Dear friends, family and colleagues
On behalf of the children and teachers in Nacaome Valle Honduras, I would like to thank you very much for your great participation in the fundraising campaign 03.2023.
Thanks to your monetary donations of €1,485 and donations in kind of €1,000, we were once again able to achieve a great deal. We are very pleased that you are so involved in our initiative and that there are so many recurring donors who support us. It shows us that we are on the right track and inspires us to keep going.
Your commitment has helped us to provide school and teaching materials as well as 101 basic equipment for students. This gives the students new perspectives and offers them opportunities that they would not have without your help. We can also use it to support teachers to improve everyday school life.
We are convinced that education is an important factor for the development of a country. It is therefore important to us to promote them and to help the students and committed teachers. With the material that we were able to provide, the students have more fun learning and are interested in change and the teachers have the opportunity to give special support to children with special needs.
Education is a civil and human right, determines significantly individual life chances and is an important factor for political changes. Through your donations, you give students a chance to change their lives and improve their future, attend school, and save money on school supplies. By promoting their social skills and political education, we broaden their horizons and sensitize them to political changes and food for thought in relation to human rights.
This initiative shows that everyone can make a difference.
Now I would like to share with you what happened in this campaign:
There were various donations in kind, which were monetized via ebay classifieds. In the case of donations in kind, an Amazon wish list made it easier to complete the so-called student sets and class sets and made it possible to donate books. Upgrading the website and installing 2 different payment services made it easier and more diverse to donate.
Now an overview of the donation volume and the implementation:
A donation total of €1,485 was raised.
This time, the donations in kind filled 2.5 suitcases and had a volume of approx. 75kg.
The Lufthansa BER team donated the second suitcase.
This time the luggage was booked directly to Honduras and saved the controls and possibly. Houston fees.
Some of the material for the student sets is expensive and could not all be collected for the planned 100 sets. So when I arrived in Honduras – Tegucigalpa, I set myself the task of finding a wholesaler for school supplies. After an intensive search, various approaches to the usual top dogs (American office equipment suppliers) I found what I was looking for:
With several branches, the office and school outfitter is known and loved as a local family business. After a long conversation in a branch, an employee accepted my project and added the missing materials to the school sets with me (college pads, compasses, pencil cases, scissors, board markers, pencils and various small items). Due to the fact that this is my first but not the last time shopping and the team is convinced of the initiative, I was surprised with a 10% discount.
When collecting the materials with the support of initiative members, we supplemented the purchase with diagrams for the classes at the comprehensive school in Nacaome.
The Disproa team invited us to order upcoming campaigns in advance – then they could also be delivered to Nacaome free of charge. That would save the transport from Germany, the onward transport to Nacaome and a journey for a member. This is an offer for the Honduras initiative including corresponding discounts for larger purchases.
THAT has left us a little speechless and opens up new possibilities for us.
(See the upcoming actions and how to do them for more on this.)
Thanks to the entire Disproa team!
In Tegucigalpa there were still 2 addresses to visit. The next address was a bookshop for schoolbooks and teaching material. A traditional bookshop, run by the 3rd generation. The boss personally advised us and helped us to find the right books for the grade levels. She surprised us with a small discount and is looking forward to being a contact person for the Honduras initiative in the future. In terms of prices, however, it is (as in Germany) tied to the prices of the publishers, but is happy to be able to participate with small extras or percentages. Thanks!
The last address before leaving for Nacaome was a printing house for educational material: maps and atlases.
The young team at the front desk has taken on our concern to put together maps and atlases as teaching material for a school in Nacaome. The double-sided map of Honduras was in stock and the other 4 maps requested are being made: North America, South America, Europe, Africa, … why the Asia map played no role, my sister (teacher) will talk to the teachers in the next board meeting Discuss Nacaome in more detail 😉
For all cards, we opted for a kind of laminate cards that can be wiped clean, are particularly UV-resistant and very robust. The publisher gave us a 5% discount due to the fundraiser and would consider this amount again for future orders. We were happy and remained with heartfelt thanks and the prospect of definitely getting together again. Thank you!
Now we drove to Nacaome, the destination of the donations, with a fully loaded wagon.
In a team of 4 members, we dedicated a whole day to sorting and assembling the student sets and school sets. It was a great pleasure for us to pack the many donations in kind in individual bags and to see that so many sets are created with such a large donation.
101 student sets were created which are distributed to 5 schools. The school sets go to 3 schools. The books will be distributed to 3 schools and the maps will go to 1 comprehensive school.
The additional donations should also be used in a meaningful, goal-oriented manner and where it is most needed:
€250 was donated to Lunches4Learning. 1 school has to build a furnace and another school has to use the exhaust for an installed furnace. Since the kitchen is essential for the concept of the organization and a friend and member of the Honduras initiative asked for help – we decided to make this donation. I was allowed to accompany him in his work over the last few years and get an insight into his work. The need for help and the need for donations to the schools are beyond question. And in addition to donations in kind in the form of student sets, we felt that an additional monetary donation was right and important this time.
The organization Lunches4Learning has been working with an unbeatable concept in southern Honduras, the poorest region of the country, since 2004. Read more here.
100€ was donated as start-up capital for a student project at the “Centro de Education – General Manuel Bonilla” comprehensive school in Nacaome. The graduating class works on a project for the school as a gift for the successful school years. There will be a blog post about this in the summer, because the project will be completed by the end of the school year in November and is currently (according to the students) still secret 😉
Now we went on different days with the pick-up and the loading area full of school things & Basic food in 9 schools.
I was allowed to spend one day at the Centro de Education (General Manuel Bonilla) – Nacaome and attend the morning school roll call, the lessons (social studies, Spanish) and a teachers’ conference*. The first student starter sets found happy children’s hands:
The special thing about this day was the preparation of the distribution of the student sets. Classes should distribute the limited number of sets among themselves, reflecting on what it means to be needy. This filled several lessons in the run-up to the action. On the day itself, I was all the more pleased to find open-minded, reflective and conscious students. I was warmly welcomed and taken to my heart. All students would like to express their thanks for the recognition of their academic achievements and the support from people from Germany.
A set and a small Gift went to a girl, 11 years old, who cannot attend classes because she has to work for the family. She comes to school before everyone else every day and leaves after class. She stands at the school entrance and sells fruit from the family garden to secure a living for herself and the family.
* The teachers’ conference was a joyful ambush to serenade me and give me a cake for my birthday 🙂
I spent another day with 3 friends and members of the organization Lunches4Learning to visit 7 schools in the mountains and poorest areas of the Valle. Basic food was delivered again and more student starter sets were distributed. There were many conversations with the teachers and headmasters, I had so many questions and the basic tenor was: the need of the children in the region, who have neither enough food, school supplies nor clothing. The student sets were once again met with sparkling children’s eyes, which now have more incentive to go to school.
As a result of the discussions and inquiries from the school directors, there will be individual new fundraising campaigns in the future. At one school all children are missing shoes, at another there is a lack of clothing and at another there is a lack of basic teaching materials for the teachers. See the upcoming campaigns in the Blog and under Donate.
One last day of school for me went to the Escuela Urbana Mixta (Prof. J. S. Alvarez Mendez) – Nacaome. The school is located in a neighborhood of Nacaome that was very different from the rest of the city.
A school building on a devastated site with 2 classrooms; sparsely equipped with the necessities and not really a safe and pleasant learning environment. The window grilles have been vandalized, partially broken open, the fences demolished and torn, and the yard partially a garbage dump from the residents’ garbage all around. The kitchen has been broken into and destroyed, the stove no longer works and the inventory has been stolen. The sanitary annex is unusable because the sewage system and the water reservoir have been destroyed. The sports field, a welcome playground, of course also for the children in the district, is unfortunately unsafe because the fences have been torn down, equipment has been stolen and the doors have been vandalized.
After the first shocking pictures and a conversation with the teachers, the picture was completed with the resulting circumstances of teaching, the daily routine and the provision of school meals for the children. A community of parents has formed, which rotates around preparing the children’s school lunches at home and delivering and distributing them to school at lunchtime. The teachers bring the teaching material to school every day because there is no longer any safe storage. Conditions that need to be changed! See upcoming actions.
I was allowed to take part in 2 teaching units and watch the little ones learning & participate. It was actually an experience, because after initial skepticism, everyone took a liking to me and at the end I was allowed to give a lesson in “painting”. At the end of the lesson I was suddenly Proffe 🙂
After lunch and the break from playing, we devoted ourselves to the donations and talked to the students about the future of the children – if they continue to attend school and want to take their lives into their own hands. I was warmly invited to come back soon. I will.
On behalf of all participating schools, principals & I would like to thank the teachers and students for all friends, family members and colleagues who have implemented this campaign. It is emphasized again and again that it is a blessing and a joy that people across continents are connected, take care of each other, are allowed to participate from each other and, in the case of the initiative, receive such a large amount of affection through donations. It is not a matter of course to receive a gift without asking, which satisfies the most basic needs of knowledge-hungry children in everyday school life. It triggers exactly this one feeling in all children in all encounters: “… what I do, no matter how exhausting it is or maybe against the will of the parents, is exactly right. Even if we have no money, there is it is people who believe & think of us and with affection lighten the path we are trying to walk. …”
I want to say THANK YOU to everyone.
I was very happy,
To know you all as supporters by my side.
Best regards.
Addendum: On this trip it became clearly visible that the education system is moving a little bit in the right direction under the President. It is embarrassing to observe that, as usual, it is distributed from top to bottom and those who shout the loudest, maintain contacts or have connections are taken care of first. Until the end of the education chain, namely the schools in the poorest regions, there will probably still be a lot of time to pass through the country and a few hurdles will have to be removed. Understanding does not extend from the office chair to the student chair, as we might imagine. All the more I stay active and work on my own initiative for and with my friends in Germany and especially Honduras to support their visions and efforts.