Orphans and Widows
When parents die, the children left behind face daily hardships in order to survive. In this region of abject poverty, children who lose their father (typically the family’s primary earner) or worse, both parents, suffer the greatest adversity. In the area Adopt-a-Village serves, there is no government, church, or aid agency to provide food. For these orphans, chronic malnutrition is guaranteed. Orphaned children begin working in the fields at the age of six. Few have shoes or decent clothing, and their poverty keeps them from attending school. Grandparents—long finished with raising their own children and struggling to survive themselves—are little able to care for the children. Mothers left to support several children on their own are forced to take up their deceased husbands’ machetes, gather their children, and seek manual labor on coffee farms. When no work is available, desperate mothers 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.
Adopt-a-Village’s Widows and Orphans Program was created to help these children survive. We deliver emergency food, such as corn, as well as clothing and school supplies to the children and their care-givers. In some cases, thanks to the generosity of AAV donors, we have been able to replace the mud-floor homes in which many of these families live with sturdier wood structures.
We are currently seeking ways to help widowed mothers become economically self-sufficient, such as Juana Alonzo, as shown in our photo, who crochets and sells these colorful bags. Juana is the sole support of her family; a blind sister, a 25-year old son, handicapped by polio with no use of his legs, and a teen-age boy who she is supporting while he attends school.
Village women learn how to make "green" compost
A new sustainable mini-farming program recently launched by Adopt-a-Village is helping widowed and single mothers to grow food for their children. Families without a father, the traditional breadwinner, suffer the most from chronic malnutrition. The program trains how to create organic compost and vegetable beds for highest production, information on the vegetables containing the highest nutritional value, and how to harvest seeds. Most orphans and single-parent children in this region suffer child development issues and neurological damage which inhibits learning and their ability to work effectively when they become adults. The damage is irreversible. This program that promotes good nutrition can change this for the bettert.
Adopt-a-Village in Guatemala regularly purchases 100 lb. sacks of corn, (the staple from which the Mayan make their tortillas) and delivers them to orphaned children and their caretakers. ( Here, the girls hold out their sack open to catch the corn being poured into it).
How You Can Help
You can make a donation of any size to support the Widows and Orphans program, or select a designated amount to purchase corn, beans, clothes and/or school supplies. Click here to donate now.
