To be an orphan in Guatemala

To be an orphan in this part of the world is a child’s greatest adversity. When parents die, their children suddenly find themselves at the edge of an emotional precipice; their daily need to survive becomes a never-ending dread, their future fearful.

Some orphans may go to live with elderly grandparents or relatives. Other children are fortunate to still have a living mother. In either case, their poverty is extreme and their circumstances desperate. They never know if they will be fed the next day or if one of them will fall ill and die for lack of money to pay for distant medical care.

In the area Adopt-a-Village serves, there is no government, or even church, to provide food; for orphans, malnutrition and suffering are guaranteed. These children work in the fields from the tender age of six; few have shoes, clothing is worn and ragged, and their poverty keeps them from attending school.

Who takes care of them?

Grandparents—long finished with raising their own children and struggling to survive themselves— are little able to care for the children. Left with the burden of supporting several children on their own, mothers have no marketable skills to do so. Such a mother must take up her deceased husband’s machete, gather her children, sometimes carrying a small youngster on her back, and seek manual labor on coffee farms. When no such work is available, some mothers, out of sheer desperation, entrust their children to neighbors, migrate to Mexico or a distant part of Guatemala, and toil for months in the fields. Their children are left behind with the fear and uncertainty of never seeing their mothers again.

 

How you can help

Adopt-a-Village manages a special program to help orphaned children. We seek ways to aid the family to become economically self-sufficient, thus bringing pride as well as income to the family. For instance, we have implemented a chicken project in which money from the sale of eggs helps to put food on the table. The assistance and encouragement the program provides help mothers to remain at home with their children.

When Adopt-a-Village has funds available, we purchase and deliver emergency food, such as corn, the Maya’s dietary mainstay. As well as food, the children need clothing and school supplies. The ramshackle huts in which they live have no electricity, running water, and almost no furniture; family members sleep on bare planks. When it rains, water floods through leaking roofs and flimsy walls constructed from tree and palm branches, turning their dirt floors into pools of mud.

Please help these desperate children. Please reach out to them with your heart and with your generosity.

How to Help