Help 500 Guatemalan Children Receive an Education

Written by Thais Arriola

Hello! We want to provide an update on the progress of our school for the little ones called “El Semillero”. This year we have been working hard to promote and develop the academic and artistic skills of our students through various educational and cultural activities. Our theater, singing, painting, poetry, dance, science, English, and chess festivals have been an enormous success, and we've seen greater participation from parents in all of our activities.

We have maintained an educational dynamic that allows our students to move and develop their critical thinking constantly. Within the challenges after the pandemic, we can mention the constant adaptation of pedagogic planning by our teachers. Likewise, we have managed to have psychological care that helps the promotion of emotional and physical health in our students. In the last three months , thanks to your support we have delivered 19,389 nutritious meals at our two schools, and the wellness program team managed to give 182 psychological sessions with our hired psychologist and five interns. Each month our doctor was able to treat 44 students and their families. These medical checkups have allowed our students to develop their academic activities in a better way, these checkups have been executed by our project in alliance with the local community health facility.

One of the significant challenges that we have in the little ones' school is to manage to collect all the material and resources that can allow us to provide education to the students, who because of social problems do not have the resources to come to school.

At our new Center of Opportunities , our high school, the program that is thriving the most is the cooking program. They are working hand-by-hand with our entrepreneurship program. During the last two months, we have had the support of a Guatemalan chef who is teaching our Culinary Club national confectionery. With more than 22 recipes the students have been introduced to; the students now have the opportunity to create a start-up inside the school. The confectionery sweets obtained from the classes are being sold at our private events. Along with other products, the Culinary program is becoming self-sustaining very quickly and kids are learning valuable skills. We are getting ready to open our school cafeteria, which will be led by the students.

For the first time in our history, we managed to reach out to local businesses near us that are willing to receive our graduate students so they can shadow their employees for a month. Most of them are in the food industry due to the proximity of the community we are located in, Jocotenango is next to Antigua, Guatemala which is packed with restaurants and coffee shops. All of our graduate students will shadow a different business. We are very happy to accomplish this.

Our programming and robotics program is very popular among our teenage students, they are learning how to develop apps and how to program through JavaScript with HTML and CSS. The robotics program is in great demand. Since these programs are being very successful our biggest challenge is to provide the equipment necessary for all of our interested students to access it. Providing AI to our classrooms and laboratories is also a challenge we are already working on solving.

We are very proud to share one of our most recent success stories from our project. Our boxing team has made outstanding accomplishments thanks to the leadership of our sports teacher Kevin Lorenzo. The boxing and basketball teams that Kevin started at El Patojismo have 30 participants practicing boxing and 15 participants playing basketball; Some of the achievements the boxing team has accomplished these past months are: the participation of one of our students in an international continental championship that was held in Colombia, winning the third place and another participation in a international continental championship that was held in El Salvador. We won gold medals at national championships for basketball, and the team also participated in two municipal championships (feminine and masculine) where we won as well. We also had one victory in the district championship classification allowing us to move on to the regional games.

Witnessing how our students and teachers are able to reach their goals and dreams thanks to the existence of our project makes us stronger and gives us a lot of hope for the future . All of what we do would not be possible without your donations and constant support. Thank you for being part of the progress we have made regarding the social transformation of Jocotenango.

Greetings from Guatemala,

We are very proud to announce that we started 2023 with a new school, designed to provide secondary education. Our new “Centro de Oportunidades CDO” (Center for Opportunities) would not exist if it were not for the support and trust that our donors have constantly given us.

This building represents dignity and hope, it gives young Guatemalans a modern, clean, and safe space. We want our students to experience an education that provides them with useful skills for their professional lives. We believe that if we want to create a real impact, we have to provide them with everything from a decent infrastructure to healthy spaces for learning so they can have what they need to accomplish their dreams and believe there is nothing they can not do.

In this new school, our main concern is how to educate at-risk teenagers that are struggling in life. These students have received almost no education for the last 3 years because all public schools were shut down in Guatemala as a response to COVID-19. Many students were adversely affected by the violence in their homes and on the streets, the lack of financial resources in their families, and mental and physical health issues and abuses. Some of our students are already mothers as a result of the aforementioned. Thus, trying to keep them in school and motivating them to graduate from high school is one of the biggest challenges that most of the countries in Latin America face. This challenge made us question our current educational methodologies. We work with the teaching team and students so we can achieve a methodology that is inclusive and can reach every student positively and effectively. Our investigation into project-based learning strategies made us notice that with these educational approaches, we can help hundreds of teenagers develop skills that increase their access to decent jobs. We have been applying this approach in the new school since day one.

The first months at the new school have been a little difficult. Dealing with a new educational approach that teachers are not familiar with takes time. But so far, students have responded in a very positive way to the new strategies. Most of them say that they are enjoying their learning process more this way. With the variety of workshops we are offering this year, we have been able to empower our students by letting them choose what they like and discover what they did not know they could be good at. We partnered with some successful entrepreneurs in Antigua, Guatemala, and learned about what were some of the basic features they were looking for when hiring staff. We are using this information to help prepare our students to be ready and become good candidates for the job opportunities around our community. Thanks to that, some of our students are graduating and already have a decent job. Students in Guatemala often have to drop out of school to support their families economically at a young age. Thus we know focusing on creating more job opportunities is one of our biggest concerns. We want our students to graduate from school and stay in Guatemala to support themselves and their community.

Currently, we offer the following workshops, each one has about 20 to 50 student members:

Our psychologist and the three interning psychologists are addressing special needs in the classrooms. They have noticed an increase in the need for sexual education since the beginning of the pandemic. Based on this, our team began to formally teach a professional program in sexual education. They started with subjects like anatomy, the rights around sexual consent, birth control options, and the risks of teenage pregnancies.

Due to Guatemala's lack of safe places to manage menstrual hygiene as well as lack of education to access menstruation-related products or information, we have witnessed that when people are unable to adequately manage menstruation in school, their school performance suffers. So for the first time, we organized for all the young ones in our school a morning in which we offered workshops with information relating to menstrual products as well as increasing awareness through artivism, health, and care information. The students learned how to create their own reusable menstrual pads. This type of content allows our students to be empowered and make informed choices about their bodies.

We also reinforced our support program for young moms who attend our school. By now we have supported our four young moms with clothes for their babies, vitamins, nutritious meals, medicine, and diapers. With the support of a nutritionist the babies that are suffering from malnutrition are taking home the supplements and the special diets they need to overcome the difficult situations they are struggling with. Sadly most of them do not count on support from the baby’s fathers or their parents. The only help they receive is from the team at the school.

We are very happy to announce we have provided 21,163 food plates in the last three months. In the last 3 months, we have 440 students to whom we have provided 235 psychological therapies and our doctor has provided them with 89 medical consultations.

Little by little we have been trying to find a way to make our secondary school work the best way we can. The results have been positive. Seeing some students leaving at 6 to 8 pm, just because they feel safe and loved in their new school makes us feel like we are on the right track. We have been working hard to make all of your donations create a big impact in Guatemala. We are dreaming big and we know over the years we will keep building more and more El Patojismo’s schools around Guatemala.

We are very grateful for your constant support and the trust you have been showing us over the years. And, for the new donors, we promise to make you feel very proud about the donations you have made and for the ones you will keep making!

Without your support, El Patojismo wouldn't be possible.