Search results for: guatemala

Avivara was the recipient of a Foundation Beyond Belief small grant last quarter. Avivara’s Executive Director Gary Teale gave us this report about how the grant will help them improve education in rural Guatemala.

Avivara is very grateful to Foundations Beyond Belief and its donors for their generous contribution of $1,500 to our programs to improve the access to and quality of education in poverty-impacted rural villages in the Central and Northwestern Highlands of Guatemala.

The money donated will be used to help Avivara conduct writing workshops for the students and teachers in the rural public schools, and publish Volume III of Tenemos Historias Para Contar, an anthology of stories written by the students taken from the oral traditions of their villages. These anthologies are used to promote reading and writing skills among the students while also being a record of their indigenous oral traditions and village life.

Gary Teale, Executive Director
Avivara

First-quarter education beneficiary Roots & Wings International gave us this report about how they are using the funds contributed by members of Foundation Beyond Belief.

Thanks to our partnership with Foundation Beyond Belief, Roots & Wings International received $3,390 in donations during the first quarter of 2011. This money will go a long way toward providing higher education to the children of indigenous Guatemalan coffee farmers. For these families, most of whom subsist on about $2 a day, providing a college education for their children under normal circumstances would be nearly impossible. Now, we’ll be able to make the impossible possible. Not only will we be able to provide scholarships to new students but continue to support those students currently in our scholarship program as well. Here are just a few of our current scholars:

• Manuela Tambriz Ixtos is currently studying pedagogy at university and hopes to become a teacher at the RWI university preparatory school, which we hope to have open by 2012.
• Pascual Marroquín Guarchaj is studying social work, in the hope of returning home and working with the youth of his community to curb the rise of gang activity.
• Miguel Lomberto Sohom wants to become the first indigenous nurse in his village, which has been historically staffed by nurses from large cities. Miguel is currently studying at university to achieve this goal.

Roots and Wings International is grateful for the support of Foundation Beyond Belief. As Epictetus once said, “Only the educated are free.” Roots and Wings International is committed to helping Guatemala’s indigenous youth attain freedom from poverty through education, and we could not do it without your help.

Erik Swanson
Executive Director and Founder
Roots & Wings International

Roots & Wings International, our current Education beneficiary, continues to bring educational opportunities to the indigenous poor of Guatemala through university scholarships, computer literacy programs, and after-school tutoring.

Twelve-year-old Manuela Tambríz Chox participates in RWI’s computer literacy training and after-school tutoring program. In Guatemala, 60 percent of the population does not graduate from elementary school, so RWI has designed these programs to help children aged 5 to 11 remain in school and successfully complete elementary school.

Manuela’s father Manuel works as an agricultural laborer, while her mother María works in housekeeping. Although her parents earn less than US $2 per day, they have made the commitment to enroll Manuela in school with the hope that an education will provide their daughter with a more promising future. Manuela is a hard-working fifth-grader who aspires to be a doctor one day.

RWI includes a specific non-sectarian statement on its website: “Roots & Wings Int’l is not affiliated with any church or political organization, and we do not promote any religious or ideological perspective. Our goal is to encourage students to develop their own world view based in their own culture and life experience” — a perfect fit for Foundation Beyond Belief.

Learn more about RWI:

Read More