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 The following excerpt is from an August 23, 2010 article published by The Kansan. To read the article in its entirety, please click here.
After Tropical Storm Agatha collided with Guatemala this summer, its aftermath created scenes of villages destroyed and families swept away. With a psychological toll as heavy as its physical effects, the storm remained long after the skies cleared. There to help pick up the pieces was Wuku’ Kawoq, a nonprofit organization founded in 2007 partly by two alumnae, Emily Tummons and Anne Kraemer Diaz, and annually aided by University students.
Disaster relief immediately became a priority in addition to the organization’s pre-existing summer plans of providing medical services to Guatemalans in their indigenous Mayan language, Kaqchikel.
Tummons, board chair of Wuku’ Kawoq and an instructor of Kaqchikel at the University, said that among the organization’s undertakings are child malnutrition projects in poor coastal communities, water projects in rural communities and diabetes projects near Guatemala City…
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 The following excerpt is from an August 24, 2010 article published by KLTV.com. To read the article in its entirety, please click here.
LONGVIEW, TX – Good Shepherd Medical Center, Longview Orthopaedic physician, Dr. Jordan Stanley, and Refuge International make the dreams of an 18-year-old boy come true through pro bono surgery.
Alejandro Ixim was born with bilateral club feet in a remote area of Guatemala, and never received treatment for this very curable condition. In the United States, children with this condition begin treatment at birth and most children with club feet can be ‘cured’ with braces, according to Deborah Bell, president of Refuge International.
Alejandro never had access to such care, and had never seen a doctor or a nurse until he was a teenager. As a young adult, having bilateral club feet is crippling. Alejandro grew up learning to walk on the sides of his feet, not the soles, and he could only walk short distances…
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The following excerpt is from a June 20, 2010 article published by The Colorado Daily. To read the article in its entirety, please click here.
BROOMFIELD — What began as a simple trip to Guatemala in May as part of the United Nations’ World Food Program has turned into a passionate cause for Broomfield-area real estate agent Lisa Crawford.
Crawford, founder of the Denver chapter of the Friends of the World Food Program, was one of eight volunteer coordinators for the U.S.-based nonprofit that builds support for the United Nations program. She toured poor villages to see firsthand World Food Program sustainability projects.
“The only way to get what we’re talking about is to see it,” said Jessica Alatorre, the Friends of the World Food Program outreach associate who led the tour…
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The following excerpt is from a June 11, 2010 article published by NBCMiami.com. To read the article in its entirety, please click here.
 He wades through garbage dumps on a regular basis.
Food for the Poor photographer Benjamin Rusnak is just that dedicated to his craft. For at least one week each month, Rusnak visits a developing country to tell its tragic story through images.
“Very often images are lost and stories are lost in the huge wealth of visuals that we have. This is one way of stopping people and getting them to think,” said Rusnak, who began his photojournalism career at the Fort Meyer’s News Press.
Rusnak won the prestigious Gordon Parks award, as well as Photo of the Year, from Interaction, the nation’s largest coalition of U.S.-based government organizations devoted to the world’s poor…
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The following excerpt is from a June 7, 2010 article published by National Geographic Traveler. To read the article in its entirety, please click here.
Across Guatemalan farmland, a new breed of bicycles is being used to thresh corn, de-shell coffee beans, and even blend fruit smoothies. There, in a country with a history of endemic poverty, Maya Pedal works to combine exercise and technology to provide livelihoods.
Formed in 2001 and supported by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Maya Pedal’s workshop creates handmade bicimáquinas–low-cost machines made from old bike parts, concrete, wood, and metal…
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The following excerpt is from a June 7, 2010 article published by The Morning Star. To read the article in its entirety, please click here.
By BROOKS VANDERBUSH
Contributing Writer
TRAVERSE CITY – For children in Zones 3 and 7 of Guatemala City the only things to climb on or play around were garbage.
These Zones encircle Guatemala City’s garbage dump, the largest such dump in Central America. It consists of literal mountains of unregulated refuse. The families living within this community depend on it for their livelihoods. Day in and day out they scavenge through the dump searching for items to sell, wear, eat and build their homes.
Until Safe Passage came along, this was the only world that the children knew…
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The following excerpt is from a May 28, 2010 article published by Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News. To read the article in its entirety, please click here.
An innovative bicycle-powered water pump, created by a student at the University of Sheffield, has proved a huge success and is now in regular production in Guatemala, transforming the lives of rural residents.
Jon Leary, 24, a MEng student in the University’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, took his bicycle machine design from a Steel City drawing board to the heart of Guatemala as part of his dissertation, which required him to ‘make something useful out of rubbish.’
During his four month stint in Guatemala, Jon spent time improving the design for his bicibomba movil ? a mobile bicycle-powered water pump to be used for irrigation and general water distribution – by working with the Guatemalan NGO Maya Pedal, who design and build a variety of weird and wonderful bicycle machines using abandoned bikes sent over from the US and Canada…
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The following excerpt is from a May 24, 2010 article published by Media Newswire. To read the article in its entirety, please click here.
CHIMALTENANGO, Guatemala – An ongoing U.S. Department of Agriculture-funded Guatemalan Food for Progress project led by the Norman Borlaug Institute for International Agriculture is helping farmers in the highland region of Chimaltenango by establishing a new cold storage unit and food processing training center.
The storage unit and training center were established in response to food production, processing and safety needs identified through on-site project personnel working with local farmers, community leaders and others involved in agribusiness, said Johanna Roman, coordinator for Latin American programs with the Borlaug Institute, part of the Texas A&M System.
“Since 2005, we have helped tens of thousands of Guatemalan farmers, mainly indigenous people, through different USDA-funded Food for Progress projects,” Roman said. “We’re hoping this recent addition of a cold storage unit and food processing training center will help them expand their ability to sell their products locally and through export.”…
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The following excerpt is from a May 7, 2010 article published by The Province. To read the article in its entirety, please click here.
When most of us plan for time off work during late fall or winter and yearn for warm tropical breezes, we look for sandy beaches in Hawaii, the Caribbean or Mexico.
But for a small Surrey-based group of medical professionals, taking time off work for fun in the sun is entirely different. Sure, they also experience warm tropical breezes — but they’re worlds away from sun-baked beaches. Instead, these folks are spending their “vacations” performing surgery 10 hours per day in developing countries such as Guatemala.
As members of the non-profit group Health for Humanity, they pay all their own expenses — airfare, accommodation and meals — to take part in the society’s annual two-week mission to the Central American country and periodically to participate in similar missions elsewhere such as the Philippines.
A typical Health for Humanity team consists of five anesthetists…
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The following excerpt is from an May 6, 2010 article published by Relief Web. To read the article in its entirety, please click here.
In the southern highlands of Guatemala people are hungry. Recent prolonged droughts and a drop in remittances due to the worldwide financial crisis have left many families unable to grown or buy food. Guatemala, which has one of the world’s worst rates of chronic malnutrition for children under five (an estimated 47%), is facing a worsening food crisis.
To combat this problem, MADRE and Muixil have expanded Farming for the Future, a food security and microenterprise project for Indigenous Ixil women in El Quiché…
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The following excerpt is from the inaugural issue of EVFP: The Human Development Magazine. To learn how to order this magazine, and to view a preview of its entire first issue, please click here.
The Women of Lake Atitlan (by Marcelle Renkin and Dana Kulchawik)
 Many of the traditions that define and sustain the Mayan culture remain today but not without the effort of local and international organizations and individuals who strive to protect traditional knowledge and local resources through its practical application…
Jane Mintz, an experienced social worker and weaver herself, began working with indigenous women artisans and families in 1988. This collaboration was the beginning of Maya Traditions, an American-based Fair Trade wholesale business and Guatemalan-based production and social service organization.
A WEAVING GROUP BORN OF TRADEGY
Antonia is the founder of her weaving group which formed in response to a massacre in her mountain village in the highlands of Guatemala in the early 1980’s. Antonia works to help her group gain markets for their weavings, aiding in the economic vitality of her community. Antonia’s group began working with Maya Traditions in the development of new samples. This Fair Trade relationship thrived and now supports the 22 members of this weaving group. In collaboration with the Maya Traditions, her group received and paid back a loan for communal land where group member’s plant and harvest corn to sell when yearly weaving supplies dwindle. These funds serve as capital for the group’s weaving projects.
A CENTER BUILT FROM WEAVING
… One of [the group’s] successful initiatives resulted in the building of a community center in 2002 for their group on their communal land.
The weavers and their families provided labor needed to build the community center while Maya Traditions and the Canadian Government’s fund for Local Initiatives paid for the materials…
To learn more about EVFP magazine, please click here. To read more articles about women in Guatemala, please click here.
The following excerpt is from an April 29, 2010 article published by PR.com. To read the article in its entirety, please click here.
Glen Ridge, NJ, April 29, 2010 –(PR.com)– The village of Santa Maria de Jesus is 20 minutes outside of Antigua, Guatemala, and a world away from Glen Ridge, NJ. But in February 2010, the two communities became closer as volunteers from both towns mixed cement and lugged cinder blocks to build a house for a poor Mayan family. In the just published book, “Old Enough to do Good in the World,” Samantha Cordero, a 3rd grader at the Ridgewood Avenue School in Glen Ridge, NJ, tells the story of the trip that changed her life, and her view of the world around her.
Like many New Jersey families, Samantha’s parents were keen to get away for the President’s Day break in February 2010, and had their sights set on a beach holiday. Those plans were thrown out the window and a firm decision made when 8-year-old Samantha asked, “Can’t we go somewhere and do good in the world?” With the help of a New Jersey non-profit, From Houses to Homes, the family traveled to Guatemala. Putting together the journal she kept during the trip with photographs her mother took, Samantha tells a touching story about how she and her parents built a home for a family who had been living in a small, one-room shack with a dirt floor, walls of dried cornstalks ‘waterproofed’ with black plastic on the inside, and no windows and no running water…
Editor’s Note: All proceeds from the sale of this book will be donated to From Houses to Homes. Click here for purchasing information.
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The following excerpt, which references one of our profile subjects, The Timmy Foundation is from an April 14, 2010 article published by the Indiana University Newsroom. To read the article in its entirety, please click here.
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — Savvy investment strategies and a year of strong growth in the stock market enabled the Virtu Project at Indiana University to triple the money it raised for the Timmy Foundation, an Indianapolis-based global health and development nonprofit organization.
The project, created and run by students in the Liberal Arts and Management Program at IU Bloomington, is an original social entrepreneurship initiative that uses donor pledges to a mock investment portfolio to raise money…
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The following excerpt, about one of our profile subjects, Hearts in Motion is from an April 14, 2010 article published by the Harbor Light News. To read the article in its entirety, please click here.
As profiled in the Harbor Light last month, Bear Creek Township Resident, Cathy Shier, and her sister Terry Greiner, recently spent ten days in Guatemala as part of a Hearts in Motion mission to aid children and families in the village of Zacapa.
The sisters both attended St. Francis Catholic School in Petoskey for 12 yrs. growing up, and credit their generosity and spirit to their mother Marge Upton, a Petoskey native. Shier runs the day care at Bay Tennis and Fitness and is a retired teacher.
Though this was not technically a vacation for Shier, she says that she would volunteer to go back again. With no hot water, thin mattresses, cement floors, and high temperatures; enjoying a trip like this one takes a unique outlook…
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The following excerpt is from a March 30, 2010 article about our friends at Fotokids, published by The Comment Factory. To read the article in its entirety, please click here.
This article was written by Ana Caistor-Arendar, who lives in – and writes about – Latin America. To read more articles by Ana, please click here.
Ten-year-old Diego lives beside the train tracks in the centre of Guatemala City. He has two older brothers, who belong to rival gangs. A year ago one of Diego’s brothers was shot in the stomach by a member of the other brother’s gang.
Diego is not in a gang. He had been taking lessons in photography at Fotokids, an organisation that attempts to bring young people in Guatemala out of poverty by providing training in the visual arts. He had dropped out of the organisation, claiming it was too much hard work, but returned shortly after he left.
“He came in one day and said to me, ‘I’ve been thinking about it, this is a really good project, would you accept me back?’,” recollects Nancy McGirr, who founded the organisation 18 years ago. “He is now here every other day in the morning, without fail, and not only is he doing his work but he is enthusiastically involving himself.” …
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The following excerpt is from a March 26, 2010 article published by USAToday.com. To read the article in its entirety, please click here.
When university students choose to volunteer instead of a raucous trip to the beach for spring break, it is always inspiring.
That’s why I’ve asked Kelly Kupers, a student at the Vanderbilt Owen Graduate School of Management, to share her experience from a recent week-long trip to Guatemala. Through Vanderbilt’s Project Pyramid program, which aims to help those at the bottom of the socio-economic pyramid, Kupers and the other 22 students on the trip, gained great insight into the problems of extreme poverty and ways to ensure the sustainability of development programs such as Project Pyramid.
Here is Kupers in her own words: “Malnutrition permeates throughout the Guatemalan population, especially among children. As a Vanderbilt University student who traveled to rural Guatemala to aid in malnutrition mitigation, I have learned both about Guatemala’s culture and the importance of understanding and respecting cultural practices.
As we develop a nutritional supplement to address the widespread problem of malnutrition, I have encountered many individuals and groups whose generosity and guidance enable us to understand the dynamics of malnutrition. While there is certainly no shortage of available nutritional supplements in Guatemala, cultural factors thwart the success of these products…
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