Child Aid - Building Brighter Futures

We are very proud to announce that Portland Roasting is supporting Child Aid’s literacy work in Guatemala this season! Every time Portland Roasting sells a bag of its special Guatemalan Holiday Blend, it will donate $1 to Child Aid!

This means that every time you buy a bag of Guatemalan Holiday Blend coffee, you support Child Aid. The money raised will help fund Child Aid’s Reading for Life program in the coffee producing communities of Pasaq, Xojolá, Palá and Chicacao. Since you’ll be getting a pound of the city’s best coffee in the process, everyone wins!

So where do you get it? Buy it online here, or pick up a bag at one of the following Portland-area stores:

Whole Foods
Lamb’s Garden Home
Zupans
Sheridan’s Fruit Company
Lillian’s Natural Marketplace
Lamb’s at Stroheckers
Made in Oregon

Our hugest thanks to everyone at Portland Roasting!

This Saturday, November 20th, join Child Aid by observing Universal Children’s Day. This commemoration marks the day on which the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of the Child in 1959 and the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989. This convention remains the most widely ratified human rights treaty in the world, signed by 193 states. It promotes the rights and general well-being of children all over the world, including “the right of the child to education” and urges countries to “encourage the production and dissemination of children’s books.”

Read the entire convention here (Right Click to Download PDF Version)

Despite this world-wide acknowledgment of the importance of children, they remain one of the most vulnerable populations. Many live in extreme poverty without access to the most basic services, including education. Guatemala is no exception. In Guatemala, most children are born into poverty and the country has the lowest literacy rate in Latin America. This is why Child Aid is dedicated to expanding educational opportunity for children as a means to alleviate poverty in Guatemala. Our literacy programs reach thousands of indigenous Guatemalan children who lack access to books and libraries. With your support we can help many more. Please take this day to reflect with us on the importance of children in your life and how you might help those children less fortunate. Your support can transform lives.

Donate Here.

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.

Last year, in the highland community of Pasaq, Guatemala, second-grade teacher Andres Choc noticed a remarkable student with a keen interest and ability in reading. After being impressed by the student’s enthusiasm and skill, Andres asked the student where he had learned to read so well. The student replied he had spent the school break participating in Adventures in Reading, a literacy program at his local library created by Child Aid.

Andres Choc, pictured with his family, is helping bring Reading for Life to Xojola.

This is how Andres’s interest in Child Aid began. Soon after, he attended a Child Aid teacher training in Pasaq and borrowed books from their library to bring home to his own children in the neighboring community of Xojolá, where there is no library. Seeing the affects of the literacy programs in Pasaq and the response from his own children, Andres became determined to bring the same resources to his community. He arranged meetings with local and school leaders and finally presented Child Aid with a formal request.

Since August, a volunteer librarian from the community has attended various Child Aid trainings, visited the library in Pasaq and is preparing to lead literacy programs for the community’s new library. Also, with support from the mayor, community members have renovated a storage room for the children’s reading room. At our U.S. office in Portland, we have been working hard to raise funds to open the library and begin our literacy program in January. (For more details on the project see previous blog posting.)

Kids reading new books in Xojola.

We were thrilled to see these concrete achievements in the performance of students who participate in Child Aid’s literacy programs, and this great example of how our programs are expanding to new communities. And like Andres, we want to bring the opportunity of literacy to his home of Xojolá. We still need to raise $9,000 and we hope you can help us reach that goal. Please donate here. Your contribution to this project will help to create readers like the exceptional student that motivated Andres to bring a library to Xojolá.

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.

We just received some photos from our Program Director in Guatemala, John van Keppel, of a celebration in one of the communities where Child Aid works. Yesterday, the Kaqchikel community of Las Canoas gathered to inaugurate new furniture, bookshelves and a computer for the library. Thanks to the Planet Wheeler Foundation, the kids now have tables to sit at, and newly delivered Child Aid books are on shelves low enough for them to reach. The Las Canoas librarian is cataloguing the books and will be using the new computer to help with the book-lending program.

During the celebration, students displayed exhibits outside each classroom showing the various reading techniques they learned in Child Aid workshops. Director of Development Danny Palmerlee was able to attend.  He described the community’s excitement in seeing teachers and students so involved in reading activities. The local school director has been very supportive of Child Aid’s work in Las Canoas, and teachers are regularly using the techniques they have learned. Many teachers, for example, are using the “Star Readers” charts (shown in a photo from John) to encourage reading, and such techniques have realized impressive results. Primary schools students have become more engaged in and enthusiastic about reading. Also, the librarian reports that, with more reading in classrooms, kids are using the library more than ever.

Danny Palmerlee mentioned that the Ministry of Education recently passed a law requiring every child in school to read five books per year. Within the schools where Child Aid works, however, teachers report that some students are reading five books per month. The entire school attended the event to show support for the library and reading programs, as did parents, community members, and the mayor of Las Canoas. Yesterday’s celebration was an excellent opportunity to see the results of and enthusiasm for Child Aid’s work.

Here’s an excellent and sad video showing how people in Guatemala are still struggling following the devasting Tropical Storm Agatha.

The United Nations just released its dense but highly informative State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples report. Throughout the report, the UN reiterates the fundamental importance of providing greater educational opportunities to indigenous children. For those without the time to hunker down and read all 250 pages of the report, here are a few excerpts that pertain specifically to Guatemala and education.

“Indigenous peoples also face huge disparities in terms of access to and quality of education and health. In Guatemala, for example, 53.5 per cent of indigenous young people aged 15-19 have not completed primary education, as compared to 32.2 per cent of non-indigenous youth. Although infant and child mortality has been steadily decreasing throughout Latin America over the last four decades, child mortality is still 70 per cent higher among indigenous children. Furthermore, malnutrition is twice as frequent among indigenous children in the region.

“Indigenous peoples also suffer from discrimination in terms of employment and income. According to the ILO, indigenous workers in Latin America make on average about half of what non-indigenous workers earn. Approximately 25-50 per cent of this income gap is “due to discrimination and non-observable characteristics, such as quality of schooling”.

“...in Guatemala, indigenous peoples’ poverty rates are 2.8 times higher than the rest of the population.”

“In Guatemala, only 54 per cent of indigenous girls are in school, compared with 71 per cent of indigenous boys. By age 16, only a quarter of indigenous girls are enrolled, compared with 45 per cent of boys.”

The World Bank has reported that “the rate of stunting [height/age] for Guatemala overall is 44 percent, but for indigenous children the rate is 58 percent, higher than either Yemen or Bangladesh, and almost twice the rate for non-indigenous children.

Read the entire report here

We have one chance and a deadline. Now we need you.

Child Aid recently received a $100,000 matching challenge pledge. If we can raise that amount from our individual supporters between now and December 31, Child Aid will earn an additional $100,000. If we don’t make it, we lose it!

Educating a child is the best way to provide her with a path out of poverty. Thanks to this matching pledge, the impact of whatever you give gets doubled.

Your gift this season is critical. Your support and this historic pledge will help us continue to bring critical educational programs and health services to thousands of children in Guatemala and southern Mexico.

Thank you for your support! Please donate here.

Once again, childhood malnutrition in Guatemala has made international headlines (read Miami Herald story here). The drought in Jalapa department, the worst in 30 years, has depleted food supplies and worsened an already existing food shortage among a huge sector of Guatemala’s rural poor.

We see the effects of malnutrition on children in Guatemala ever day, and this excellent video makes it very clear just how bad the situation has gotten. But the same video provides a serious reminder that “food alone is not enough to change the fundamental economic and social problems at the root of Guatemala’s hidden malnutrition.”

For us, this is further reassurance that, even amidst a food shortage, we’re doing exactly what needs to be done. At Child Aid, we’re in it for the long run. Our mission is to help poor Mayan children get the education they deserve so they have greater opportunities to provide for themselves and their families. And we need your help to do this!