It’s that time of year again when all the kids in Guatemala go back to school! This year is a little more “normal” than the past couple of years with online-only and hybrid classes. The government last year instituted a color coding system based on COVID cases per region which dictated if kids would be present in class, online-only, or hybrid. Everyone in the country is tired of dealing with the quarantine restrictions and since the vaccination and contamination rate has touched the majority of the population, it isn’t as much of a concern. This year we are sponsoring 7 children through school and helping a handful of others with their school supplies.
For the past couple of years we had been holding onto the hundreds of backpacks that have been donated since the kids weren’t physically going to school they didn’t need them. We discovered at the end of last year, however, that they started to “go bad” in storage meaning they began to grow mold on them! Olga went through and cleaned each one individually and set out to figure out how we can bless families with all of these backpacks. The other thing we realized is that the majority of backpacks donated were for kids in primary school: all our kids are grown up now! They are in their teens and finishing middle school or high school. It’s hard to believe, but alas here we were with a ton of backpacks and nobody we knew we could give them to.
Olga coordinated with a director of a local public school in Linda Vista to hand out backpacks to those families with limited resources! Here are some photos of Olga making sure these kids get them and the backpacks get put to good use!
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