Liderazgo

Hello everybody!

I am so sorry that I am only updating until now,

but things have been crazy around here! I had my vacation in the States and came back to a lot of work with the kids. And then, unforunately, I had to fly back home because of a family emergency. Although it has been a tough time, I am back with my kids who are helping me get through it all.

I have some news and pictures to share with you all.

We have have a big project coming up this weekend. It turns out we got some money that was sent over by some great people from Germany to help out with the "corredor seco" in Guatemala. What this basically is, is a region in Guatemala that has been hit hard with climate changes and therefore their harvest has been non existent. That basically means that they have no income and many people have been dying. So these people in Germany sent us money so that we could help all of these victims of the Corredor seco. We have been investigating where and what is the best way to help some of them. We decided that we wanted to get contacts via the Catholic Church since they have been very involved in the process of these regions. And now we are going to El Progreso on Saturday to meet with a local priest. We set up the meeting so we can familiarize ourselves with the community and with the needs, instead of just showing up with goods. That way the kids can see the reality of these communities. Then in April, we will go back to deliver actual material goods. All of our kids are very excited to do this. It is definitely something new for them, but they are ready for the challenge.

The pictures I am posting are from a "camp" that we had at the house. Our leadership group had "capacitaciones" or workshops with people from an outside organization before this camp. The camp was done with all of our basico kids = middle school kids. The goal of the camp was to show all of the kids team work. The name of the camp was "heroes" and all 70+ kids were divided into four groups and they competed against each other. The leadership kids were split up and they were supposed to put what they had learned in the workshops into practice. The point of it was to have our kids understand that they are not always going to win, but that if they have a positive attitude even if they are losing, they will be able to move on and go for the next goal instead of focusing on all of the reactions and feelings that come with losing. The camp was named "heroes" because they talked about how society sells us super heroes, but when real needs, like hunger, abuse, poverty, come up, there are no super heroes to save us. We are the ones who have to step up, because superman does not exist for real life problems in our world. I think the leadership kids got a lot out of it. It was really difficult for them to keep a positive attitude and to pull their teams up. Not all of them did it, but they were conscience of how difficult it is. In a meeting after the camp, we definitely talked about how they reacted, how others reacted, and how they were "supposed" to react. We are trying to schedule another camp, outside of NPH, since the kids loved it.