Education for 600 children in rural Latin America

I hope all is well. It has been a great few months on the projects and thank you so much to everyone who donated to the Appeal to allow us to continue and expand our work in Latin America. As a bonus, GlobalGiving will be matching all individual donations to this page up to $50 by 50% between today, Tuesday 25th March to Friday 28th March. If you can it would be fantastic if you could donate something and take advantage of this extra matching and thank you so much in advance. 

Thanks to donations to the Appeal, we will be supporting fifty students with disabilities this year in Guatemala in a small school on the lake. Each student will receive school materials which will ease the economic burden on their families. The school has very few teachers due to lack of governmental funding so Gaspar, our project manager, will also volunteer at the school as an assistant when he can. More schools have been identified over the past couple of months which we will support with classroom materials. Over time we will see what further help we can provide.

Our secondary school and college students are into their third month of classes. We are supporting one hundred students from several communities in secondary and college education. We are also supporting three hundred primary school students with materials so they remain in school rather than dropping out due to lack of school books and pencils. 

Work continues on the new centre for Plan Costura in one of our communities whilst meetings are held to start a new plan in another community which will provide opportunities for dozens of teenagers and mothers.

The new school year gets back underway in Peru this month and we will be continuing with our local Phoenix teacher as well as providing daily fruit for the children. We will also be buying gas for the school meals which will be enhanced with fresh vegetables from the school garden. As we do each year we will be providing each student with their own textbooks which they can use at home as well as in the school. 

Classes have resumed in Ecuador for the second half of the school year. Work has begun with the school vegetable garden which will provide continuous food for the daily meals. Not everything can be successfully grown at 3,500m (11,500ft) so they have planted cabbages, carrots and beetroot. It is 100% organic using animal fertilizer.

Music is such an important part of the curriculum and one of our local teachers takes all the classes. The students not only learn how to play the instruments, which include wind powered keyboards, they also learn how to read music.

The first harvest of our second large bean Plan Huerto has taken place. Most of the proceeds are currently being reinvested into expanding the programme and replanting the current plans.

We will be celebrating our 20th Anniversary in Ecuador between Saturday 31st May and 7th June with a volcano charity challenge as well as spending a day in the community doing some hands-on work as mentioned above. Each volcano will be undertaken in a day so participants who want to skip any and stay back in Otavalo are able to do so.  

If you worked with us in the past and fancy coming back to reminisce or just want to climb some volcanoes whilst getting involved in a charity challenge whilst helping the projects please do let us know by replying to this newsletter. We will need to confirm numbers by the end of March.  

Many thanks for all your support for the projects and we’ll be in touch in the next couple of months with a further update.

Cheers

I hope all is well with you. Thank you so much to all of you who have donated to this year's Appeal so far. Your donations really do lay a great foundation for the projects in 2025. If you want to donate to this year's Appeal please do so by following the link on this page.   

It has been a great few months on the projects with our annual trip to the coast in Perú for the children and mothers bringing this year’s school year to a close along with graduations. They live in high altitude desert with little water so this is always a welcome respite. The final harvest of the school vegetable garden will be shared between the families ensuring fresh produce over the coming weeks during the holiday with potatoes being planted in advance of the new school term next March.

Now we have the oven the students are learning how to bake. Recently they made t’anta wawa (guaguas de pan) which is a traditional sweet bread to celebrate Day of the Dead and is eaten throughout November.

The school in Perú will continue as normal in 2025 with our local teacher helping out across all grades as usual! We will be providing personal work text-books whilst paying for the gas for the cooking and daily fruit each month. As always we will also be celebrating cultural events throughout the year finishing off with the beach trip at the end of the year. Meals will be supplemented with our school vegetable garden and more hot food can be prepared with the oven we built this year.    

The school year has come to a close in Guatemala with graduations for some of our scholarship students taking place during the month. We provide scholarships for students in secondary school and college which is a total of six years education. Twenty of the college students graduated in accountancy and computing and many already have jobs lined up for 2025. Our primary school students who received materials scholarships at the start of the year stayed in school and successfully passed their exams. 

With the school year finished in Guatemala attention now turns to identifying new children and teenagers to receive scholarships and classroom materials for the new school year starting in January 2025. Work has started on expanding our Plan Costura sustainable plan (sewing business) in two communities which will mainly benefit single mothers and students.

As previously mentioned we will be increasing the number of scholarship recipients to four hundred. One hundred of these will be secondary school and college students with three hundred primary school students receiving school materials. The government does provide the basics at the start of the year though these are soon used up and with families unable to buy further materials the children risk dropping out of school. We provide those children at most risk with extra materials to ensure they stay in school. 

With the expanded Plan Costura sustainable plan we hope that even more students will stay in education with the proceeds they can make from the sewing business as well as single mothers being able to generate an income for their children. We will continue with our local teacher who will give extra-curricular help to the students as well as training in Plan Costura.

The first half of the school year comes to a close in Ecuador with a short break over Christmas and restarting in the new year. We celebrated Day of the Dead with Colada Morada a fruit-based hot drink served with home-made bread. During the year we contribute to many cultural events which invariably include food!

We continue to expand Plan Huerto by sewing seeds taken from the first harvest in a new area which will benefit even more families. The initial Plan Huerto has been replanted for the second crop.

The parents got together for a minga for some major school maintenance. We provided materials to help with the work which included filling in the cracks and removing fungus from the classroom walls. They were also able to finish the wiring to install lights in the new storeroom, plugging leaks in the roof and replacing and painting doors.      

In 2025 we will continue with our three Phoenix local teachers, two of whom are University students we are helping with their educational costs whilst gaining experience of actual teaching. In the school we will continue to pay for the internet as well as extra food for the meals and some classroom materials when they are needed. As always we will celebrate cultural events including fanesca at Easter, Mother’s Day and colada morada for the Day of the Dead.

With the sustainable plans we will continue to expand Plan Moo which will help cover teachers’ costs in the future. Our aim is to purchase ten more cows over the next year or so. Expansion of Plan Huerto will continue with two separate projects already providing income in two communities as well as helping to cover Plan Moo management.

We will be celebrating our 20th Anniversary in Ecuador in May with a volcano charity challenge as well as spending a day in the community doing some hands-on work! If you worked with us in the past and fancy coming back to reminisce or just want to climb some volcanoes whilst getting involved in a charity challenge whilst helping the projects please do let us know by emailing dom@thephoenixprojects.org . There is a link to the itinerary and other infomation below.  

Thank you all so much for your support this year, especially to this year's Appeal, which has allowed us to achieve so much and we hope you can continue to support the projects in the future - we have so much still to do!

Have a great 2025

Cheers     

Links:

• Ecuador 20th Anniversary Charity Challenge