SEPTEMBER UPDATE Harvesting School Gardens at Home

With schools likely closed through the remainder of the year, our Early Education Team is finding innovating ways to replicate in-school activities at home so that children can still learn and experience the fun activities that they enjoy. Remember the at-home gardens that we shared a few months ago? They have now produced their first harvest! In normal years, these are school gardens and classes compete to see who can make the best organic salad. This year, families made salads together at home and shared photos and videos of their creations with their class watsapp groups. A healthy source of pride, learning and fun for the whole family!

Kids Get Creative at Home on Guatemalan Independence Day On September 15th, local schools are usually full of parades and performances for Guatemalan Independence Day. This year, due to COVID restrictions, those celebrations could only take place at home - but the children made the most of it! Similar to the culinary activity mentioned above, our Early Education Team encouraged children to organize presentations just like they would in school, and share photos and videos with their classmates via watsapp. The children wore traditional dress and presented traditional dances and poem readings, prepared alters with local foods and Guatemalan colors. We were blown away by their creative responses!

Phase Three of Jobs Stimulus Program Gets the Green Light We want to share a special thank you to our generous donors in the month of September who generously gave a total of $25,000 to support phase three of our Jobs Stimulus Program! This next phase will support 13 projects across five different communities, and put over 100 unemployed community members back to work! Projects include building a safety wall around a local school, sponsoring community murals, reforestation around village water sources, and road and drainage repairs.

Women Teaching Women: Empowerment in Action We are proud to share that Amigos' Women's Empowerment Program is supporting the creation of a new Organic Egg Production business in the village of Jaibalito! Women entrepreneurs who will be owners of the new business took a field trip this month to visit the women entrepreneurs that are now successfully running the first Organic Egg Production Business supported by Amigos in the neighboring village of Tzununa. The women business owners in Tzununa had the opportunity to proudly share their successes and lessons learned with the women from Jaibalito. These women are not only breaking gender barriers by becoming business owners, but they are helping and teaching each other to bring about more success for women from their community. A win for everyone!

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