As the year comes to an end, we are feeling incredibly grateful for the generosity of those who have done what they can to donate to our fundraiser on GlobalGiving. Thanks to every one of you, we were able to support thirteen children of artisans at Cojolya across the 2018 school year.
Still in our first two years as a program, Mano a Mano para el Desarrollo (Hand in Hand for Development) is a young project. Yet, we are already succeeding in combating structural problems that have consistently affected our community through taking small yet significant steps to confront the problems that prevent our students from continuing their studies. The challenge for our project is to combat three central problems that affect our students: financial barriers, a lack of academic mentors, and lacking academic support. The main area we began tackling this year was financial barriers as we were able to minimize the financial burden parents feel each year. While our artisans are paid nearly 6 times the average amount in order to respect the slow handmade work going into our creations, often times this income is not sufficient on its own to support families where there are on average 4 children. Furthermore, many of our students are nieces and nephews of our weavers, and their parents' income is more unstable.
The main reason families in our community of Santiago Atitlán do not enroll their children in school is due to a lack of resources. Academic costs are more manageable at the younger level, but once students begin attending secondary school, they spend about 260 Quetzales ($35) per month on their schools supplies and enrollment fees. This is nearly 40% of the average rural parents’ monthly salary, which is about 700 Quetzales ($940). As most families have more than one child, the parents are forced to sacrifice their child’s enrollment in secondary school as providing basic household necessities for multiple family members is deemed more important.
This schoolyear, our project Mano a Mano managed to support local parents with a notable portion of expenses for their children still in school. We want you to know how we have been using your donations as the year comes to a close so that you can see the impact that your generosity has had upon our students.
Students of all ages often need to use computers, and once they are in secondary school this digital access is even more necessary for conducting research. Yet, our students don’t have access to any personal computers, so Mano a Mano participants had two computers in our offices so that they had the resources to conduct research and print their homework. We reserved these desktops for them all day, and our Mano a Mano coordinator taught them how to use the computer as many had little to no experience working with one.
Beyond our Computer Access Program, we also stored some school supplies in our offices. We offered our students the necessary amount of materials each day, and we were able to support the kids so that they could continue studying without as much financial burden for their family. Across 2018, we were able to able to cut 50% of the costs of educational materials and computer usage for all thirteen students participating in Mano a Mano. Our students were very grateful for the support as they felt more relaxed and focused in their school attendance and did not worrying as much about dropping out and saving money for their families during the schoolyear.
We hope that you, our donor, feel proud of your generous donation to our project Mano a Mano because you supported thirteen students through offering them the basic resources they needed. Now our objective as a project for the following year is to manage to support the sisters, brothers, sons, daughters, nieces, and nephews of the Maya weavers of Cojolya with 100% of their schooling costs so that they can continue studying.
As they year comes to an end, consider donating to our Mano a Mano project in order to support the children of maya weavers so that we can reach our goal and necessary budget of $10,000 to benefit the next generation of our community.
