Adopt-a-Village in Guatemala

Our first graduation!  What better way to celebrate the 20^th anniversary of Adopt-a-Village?

Only the country’s violent October tropical storms threatened the schedule.  Three days before the ceremony, president Alvaro Colom issued a plea for people not to travel the flooded highways—many of them destroyed by landslides, and mountainsides still collapsing with the heavy rains.  “Travel only in an emergency,” was the edict.  AAV’s director, Frances Dixon, determined that attending the first graduation of the Mayan Center for Education definitely required travel, and after 3 ½ arduous days of re-routing and skirting blocked highways, she reached the isolated mountain school, drenched and muddy.

Strains of the marimba music lifted spirits (although not the rain) and signaled that the festivities were about to begin. The school’s colors, green for the mountains and gold for the jaguar that lives nearby, festooned the hall; students proudly presented themselves in their forest-hued shirts and gold satin cummerbunds; and all proudly posed for keepsake photos garbed in a traditional cap and gown.

The ceremony climaxed with smiles and tears as parents rose and stepped forward to embrace their children.  What were they thinking?  Long-held dreams were coming true for them in those joyful moments.  Education had been denied parents in their youth when they found themselves trapped in refuge for years in Mexico during the Guatemala civil war, but in these moments they could rejoice, watching their first children graduate.

Two years of dusk-to-dawn days spent by staff and students living and studying in a remote rainforest mountain campus had paid life-size dividends.   New doors were opening—some students were continuing on to university, others were taking jobs or preparing to begin small businesses, and a top student had won a teaching internship at the Center.

Best of all, students would be sharing their knowledge in their home villages.  Indeed, they had already introduced sustainable organic gardening skills to their families and neighbors, and seven nearby communities had benefited from the students’ instruction during school service projects.  “Train a student, transform a village”—this school motto had born fruit with the first graduation!  Their education had empowered them to create a powerful surge of change in their communities—a change ensuring nutritious food for a people suffering from one of the world’s highest rates of chronic child malnutrition.

Please share these joyful times with us.  You can assure the continuation of a better future for the Maya by giving a scholarship to a deserving student for the 2012 school year.

Give Now

Two extraordinary events occur when you give an Adopt-a-Village scholarship.  First, you change the course of one child’s life.  And then, you change the course of a community.

Our Mayan Center for Training and Education benefits worthy and impoverished students to improve their lives.  Additionally, through students’ community service, it benefits entire villages.  A scholarship is the key that opens doors to employment, professions, or university enrollment for a student.  But more—it is the key that empowers parents to transform their children’s debilitating hunger to good health.  By teaching our unique sustainable gardening methods, families are being helped to stem the chronic malnutrition rampant in their communities.

Guatemala has the 4th worst level of chronic child malnutrition in the world.  Lack of food impedes children from gaining a normal height and from growing strong and disease-resistant bodies; worst of all, it destines them to suffer irreversible brain damage.

Our training center is one of only three in Guatemala that offers accredited courses in sustainable organic vegetable-growing.  With a demonstration mini-farm fully operational and a nutritional health center under construction, we are now sending cadres of teachers and students to train families in surrounding villages.

Please become part of this life-giving force that will stop the chronic malnutrition and its deadly consequences for Mayan children.  Give the gift of education and help turn the tide for an impoverished and hungry people.  Your scholarship will provide the opportunity for one student to help train hundreds of his neighbors.  It will empower Mayan families to become self-sustaining in food production.  It will insure that parents can raise healthy children—children with strong bodies and strong minds—a new generation that can build a better future for their people.

Thirty enthusiastic students from the Venice High School in Florida, members of the school’s Interact Club, are raising funds to further a student’s education in Guatemala. Interact, a youth service club sponsored by local Rotary clubs, undertakes an international humanitarian project each year as well as helping local charities in their fund raising efforts. This Interact Club is sponsored by the Venice/Nokomis Rotary Club.

The Interactors’ ambitious goal is to raise $2,000 to support a full scholarship for a Mayan student attending the Adopt-a-Village training center in a remote Guatemalan rainforest. The school, the only one of its kind in northwestern Guatemala, focuses on building leadership skills and providing agricultural and forestry training. Students are participating in a major bio-intensive mini-farming project that is helping local communities combat the high level of malnutrition in the region. With the country confronting a food crisis—United Nations statistics show that Guatemala has the fourth highest level of malnutrition in the world—the Interact Club will ultimately bring aid to more than just a single student through this specialized training.

The Interact students are selling Mayan handicrafts at local Venice events to raise funds for the scholarship. Theirs is a gift that will keep giving—it will benefit many communities and most importantly, through increased food production, ensure that fewer children go hungry.