I’m down here for six months taking part in the most well-structured and thoroughly thought-through program I could imagine. It provides non-religious, free education for kids who wouldn’t be in school otherwise. It is not English lessons or indoctrination. We are teaching from course books they use in the public schools here. The school is called Escuelito Pajaro De Fuego and is in Andres Itzapa, a forty-five minute drive from Antigua, Guatemala. It is a very poor community with an abundance of smiling faces. Every day I make a world of difference to these kids who, if it weren’t for this project, would be working the fields with their fathers.

The school is one part of a closed cycle that addresses education, sustainable economy and use of natural resources. It also includes building efficient stoves to fight deforestation and a tree-planting program that provides fast-growing, slow-burning trees for free to the families and a source of income for the mothers.

The school is the result of unbelievable effort fueled by monumental passion and belief and a world- spanning collection of volunteers, interns and coordinators. It is part of The Phoenix Project, the umbrella organization that runs similar projects in five Latin-American countries. Dom, the man who runs it all, has incredible compassion for each kid; he knows their names, their families, and how they’re doing in school. This is one of two schools in Guatemala, let alone the four other countries stretching as far south as Ecuador. It is truly amazing what Dom (pictured with Profe Franky) has done here and plans to continue doing. The whole idea, as he explained to me, is that if it is not sustainable, there was never any point in putting the money there in the first place. Not a single penny goes to waste here (especially with a conversion of 8 Quetazales to 1 US dollar). 98% of the people paid by the Phoenix Project are local people, the rest are volunteers.

To give you an idea of where your donation will go, until I brought in packs of pencils in my first week, the kids were using pencils mangled and broken, smashed and used down to as short as one inch. We have to share our classroom with another class and there are only half walls to divide our “room” from other classes. We buy all our own supplies: whiteboard markers, rulers, large paper for diagrams and posters, photocopies, everything. Just ONE DOLLAR would buy every kid in my class a new pencil (and that is not an exaggeration!)

We are also in desperate need of help for Honduras, where it is all the more important for the kids to stay in school. There, the community lives off one harvest of coffee for the whole year. I have yet to see the project in Honduras, but the school I am at now in Guatemala is, without a doubt, one of the two most well off projects down here. When I get to Honduras, I will update about how it is there.

Thanks for reading. Please give anything you can and pass this page on to everyone you know. If you have any fundraising ideas, don’t hesitate to go for it! Get in touch with me on my Facebook page to hear more about it or chit chat about fundraising ideas.