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RWF Guatemala Journey July 18-27, 2008 Dear family, friends and supporters, Hanley Denning understood these deplorable conditions – conditions that the city refused to acknowledge. As a way to help ameliorate the awful suffering around her, Hanley opened a daycare named Safe Passage to remove children from their squalid conditions during the day and to provide balanced meals. In Guatemala City we visited a non-profit organization called OASIS which provides support, education and economic aid to persons in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community. The LGBT community has desperate need of OASIS because individuals are being murdered on the streets, mostly by the army and police. The unconscionable fact is that the justice system will not prosecute these crimes. Part of RWF’s financial gift will help to keep the doors open at OASIS, allowing the organization to provide education about the growing HIV epidemic and provide aid for housing costs to those who are forced out of their homes. We toured the facilities of Women in Solidarity Clinic founded by an amazing woman of great character and strength, Rosa Escobar. She began the clinic in a warehouse to provide medical assistance for Mayan women and their babies. After years of financial struggle the clinic moved to an old building which had been converted back to usability. During the civil war 200,000 people died and 50,000 more were “disappeared.” One consequence of this tragedy is that many orphans were systematically ignored by the government. In the beautiful mountains surrounding the area, we met a Catholic Sister who for many years has run Santa Apolonia Orphanage on a mere shoestring budget. A highlight of our travels was a visit to meet Juan Ixchop, a Mayan spiritual leader. We were each given a Mayan blessing of good health by congregation elders who used corn colored candles in a ritual of cleansing. Juan’s purpose is to retain and spread ancient spiritual traditions now being lost. RWF brought several digital cameras for the center to use in recording their ceremonies and a monetary contribution funding 40% of their budgeted We stopped to visit a little village in the mountains off the main road. They had just completed their new water system. RWF has funded the repair of similar water projects in Guatemala and has funded three water projects in Honduras. With the well functioning and the pipes assembled and installed by villagers, they were ready to celebrate this wonderful contribution to the community’s health and wellbeing. They had been obtaining their water from a polluted river. When we arrived, they were waiting with arrangements of wild flowers, a rainbow of balloons and a traditional spreading of pine needles on the ground to add the We feel blessed to reside in the United States and to be involved with amazing people who give from their hearts. Thank you for your support! Please consider donating toward RWF’s many worth causes around the globe by visiting www.rainbowworldfund.org/donate. Consider joining us on our next journey to Guatemala on July 9 -18, 2009. Learn more here: http://www.rainbowfund.org/journey/ |
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Our recent Rainbow World Fund travel to Guatemala with was all at once exhilarating, exhausting, and hopeful. As witness to the desperate needs of the Mayan people, and to the committed people who work to overcome poverty, disease, and illiteracy, it is our obligation to tell some of their stories. Over the course of our 10 days in Guatemala we visited many of the projects that RWF has supported for years and a few projects for the first time. Fifteen RWF volunteers brought down nearly 1800 pounds of medicine and educational supplies valued at over $300,000, which we distributed along with $56,000 in grants. Here are some of the humanitarian highlights of our trip.
In Guatemala City there exists a huge ravine that for many years has been the city’s garbage dump. Because of the recent civil war, many of the Maya are homeless and unemployed and receive little or no help from their government. Thousands of these people were forced to move into the city dump and subsist by retrieving recyclables to sell as they are able. Their children live with them eating only food they find there. This brief description does not do justice to the enormity of horror we observed. 
Today Safe Passage provides daycare, food, hygiene education, medical services, general education and job training. Because of what Hanley has done, there is hope that some of these unfortunate children will escape from the grip of abject poverty. This year we donated much needed dental supplies for the children and their families. Over the years RWF’s monetary donations have helped Safe Passage meet a variety of needs including obtain food and rations to help keep the project going.
Now they are able to offer prenatal care, cesarean sections, infant care and much more for women and their babies who would otherwise likely die in childbirth. Rosa showed us the “new” laboratory with great pride, including a microscope RWF donated last year and a operating table and lamp made available through RWF contributions. Rosa cried when we presented her with our donation consisting of ample medicines and medical supplies to treat indigenous women and children along with a $5000 grant.
Today there is a live-in school where the children receive education, vocational training and plenty of love and attention. This year we met Javier, just 45 days old. He was abandoned and nameless but now has a loving family at the orphanage. He is a beautiful baby and never lacks attention from the Sisters or his new siblings. RWF’s donation will help the Sisters’ continuing efforts to provide for the orphans. They also received a large supply of toothbrushes, clothes, school supplies and stuffed animals, enough for each child.
project to capture spoken narratives from the last carriers of now-dying traditional Mayan knowledge. We asked Juan, as a Mayan leader, to speak out in support of LGBT Mayans as people worthy of dignity and community understanding. RWF is now preparing a proposal highlighting specific ways that Juan can achieve this admirable goal. We are sending PFLAG and other Spanish language booklets that educate about LGBT people. This is a beginning that RWF hopes to foster and see growing when next its volunteers visit with Juan.
fresh scent of nature to the festivities. There were a great many speeches which were interpreted from the community’s native dialect to Spanish and English in a spirited bidirectional conversation of thanksgiving and good cheer. The young women danced a traditional soft-step dance based on the belief that God is in the earth and ought not be trod upon too heavily. The women were invited to speak (highly unusual because of their lack of education), offering their thanks and reading their hand-woven tapestries commemorating the completion of the water project. It was moving to witness such humble people offering this eloquent thank you. The day of the celebration we delivered a check for $20,000 to fund a new water project in rural Guatemala.
These are just a few of the highlights of our journey. We also visited a reforestation project, a project that helps the disabled, and a rural junior high school in Chinique. We made significant contributions to each of these programs including funding a new computer lab for the school with a gift of $8,800.