Before we start on todays news, I thought I better add something from yesterday. Oceanside Soccer association, from district 69, donated a ton of beautiful, high quality, colourful tshirts. We have enough to give all 85 students in Basico as well as all our high school students. Here is Vanesa wearing one of the tshirts.
Pana! Pana! Pana! That was the shouting we heard as we boarded the boat to Panajachel. Pana, as it is fondly called by locally, is a 20 minute boat ride across the lake from Santiago Atitlan and it is where we are headed today.
Our first meeting is with the mom of Maria Isabel, our first year university student who is studying business administration and English on Saturdays. We could not meet with Maria Isabel as she has managed to get a job during the week. She is an assistant to a dentist and is making $120/ month. This is great news as it is difficult to get a job locally. She is using this money to buy a computer…a must for anyone studying in university. She is also helping her family to buy food.
Three years ago her father was injured at work. The family took out big loans to pay for the expensive back surgery but unfortunately it was not successful and he can no longer work. We were meeting with her mom to purchase beautiful beadwork.
Our next meeting was with Mayan Families. We have 2 women from Chuk Muk signed up to take the beginners sewing program in Pana. It is a 6 month program, twice a week. We are covering the cost of the program as well as the transportation costs. It will cost $11 / week for us to send the 2 ladies by boat and to pay for their pick up ride to and from the lake.
We have Maria Luisal taking the course. She should be in Carrera ( high school) this year however the family is too poor and could not afford the costs not covered by sponsorship and she needed to earn money to help the family. She is going to take the sewing course which is being sponsored by her sponsor Liz Pric and then teach her whole family to use the sewing machine. Next year when she is 18 she can go to Carrera just one day a week which will reduce the burden on her family.
As, cheapest prices on cialis in some cases the ED medicines contain Sildenafil citrate which relaxes the muscles of the penile region during the working of intercourse. According to the National Health Service (NHS), UK, about 40% of sufferers developed PTSD after a loved one discount price viagra (or someone really close) died suddenly. This is how it becomes a cheap 100mg viagra pleasurable activity. Shatavari is used for centuries mainly because of its availability on online drugstore and http://robertrobb.com/make-asu-basketball-arizonas-team/ levitra without prescription cheapest prices.
The other student is Cruz’s mom. This is a very poor family with an alcoholic father. The mom, Antonia, makes very intricate beadwork and will be a perfect person to make our flannel sanitary pads. The majority of her course is being paid for by Shirley Sterling. Thank you Liz and Shirley for helping us to bring 2 families out of abject poverty.
Our next stop was Porch de Solomon. We wanted to thank them for hiring 2 of our students in their Santiago Atitlan housing project. We also wanted to see if they would help us build a classroom for the Basico. P de S is interested in starting nutrition and garden program. We therefore organized for 2 of their workers to come over in the next 2 weeks and learn from our program.
Finally we stopped at Curtis’s home. Curtis is a wonderful man who gives us free chaya plants. He also runs a large bead cooperative. As we are starting a small bead cooperative we were wondering if we could purchase beadwork from his manager, Elvin, at wholesale prices. The answer was a YES.
One of the ladies in our new bead cooperative has had her thyroid removed. She is very sick and needs expensive medicine daily. She will be running a small store selling beadwork with her 2 daughters.
This was a busy day filled with meeting, but it was in a lovely setting and we had a very tasty lunch. Pana is filled with GRINGOS and as a result has many great places to eat. We then got one of the last boats home on a very rough lake.
