Improving health of 500 Guatemalan school children

Dear Supporter of Mayanza,

We are excited to share with you that our team will return to Santigo next week for another busy and fulfilling week of work in the schools. 

This week was the community wide fair that honors the namesake of the town of Santiago, the "feria de santiago apostol".  From music, to dancing, beauty contests, rides and special food, the fair is an event for the whole community. Most children attend this celebration with their parents, and these celebrations go on for many days into the wee hours of the morning.

So, we decided to bring our team down the next week and increase our chances of more children attending school and receiving the benefits of our health screenings. We will continue to screen for anemia, check growth and offer de-worming medications in an attempt to prevent anemia. 

Why focus on anemia?  Long-term anemia effects the growth and development of children, physically and mentally.  Children who grow and develop healthy go on to become a source of economic stability in their families which in turn affect the rates of poverty, abuse and malnutrition in the community. 

Help us to break the cycle of anemia, a contributing factor in poverty in Guatemala!  We need your support to continue this important work in Santiago.  Please consider making a donation today.

Thank you!

We have just returned from a visit to Santiago and we are excited to share some news and updates with you!  Our last Community Health Fair was in February 2020 just before the pandemic and we decided that it was time to host another one.  We brought down a team of 10 volunteers and joined a dozen health educators and volunteers from Santiago to hosted a series of 4 health fairs.  

We invited children from the schools that we partner with and their parents to come and engage in our health screenings and education on oral health, hygiene, nutrition, exercise, women's health and reproduction, prevention of anemia, and use of low emissions stove and water filters.  Families received health related supplies including soap, hand sanitizer, and toothbrushes and toothpaste.

Thank you for your generous support and donations in 2023!  With your help, we were able to educate over 700 members of the community of Santiago.  We will return to Santiago in July and hope that you will continue to support us!

Links:

• Find out more about our work in Santiago!

Updates from Mayanza

In rural Guatemala, where entire families help with the harvest of coffee beans, schools ends in late October.  This means that during this break from school, the children do not receive a healthy snack and enrichment at home that would typically get in school.  Mayanza has created a program to fill this gap for a group of local children in the community of Tzanchaj.  These students attend one our partners schools during the school year and our program includes fun, interactive activities and a healthy snack each day for the month of November.

In our second year of this program, two teachers create learning activites related to health education, literacy, math, art, movement and music.  The children rotate through interactive learning stations, have story time and then create art based upon their stories. And the healthy snacks are so important for the health development of the children.  Your donations help us to provide this enrichment in preparation for return to school in the new year.

School resumes in January and our team returns in March 2023, so we will update you after our next trip back to Santiago!

We are grateful for your support and hope that you will consider a donation to Mayanza before the end of the year.  This is such a critical time for us to build the funds to sustain our projects throughout the year and your donation, no matter the amount, is so important for our programs. 

Updates from Mayanza

We are excited to share with you updates from our recent trip to Santiago the week of July 23.   The children have returned to in-person learning and this was our first trip where we could work with the school children since 2020.  Guatemala's economy was significantly impacted by the pandemic and continues to sustain impacts from inflation. These systemic factors directly impact the nutrition and health of children in Santiago. 

We returned to the schools to continue our anemia program where each child is measured for growth, screened for anemia and given anti-worming medication and daily vitamins.  These interventions occur twice yearly and our health educators have continued to work in the schools each week since they opened for in-person learning in the Spring.  Our next steps are to analyze the data we have collected to determine the baseline level of anemia and then work to decrease it.  We plan to return in February to continue this project. 

Thank you for all of your support and donations to help us maintain our presence in Santiago despite the economic hardships we are all facing.  You support means everying to us and allows us to continue our work.

If you haven't donated recently, please consider making a donation today to Mayanza .  Recurring donations are matched during 2022 and these important donations allow us to sustain our work.

Muchas gracias!  Thank you!  Maltiox!

With the arrival of spring, and the relative decline of COVID cases, children in Guatemala are finally returning to in-person school consistenly for the first time since 2020.  And for our health educators, this means there is a lot of work to be done and time to make up for.  Both of our educators Lola and Elias are back in the schools throughout each week teaching topics such as hygiene, nutrition, exercise, and disease prevention. 

Our team returned to Santiago in February, prior to the schools re-opening, and met with school administrators and teachers to perform a needs assessment.  The needs assessment focused on areas of need directly related to topics consistent with our health education curriculum.  We performed approximately 20 interviews with questions focused on the areas of hand hygiene, nutrition, exercise and dental hygiene.  Our team will use this information to help drive our future projects to ensure that they are consistent with the areas of need identified by the schools.

In the next few months, we will be making decisions based upon the needs assessment and then start to implement our plans.  We look forward to updating you about our progress with our next report.  Thank you for all of your support of our work!  Now that in-person school has returned, there is much work to be done and our team is ready to jump back in!

Links:

• Check out our website and online shop!