Upskill a Community to Fight Poverty in Costa Rica

Dear Supporter, 

In December we held a fundraising event in local restaurant to raise funds for the GVI Charitable Trust, with our current goal to build a cafeteria for a small local elementary school called Roncador Primary School. This school is in the countryside and it has plenty of students but not enough physical space for all the school’s needs.  In order to keep government funding for the school lunch program (often a student’s main meal of the day), it is required to cook and serve the food on the school premises, but Roncador School does not have a cafeteria. To keep serving lunches, the resourceful staff at the school decided to divide one of the 3 classrooms into half cafeteria, half classroom, and rework the schedule to have multiple grade levels together in other classrooms to ensure space for all. While an amazing show of resourcefulness and positive solutions to a negative situation, the situation is far from ideal for learning.  In essence, one of the classrooms is divided by a thin wooden half-height folding divider; one side there is a teacher trying to teach the special education students – those  that have the most trouble learning -- and on the other side is the cafeteria where there are more than 20 kids eating, shouting and doing their prayers before eating. 

As one 11 year-old student wrote in her thank you card to all the Charitable Trust donors who are helping us to reach our goal, “I think we need a cafeteria because when we are receiving classes, the other kids are saying the prayer and it interrumpts us a lot and we interrumpt them too. For that reason, we need a cafeteria and also because it is better for the cafeteria lady and she is my aunt.” The school has been saving money from their small infrastructure budget as well as hosting events like the extremely popular Costa Rican bingo fundraisers, but they still need another US $10,000 to have enough to build the cafeteria.  Cue GVI…!

The volunteers thought it was an important project to raise the money to build the school a cafeteria so they do not have to try to learn while others are eating simultaneously.  We have been invited to work with Roncador School starting next year, where they are incredibly excited about the possibility of working with volunteers, practicing English with native speakers and doing fun workshops.  Knowing all of this, our stellar volunteers took the project to heart.  While most GVI projects typically raise funds for Charitable Trust projects using online donation campaigns, this group went one step further and also organized a local event, to raise awareness about GVI’s work and the situation at Roncador, and encourage locals and visitors to get involved.  

The fundraiser project is called “Brick by Brick: Un Comedor (a cafeteria) for Roncador”, with donors writing their names on “bricks” to put up on the brick wall poster that volunteers made; once the cafeteria is built GVI will paint a real brick wall with donor names into the design of the cafeteria.  After making hand-drawn flyers andposters, walking from business to business to ask for donations for the silent auction, making gorgeous decorations with the kids from Roncador to transform the restaurant, preparing a Karaoke show, rehearsing, and prepping the event site, volunteers and staff were exhausted but so motivated.They put on a fabulous event with a silent auction, karaoke and salsa lessons, where people had fun, GVI’s work here was showcased, the dire situations in schools was discussed, and,most importantly for this project, many donations were brought in – the event raised nearly $1400!  While we still have a ways to go to reach our goal of $10,000, we are now one step closer to building the cafeteria for Roncador..

To see the school for yourself and learn more about the project, check out this short video:

http://vimeo.com/111556642

Thank you for supporting this project and microproject!

All the best

GVI Quepos

Links:

• http://www.gvi.org