POSTED BY KATHLEEN GUERRA | JUNE 7, 2013
In Guatemala, we recently hosted the Secretary of State during his participation in the Organization of American States General Assembly in Antigua, Guatemala, a beautiful colonial city that was formerly the country’s capital. As Cultural…
Great to see Secretary Kerry giving an audience to youth in Guatemala! ChildFund has worked with children and youth in Guatemala since the 1960s.
Pleased to report that Luis Amendola, project director on ChildFund Honduras’s USAID-funded Community-Based Maternal, Neonatal and Child Health Innovation project will be presenting today at the Global Newborn Health Conference in Johannesburg, South Africa.
The theme for this year’s conference is “Accelerating the Scale-up of Maternal and Newborn Health Interventions. Luis is one is one of five presenters for today’s session, “Home-Based Newborn Care: Country Successes and Challenges.”
We anticipate the presentation will take place between 9:15-11:30 this morning and is being live-streamed. Tune in at http://www.newborn2013.com and learn more about ChildFund’s work with USAID in Honduras and why it’s so critical to address the developmental needs of newborns.
Each year, ChildFund and our global colleagues in the ChildFund Alliance, gain insights through our Small Voices, Big Dreams survey. The survey asks 10- to 12-year-olds some important questions about their hopes, fears and dreams.
Luis, age 11, from Guatemala had some key messages for us: “If I was president of Guatemala, I would give children support and protect them from the violence that exists in my country,” he said.
Luis’s biggest fears are earthquakes, rain and drought; he has had to experience all these things within his community as well as forest fires, landslides and storms.
Luis is also concerned about the environment: “The biggest problem within my community is the trash, and, therefore, if I could do one thing to help it would be to clean up all the trash and the rivers to make for a cleaner and safer life for my community.”
Listening to Luis, who is one of five children in his family, inspires me to keep seeking solutions that improve the lives of children who live in extreme poverty. Find out more about ChildFund’s work to help children like Luis in Guatemala.
January marks my sixth anniversary as president and CEO of ChildFund International. I often think back to that first day of work. I was on an airplane. I flew from Richmond, Va., (ChildFund’s headquarters) to Ecuador to start my orientation.
Since ChildFund’s work was all about helping children, I figured I should start my education where that happens — in a remote village in a developing country. I chose a Latin American country because it was the part of the developing world I knew the least about, after having spent almost 20 years living and working in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.
My strongest memory of that trip comes from near the end of that first week, when we were meeting with one of our local partner organizations (ChildFund has 600 local partners in 31 countries). After a day spent observing Early Childhood Development centers and after-school programs, I was talking with local youth about their plans for the future, when a tiny Ecuadorian woman (I’m 5 feet, 8 inches, I’m sure she was much shorter than 5 feet) dressed traditionally, appeared at the community center. She had heard that ChildFund’s president was visiting and came to talk with me.
Full of emotion, and with tears running down her cheeks, she told me her story. Her husband had died 15 years earlier leaving her penniless, with several children to raise. She said she was fortunate to enroll her youngest child with ChildFund, where he benefitted from many health and educational programs over the years. He was also matched with a sponsor whom she described as generous. In addition to his monthly sponsorship contribution, the sponsor supported the family further, paying for a much-needed new roof for their small home, and, most importantly, helping set the mother up in a small business (tailoring, if I remember correctly).
The emotional mother grabbed me at this point and hugged me, saying she really didn’t know how she and her children would have survived without ChildFund and her son’s sponsor.
With my eyes already filled with tears from the mother’s heartfelt story, I happened to look up to see her tall, now nearly grown, son standing a bit behind her. Dressed in jeans and a nice shirt like any typical teenager anywhere, he looked sheepish and slightly uncomfortable at his mother’s very public display of emotion, and the attention it was getting from me and others. “What are you doing now?” I asked. After he got over his embarrassment, he told me he was taking an IT training course and hoped to get a job in that field.
At that moment, ChildFund had me — not only professionally but also emotionally. I knew I had made the right decision joining this organization. The only way we can stop poverty from becoming an inherited disease is to invest in children so they have the capacity and opportunity to bring lasting and positive change to their own lives and that of their families. ChildFund did that with this boy, now a young man. We will continue that work in 2013 with millions of children who deserve a better life.
Don’t let another 365 days pass by. Make a difference in a child’s life. Become a sponsor.
On Nov. 7, a 7.4-magnitude earthquake shook the highlands of Guatemala, hitting the communities of San Marcos, Sololá, Huehuetenango and Quetzaltenango especially hard. Thousands were injured, 44 were killed, homes crumbled and power and water services were suspended.
“My children were all with me at home,” says Irma, 37, a mother of nine children. “When everything was moving around we ran into the yard and together we held our hands. My house fell down to the ground; now we are living here next to our old house. We built a little room where we have our bedroom and kitchen with rustic wood. Most of our stuff is ruined; we almost have nothing.”
ChildFund staff is working with local authorities and other partners in the area to restore housing and respond to psychological distress. We are also working to ensure access to water and sanitation and to see that children, especially those in emergency shelters, are protected and safe.
Sharing a link to live coverage (Spanish and English) of the “Expert Consultation on Prevention of and Response to Violence against Children in Early Childhood.” ChildFund’s Early Childhood Development Specialist and other well-known experts are participating in this important discussion in Lima, Peru, today and Tuesday.
