expressed by Luis. “I used to be afraid to try new things or to speak up for what I wanted,” says Flor de Maria, “but now I have the courage and skills to be a better leader.” Flor was a teacher who was recently promoted to school director in her community of Chicacao. She travels to nearby communities to promote reading and train other teachers.

Flor de Maria presents the new Child Aid training manual to a group of teachers and librarians.

After participating in Child Aid trainings, many teachers and librarians are taking an increasingly active role in their communities, not just in their schools. These teachers and librarians are becoming more vocal community advocates, such as the librarians of Pasaq. (Read previous story about a student in Pasaq here.) After learning of an upcoming meeting with the regional school superintendent, all three community librarians wanted to attend in order to express their opinions and show their support for Child Aid literacy programs. One of the librarians said, “I feel better equipped and motivated to participate in the development of my community through education.”

Child Aid’s literacy programs not only teach young students essential skills, but they help develop inspired local leaders who are dedicated to community transformation through education.

Juan Byron Guarchaj (age 10) lives in the rural town of Pasaq, Guatemala.  He goes to school in the morning and spends his afternoons harvesting coffee or bananas to earn money for his family.  He chops firewood in the mountains and carries it into town in giant bundles on his back.  Around dusk, he spends an hour or two in the library that Child Aid helped create last year. 

After attending Child Aid’s summer reading program, Juan aspires to become a doctor.

In November of 2010, during Guatemala’s three month school break, Juan participated in Pasaq’s second Adventures in Reading program, which helped more than 25 local children work on their reading skills while school was out.  “I want to be a doctor,” said Juan, “and I want to do Adventures in Reading again this year.”  He’s not alone: Parents in 20 towns and villages enrolled a total of 1,605 children in Adventures in Reading last year.  This is double the number of children who participated in the program the year before.  We are thrilled with the success of this program and glad parents are taking an active role in our work.

With the New Year well upon us, we want to pause and thank you for everything you helped us achieve in 2010.  Last year, we served more children than ever before. In Guatemala, 7,414 kids from 26 communities participated in Child Aid literacy programs and, in Mexico, we treated and/or tested more than 2,600 impoverished children for hearing loss. 

Children in a remote classroom near Santa Lucía Utatlán, Guatemala, show off the new books they received through Child Aid’s Mobile Book Box program. These are the first usable books their classroom has had.

Thanks to generous donations from several US book publishers, we shipped more Spanish-language children’s books to Guatemala in 2010 than in any year in Child Aid’s history – 83,000 in all. Remote libraries and schools in over 50 towns and villages have already received books, and we plan to distribute the remaining materials throughout the first half of 2011. Through Child Aid’s Reading for Life literacy program, we ensure they are used regularly by children in their homes and as part of Child Aid reading programs.

Many of our supporters chipped in last year when they heard the the story about Xojolá, the remote indigenous community where teachers asked us to bring Reading for Life to their village.  By the end of 2010 we raised $18,000 for the community and began work on the library immediately.  We delivered hundreds of children’s books and will soon start literacy training for a new librarian and 21 local teachers. Our work in Xojolá is going extremely well. Check back soon for updates.

These are only a few of our accomplishments from last year. We couldn’t have done this without your support.

For the past 12 years, beginning when he retired from his teaching position at a local school in Tecpán, Guatemala, Don Ramón has been doing everything he can to make his local library a better resource for children. Year after year, he requested help from the mayor’s office. He pounded on embassy doors in Guatemala City. He handwrote letters to international organizations and asked local residents to donate any books they had.

Each year, Don Ramón accomplished a little more: a bigger room, a set of encyclopedias, a new shelf. But after more than a decade of hard work, he still lacked one key ingredient: books for children.

Don Ramón, inside the library he helped bring to Tecpán.

That changed in 2010, after Child Aid met with Don Ramón and local teachers, and agreed to begin Child Aid’s Reading for Life program in Tecpán. We provided hundreds of children’s books for the library and hired a local carpenter to build colorful wooden furniture so the children had a place to sit and read. We provided training for the two librarians and helped them start story hours for the children. We also provided literacy training to 34 local teachers – most of whom had never stepped foot in the library.

Books, physical improvements and training are the key components of Reading for Life. The fourth is people like Don Ramón, who exemplifies our belief that people – not projects – are the best way to affect lasting change.

By working with Don Ramón to promote and improve the library, and by training local teachers and librarians, we help ensure local commitment to literacy. The result is more teachers reading to children, more children in the library, and more kids reading books. In the country with the lowest literacy rates in Latin America, that’s the result we want.

We post a lot of photos of the insides of libraries we help create. They tend to be bright, colorful, clean places that create an atmosphere where children want to read. What these photos don’t show are the day-to-day realities children face just outside those walls. Here are a few photos of the communities of Palá and Xojolá which illustrate how people live in rural Guatemala and the need children have for greater opportunities. Child Aid begins work in both towns this year to help the communities implement our childhood literacy programs.

Typical home in Palá with firewood stacked outside.

Many Guatemalans must collect firewood from afar to fuel their cooking stoves, such as this man in Xojolá.

Storefront and house made of adobe bricks in Palá.

In the rural community of Xojolá, where Child Aid plans to begin work this year, the school director, Alejandro Guarchaj Mas, shared his thoughts with us about his community’s need for educational improvement. Mr. Guarchaj explained that without substantial support from the government, their community has been left without adequate resources in their schools. (To put this into perspective, Guatemala spends $133 per year per primary grade student as compared to $10,548 spent in the U.S.)

Due to economic circumstances, many children must work to help their families.

“We need the program Child Aid offers,” he said. “There is not enough work in our communities. The children have to learn how to do what we do, but better. With better education, the children here will be able to develop new and effective ways to grow, produce, and sell coffee, bananas, and artesanía,” without leaving their communities.

This year, thanks to our donors, Child Aid will begin our reading program in Xojolá and help the community create its first public library ever. For the community’s children, this will mean greater educational opportunity, and for Mr. Guarchaj, it will be the realization of a dream.

Thanks to everyone who supported our literacy programs in Xojolá. We will have more updates about their progress soon.

Congratulations to the 25 students who completed Child Aid’s Reading for Life Program! Just last week, these kids received diplomas from Child Aid literacy trainers, recognizing all their hard work and dedication to reading. What better way to spend vacation than reading! Before Child Aid’s Reading for Life program, these kids had virtually no access to books or literacy programs in their rural Guatemalan community of Tzumpango.

Three excited Reading for Life graduates at the library in Tzumpango.

Now they are even more excited, capable readers than before, with a library in their own town. Child Aid began working in Tzumpango a few years ago and has seen a huge growth in attendance at the library and increased interest in our literacy programs. See previous blog posting for more information about Child Aid’s work in this community.

Greetings from Guatemala!

What a difference time, training and leadership makes.

A few years ago the library in Tzumpango, Guatemala was much like any municipal library in the country. It had a few well-guarded books and almost no children’s books. Lending practices were restricted to approved teachers and for students only under very strict guidelines. In other words, few books were ever accessible for children to read.

Things are different now.

After three years of Child Aid trainings, head librarian Yolanda Taquiej has made tremendous changes.

Yolanda, the community’s librarian, in front of the newly renovated children’s library.

Yolanda’s first goal was to bring books to children by creating a lending program. Child Aid donated over 150 new Spanish-language story books and she began making a full inventory of their collection by cataloging the books using the Dewey Decimal System. Then she began loaning books, a practice which is practically non-existent in Guatemala. The library now loans out around 175 books a month, and has not lost a single book! Yolanda also implemented Child Aid’s Hour of Reading program to promote better reading skills for the community’s children. This year a small group of students have been coming to the library once a week to read a book together.

She asked for the Mayor’s approval to renovate a small community building to be used as a Rincón Infantil (Children’s Corner). The Mayor agreed and the community cleaned and painted the building, repaired the roof, and set up bookshelves. The community is inaugurating the space by implementing Child Aid’s Adventures in Reading, a school-year break program that helps children develop better reading skills. Thirty kids now participate in this program every day.

Child Aid trainer works with librarian sorting new books.

When Yolanda began working in the library there were about 50 users a day. Now over 200 users come to the library every day to read books and to participate in Child Aid’s reading programs. These are huge strides in a community that just a few years ago had an inaccessible library and no literacy programs.

This is a great example of how committed individuals in a community can create better learning opportunities for their children when given support, resources and materials they need. Thanks to Child Aid’s donors for helping make this possible for Tzumpango and many other communities.