Adopt-a-Village in Guatemala

School kids have just finished their three-month stint laboring in the coffee fields and are now back in school.  Picking coffee means more that taking the bean off the bush.  It means keep a wary eye on the ground at the same time for poisonous snakes.   And it means hauling heavy loads of produce on young backs to the scales before they can receive a few pennies for their hard day’s labor.  I remember as an 11-year-old, picking raspberries and strawberries for pay during my school break.  It didn’t kill me, but neither did I have to carry 100-lbs sacks of produce on my back or hope that a lethal snake-bike wouldn’t finish me off, like these kids do.

The stark fact is, child labor proliferates in this region of Guatemala much as it did in the Dickens-era, 200 years ago. In fact, one particularly unethical farmer, who owns a large coffee farm in an Adopt-a-Village sponsor village—gotten by ill gains, as the story goes—pays children $1.20 to work from 7:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. (about one-sixth the national minimum wage). He gets away with it (and has for decades) because there is no government entity or children’s rights organization to protect children from his illegal practices.  Moreover, parents, desperate to see their families survive, need every quetzal in order to keep their children fed and thus encourage them to work these long hours.

These harsh demands on children make them become adults way too quickly.  It is for this reason, I am so grateful to our child sponsors.  I feel that those children who are lucky enough to have sponsors enter their lives, stay a little younger, a little longer.  Sponsors, through their caring letters and small gifts and occasional visits, remind them that they are indeed still children, not adults in child-size bodies.  I sincerely thank all of you who offer such children kindness and care through sponsorship