Give scholarships to poor students in Guatemala

Report from 1 May-Aug 31, 2022

Brief Description of our project. The El Lustrador Foundation (ELF) helps poor children in Guatemala with their education.  ELF is raising money to provide for these needs and something else: A room to eat in, and to come together when the pandemic lifts! ELF continues to work with the community that lives adjacent to the Guatemala City Basurero, or landfill, and the kids who attend Manuel Marcos Martinez School. The families in this community scratch out a living by scavenging at the landfill, and their children attend the local school.

On May, we celebrated Mother’s Day to all the mothers of children who attend Manuel Marcos Martinez School. Because the restrictions for Covid pandemic, we couldn’t celebrate at school as we did in previous years with piñatas, Cake, food etc., this time, we supplied them with bags of groceries to celebrate at home with their children. Also, on June we were planning to celebrate the Teacher’s Day but all teachers got infected with Covid and celebration was canceled, as a gift, we bought school supplies to each teacher to make easier the education of our landfill kids. on this.

Our fundraising is going well so far: from Sep 13, 2021 to Aug31, 2022, we received $13,146 in donations for our goal of $50,000, in 180 donations from a total of 88 different donors. We have 7 recurring donors, if you are not one of the recurring donors; we hope you decide to join. And on December 23rd we received an additional $9,000 donation from a single donor! A great thank you to all of you, the donors, from The Board of Directors of ELF -- René, Linnea, Don, Eddie, René Jr., Dexter, and Tatiana – as well as our amazing volunteers in Guatemala –Marta and Caissa. We continue helping more than 200 families with food and more than 175 children with school supplies. Our next food drive will be on Children’s Day on October, our President René Corado will travel to Guatemala for a bird conservation symposium and he personally will be with the kids and check and see how the room progress is.

We still in talks with the Mayor of Guatemala City to build our proposed cafeteria and assembly room for students to gather during hurricanes and other times. After hearing about our project, the Mayor offered to help us build the room. We are waiting for him to fulfill his promise, so far the principal of the school told us that the Mayor’s staff already visited the school to take measurements for the room, we will keep you tuned in. Also, we are working with authorities from the School and an architect to plan for the repair of the only water supply tank that the school has. The present tank is in bad shape and the school cannot use it to supply water to the more than 500 children that the school holds. We will pay to repair the water tank, René will talk to the school Principal in October about this project.

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