Books for the School

Books for children seem to be taken for granted in the United States.  Every family has some.  They may be thrown in a toy box, stored on a shelf, or in the back seat of the car.  Everyone seems to have a book.  But in Guatemala, almost all of the indigenous people are suffering the process of poverty and books are just not part of the culture.  There are so few books even published in Guatemala.  Because of that, when a school has books, their instinct is to lock them up. 

There are books in a small library at the school which were carried down by volunteers over the years.  The children are able to access the library for 30 minutes a week.  However, they are still not allowed to check out books.  With few text books, the only real printed words the children read are from that precious thirty minutes a week in the library.  Printed handouts in the classroom, and occasional classroom posters or newspapers just don't help a child learn as well as a good book.  Fuency, comprehension, spelling, and writing cannot help be affected by the lack of the printed word in the school.

Because of this and our opportunity to locate closeout books in Spanish, we began hauling books to Guatemala in our luggage.  I have given them directly to the teachers for their classrooms.   This has given the teachers the opportunity to let the children read the books when they have idle time.  The "big books", which are oversized children's literature books, first caught the eye of most of the teachers. Over the years I have also seen the teachers use the leveled readers I have brought to form reading groups and have gotten the children used to presenting oral book reports.  

Many of the teachers have allowed the students to take the books home overnight to read to their brothers and sisters.  I have heard that a lot of the grandparents in the homes have enjoyed listening to the stories too.  An amazing number of them were not able to learn to read when they were young.

The teachers have expressed the need for teaching techniques to be used with the books too.  Thanks to my Windows translator, I have been able to recently start taking them directions for using leveled readers, decodable books, reader's theater, dictating stories for the emergent readers, and many more. 

If education is the best route out of extreme poverty, then classroom libraries have to be the "on-ramp" in San Lucas.  That's why we keep stuffing our checked luggage with books, stuffing our carry-on rolling bags with books, and pairing down what we will use for a week in Guatemala to fit in a back-pack a piece.  How can we not?

San Lucas Toliman Montessori Photos

I found this mission when I agreed to go on a school trip with my daughter who was taking a college class, Peace and Justic, in 2004. After that, my husband and I returned as a couple to volunteer in the many programs that have helped the indigenous people since the early 60's. Father Greg stayed with this community protecting them through a war lasted that 40 years.

As a trained Montessori teacher, I was very interested in their educational system. My first invitation to visit the school left me both appalled and amazed. I was appalled at how little the teachers had to work with and the old style method of teaching ... by rote. Teachers would write information on the board and students would write it in their notebooks. Questions would be stated with the question and the correct responses would be "Si" or "No". I was amazed by the relationships the teachers had with the students. They obviously cared very much for the students. I was also amazed at how hard they worked to give the most they could to the kids.

I befriended a young teacher named Patti who was at the time about the age of my oldest daughter, 22. She had been teaching for four years! In Guatemala, most of the teachers, especially indigenous, are trained to teach in high school. Of course, they were all taught by rote themselves so that was all they knew.

Over the years, I developed a close relationship with the teachers and we were able, through the help of Rotary, friends, and our own donations, to supply library books in Spanish, teaching materials, classroom reference books in Spanish, world maps in Spanish. These books and materials were all brought down in suitcases over the several years we have been visiting San Lucas.

Father Greg's dream of opening a Montessori preschool at the Mission was realized in January of 2010. We were very happy to have helped play a part in its opening. With the help of fundraising, over 300 pounds of Montessori materials went down to Guatemala while the school converted an unused building into a Montessori classroom. I helped provide training for the teachers on Montessori educational philosophy and training on the use of the materials in the classroom. Together with another trained Montessori teacher from North Dakota, the teachers were prepared and the school opened without a hitch. It continues to be a wonderful place of peace and learning which is rich in indigenous Guatemalan culture, it is a joy to help with the children and provide additional training to the teachers each time I visit.

One day my husband, Jack, asked Father Greg what else he could use for the school. Without pausing to think, he stated that he would love to have used turf for the schools futbol field (soccer field). He had heard that Universities often donated the used turf when they replaced their fields. So Jack was able to secure a one-year-old football field full of fantastic artificial turf for free and had enough shipped to the mission by container to cover two small futbol fields. We were lucky enough to visit while the field was being prepared by hand by the local employees of the mission. Volunteers hauled gunny sacks of sand. It was a tremendous undertaking but today the children have an amazing place to play.

We have learned that the way to help people in need is simple ... walk beside the people, don't tell them what to do, wait until they tell you what they want help through an expressed, felt, need. That is the way you can help when people are suffering the process of poverty without taking away their self respect. It and your comfortable bed just to be with them. It raises their self esteem in a country where the indigenous people have been thought of as less than cattle for centuries.

San Lucas Toliman Scholars Program

Renner, Rosalinda, and her walking companion.

San Lucas Toliman Scholars is an organization set up to help children in San Lucas further their education.  In Guatemala children are given an education until the 6^th grade.  After that, they must come up with tuition in order to advance any further.  Very few indigenous families have enough money to do this so the boys and girls continue the cycle of poverty with little education.  The lucky ones find “patrons” from the United States who will help by paying their tuition.  It is common for girls who do not go further than the 6^th grade to marry at 13 or 14 and become mothers by the age of 15.  Advancing children in school postpones parenting and makes the likelihood of getting better paying jobs more possible.  We believe that the best hope for ending the process of poverty in Guatemala is through education.

Jack and I really like Dennis, the director of the San Lucas Toliman Scholars program.  He is a very simple man who was a teacher and guidance counselor from Great Britain. He pays his own living expenses so we know our donations go directly to our students.  The organization is overseen by a board in the United States.

We are sponsoring our third student in this program making a three-year commitment to them.  Our first student, Renner, finished 9^th grade last year and we are now sponsoring him for high school.  In high school, Guatemalan children learn a profession.  Renner has chosen to become an office clerk.  Rosalinda also finished the 9^th grade but chose not to go onto high school.  We now have a new student who has just begun the 7^th grade. 

Guatemalan Beaded Jewelry and Coffee

At Ann Quinn’s Furniture and Home Store, we have been selling two types of merchandise that are very important to us because of our involvement as volunteer at the Mission of San Lucas Toliman which are the Guatemalan beaded jewelry and  Juan Anna coffee. 

One of the most important programs of the San Lucas Toliman Mission is the coffee project.  What it does for the community is astounding.  The small subsistence indigenous farmers try to scrape out a living growing coffee on only two or three acres. 

                                                          

The mission meets with a group of these farmers to ask what price they need for their coffee in order to make a living to feed and care for their families.  The consortium of farmers sets the price for their coffee.  The Mission buys the coffee from them, dries it, and bags it to sell to the volunteers that visit the mission.  It also sells roasted and “green bean” coffee to the United States through the Diocese of New Ulm, Minnesota.  The coffee is named Juan Anna Coffee which is much better than fair trade coffee because the farmers set their own price.

The beaded jewelry is made by mothers in their homes and sold to tourists in order to supplement the income of the family.  We buy beaded key chains, necklaces, earrings, bracelets, and purses to sell in our store.  We ask them to set their price and we don’t negotiate.  We feel that this fair trade way of purchasing the jewelry helps improve their living conditions in small ways and values their work.

Profits from the sale of both the coffee and the jewelry are spent on more books in Spanish for the classroom libraries and on Montessori materials.  We pay our own expenses for our trips to Guatemala.