Summer 2011 Trip to Panyebar

Three of the UC Davis InterVarsity alumni families traveled to Panyebar this summer to visit the school and meet with our friends in the village. The three families were those of Ron and Amanda Giles and their three kids, Ethan (15) Elaine (13), and Laurel (10); Ed and Lisa Snyder and their two boys Dominic (13) and Andrew (12). Leanne and I also went with our daughter Allie (7). (Little Kayla, 21 months, had to stay behind with grandma.) We were in the village for a week, June 11-18, and then two of the families spend an extra week in Guatemala before returning home.

The main point of the trip was relational, mainly to check in and see how the school was doing, catch up with the teachers and students, but we did manage to actually do some work.

With the help of helped repaint the basketball court and some of the walls at the school, and we also fixed the baños, for which the water intake had become clogged (and some fiend had made off with the toilet seats).

Overall Colegio Bethel Panyebar is in good shape. There are more kids at the school, about 75 now, than ever before, and they are expecting that there may be as many as 100 next year. They have noticed that a large number of kids are finishing sixth grade in the regional primary schools, and so the teachers want to try to offer two classes of Primer Basico (7th grade) starting in the beginning of the school year next January. To do this, some construction needs to happen on the new second level--a new banister needs to be installed to keep kids from falling off. This is important work and we covet your prayers and possible financial support for this project.

There are some challenges that have arisen related to Catholic-Evangelical issues among the staff. We are hoping and praying that they can be resolved in a fair and even-handed way, and that the school can continue to serve all children in the village regardless of denomination.

The school is seeing fantastic continuation rates into later secondary school. Nearly all of the graduates go on to the equivalent of 10th grade in either Santa Clara, Solola, or Quetzaltenango, where there is a little community of our former graduates all living together in some apartments!

Thank you for your wonderful financial support of what God is doing up in this small village in Guatemala!

Bruce

Environmental and Health Impacts from the Introduction of Improved Wood Stoves: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Guatemala

Kent Moriarty of Mayan Partners, Dan Ludwinski, and Bruce Wydick wrote a paper on the impact of the the high-tech Onil wood stoves Mayan Partners introduced in Panyebar in 2009. The paper was recently accepted at Development, Environment, and Sustainability, a journal edited at Cornell University. Thank you all for your donations to the wood stove project. The good news is that they really work! Here is the abstract to the paper:

Abstract: Improved wood-burning stoves offer a possible solution that can simultaneously impact both problems of deforestation and problems of respiratory health in developing countries. We carry out a field experiment in which new fuel-efficient wood stoves were allocated in a Guatemalan village via the use of a lottery. A 2008 baseline survey was carried out on 2,148 individuals in 351 households, and then a follow-up survey was carried out in 2009, four months after households received the stoves. We find that households with the new stoves reduced wood consumption by an average of 59.1%. We also find indications of reductions in indoor air related health problems, where point estimates indicate a significant reduction in reported respiratory symptoms by 48.6% among women and 63.3% among children.

To read the full article, use the following link: http://usf.usfca.edu/fac-staff/wydick/woodstove.pdf

Trip to Guatemala planned for June 2011

We are planning a trip to Guatemala for June 2011, tentatively June 10-19, although these dates could change a little bit. There are several possible activities we might pursue while we are there: doing another medical clinic, discussing the possibility of a wood stove business in Panyebar, a basketball clinic, and a work project on the school. Please e-mail Bruce if you are interested in going this year!

March 25, 2010

Colegio Bethel, Panyebar – a small Christian junior high in the Guatemalan highlands, a lovely though very poor place. Not too much influence in world events, I suppose. So why continue to support such a place?

Well, because of kids like Hermosillo, a student who graduated last year. Hermosillo is the first generation in his family to go to school. He’s bright, thoughtful and ambitious. His family weaves the brilliant skirts that women wear but the business is not profitable enough to send him to school past 9^th grade. Talking with him and his family in Panyebar before we left last May, Hermosillo shared his greatest ambition: to become a doctor. A doctor. His mom shrugged her shoulders and quietly stated their hopelessness. “How are we going to do that?” But after graduation in October, Hermosillo applied for a prized full government scholarship to a boarding high school only an hour away. And he got it. He was well prepared, a good deal because of his time studying at Colegio Bethel.

Ten of Colegio Bethel’s eleven graduates in October 2009 are now in high school, unheard of in this community even five years ago. And so it’s worth it. These kids may not change the larger world yet, but they will have influence on those in their community and country.

How, then, do we all continue to support Colegio Bethel, Panyebar? By doing as Mayan Partners has been doing for several years now. First and foremost we pay the teachers’ salaries. We work with the new local Board of Directors, empowering them to look after the school and its students. We keep in weekly phone contact with the directors so they are assured of our prayers and concern. We work to support the fledgling community library so that books are available for students from preschool to high school. And we pray, for Colegio Bethel, its leaders, the Panyebar community and for Guatemala.

Mayan Partners is in the process of becoming an independent non-profit. This will relieve some of the burden on Proyecto Fe that has so graciously helped us and the school. So hopefully by the summer, you will write your checks directly to Mayan Partners. We will let you know when the change occurs.

If you have any questions regarding the school, or would like to be included in more detailed updates, please let Bruce or us know.

Oh, and send your encouragement to the Colegio Bethel Girls Soccer Team which is going to the State competition in mid-April! Congratulations to the girls and their coach, Victoriano!

Peace be with you,

Ann and Kent Moriarty

On behalf of Mayan Partners

Greetings from Guatemala, where the tortillas are toasty and warm and the weather is rainy and cold. (It´s winter here--the rainy season.) I'm down here for a couple of weeks starting a research project with Compassion International with my graduate students and checking up on our school in Panyebar. I've been up to the village twice to see how the school is doing and check up on our stove project.

Overall, despite a number of challenges which I'll describe later, Colegio Bethel Panyebar is doing great. The kids seem happy, the teachers are being paid (thanks to the Lord working through all of you), and a new committee of partents, teachers, and pastors is helping to guide the school to the next level.

The "success rate" of our kids after they finish Tercero Basico (9th grade) at the school is remarkable. A huge percentage go on to high school in Quetzaltenango or Solola, the bigger cities an hour or two away after they finish, maybe 60-70%. The first batch of kids who graduated from the school three years ago are now finishing their "Diversificado" (high school). One cool anecdote--A group of them, four guys and five girls, all about 15-18 years old, have rented a 2-bedroom appartment in Quetzaltenango, the second biggest city here--about two hours away. They cook for each other and watch out for each other as they go to different high schools and trade schools in the city. Most of them are Christians and they have this little community together in the Big City, all from the village. They're studying to be teachers, accountants, electricians, and some are doing university preparation. Quite a jump from coming from families where the average parental education is approximately 2 years for moms and 3 years for dads.
Many want to be teachers, which is good, because in this country there are a lot of kids to teach.

The new school committee is working great. They have got all the families to pay a small tuition of $7.50 per month. Anyone who can´t pay can help the custodian clean up on a Saturday, and they´re good for their tuition. The school has 56 kids now, the most it has had, although the goal is to have about 80-90.

The school faces some real challenges. We still have a ways to go before the school is really "finished" in terms of physical structure. Right now the school is not physically safe. We need about $1500 to put in a guardrail to keep the kids from falling off the main story which is elevated about 8 feet above the basketball court. The south wall of the classrooms leaks and needs exterior finishing, about $200 worth of work. In the larger scope of things, about $20,000 is needed to finish the upper level of classrooms, which need windows, flooring, electricity, desks, and fixtures. They want to add a computer room up there, and maybe we can help them with that. Also, the field below the basketball court needs leveling and a fence. It would make such a huge difference if somehow we could pull together this money along with our partners in Proyecto Fe in Alaska, who are planning a trip down in November I believe.

I also had a chance to visit 5-6 familes who had received one of the woodstoves people have purchased. Kent and a local guy here, Victoriano, installed 30 stoves this spring after the 5 a bunch of us put in last June. Wow. These things seem to be working fantastically. Every family I visited reported that they went from using 2-3 cargas of wood (about 60 pounds--what a person can carry from cutting in the forest in one trip) to only 1 carga. This saves each family half a day's work, or $2 (15 quetzales) if they buy it. Total savings in wood over a year then is about $100, the cost of a stove. This also means that the 35 stoves will save about 110,000 pounds of wood being chopped from the forest every year--not a small impact on local deforestation. Moreover, they produce much less indoor smoke. None of the houses smelled like smoke to me when I visited, and people reported fewer problems with kids coughing and lung problems. My RA Laine is doing a second wave village survey here in August, so we can get some real econometric impacts of the stoves, but so far in my small sample, the evidence is pretty darn good. Thanks to Jim for the stove idea, Kento for all his hard work putting them in, and many of you for buying them for people so we could do this field experiment in the village. We'll probably be publishing the results somewhere (informally) so others can learn from this experience as well.

You have no idea how thankful people are here for your support.

Peace and blessings.

--Bruce

Mayan Partners Update

Greetings Mayan Partners. An update on a few things:

First, Kent and Ann are back from Guatemala after living in our village, Panyebar, for four months. It seems like their time there really went well. Kent coordinated finishing the bathrooms, Ann taught in the school, and they also helped install 35 of the environmentally friendly (and lung-friendly) woodstoves many of you helped finance. (We will be evaluating the stoves this summer to assess their impacts; our introduction of them was done as a randomized controlled trial with treatment and control groups.) For more on their trip, you can check out their blog at http://kentnann.blogspot.com/

Second, I wanted to discuss an issue brought up by some of the Mayan Partners who give through individual child sponsorships. This was a model that we introduced a few years ago to raise funds for the school in its initial stages. Since then, two things have happened: We have begun to encourage people to sponsor the *school* for the long-term rather than individual students. Second, these students that were individually sponsored have graduated from the school. All of these funds whether given in the name of an individual student or to support the school directly go to pay for teacher salaries so that the students can attend without paying high tuition. This is the same model that many organizations use that connect people with individual students, but in the future, we would like to encourage people who are giving through individual sponsorships to switch their giving to support the school in general, and even increase giving if possible, perhaps to $40 or $50 a month, which would be a big help.

If you'd like to have contact with an individual student--that is great--and when I'm in Panyebar next week I can try to get you matched up with a student who has an e-mail account. One thing we ask though is that you don't send individual gifts to your student. We have found this makes others in the village jealous and in the end seems to do more harm than good. Also, if you have sponsored a student in the past and would like to know what he or she is doing these days, I can find that out for you when I go down.

Third, I'm going down to Guatemala next week to check up on the school and to carry out an impact study with some graduate students related to the work of Compassion International with other schools in the area. Also, we're going to re-survey Panyebar to see if the public health programs we did last year had any impact, and to assess the impact of the woodstoves. If anyone would like me to find out anything while I'm down there or make contact with anyone, I'd be happy to do that. One important thing I need to do on a personal level is to visit with the family of our former student we sponsored, Lourdes, who tragically passed away due to pregnancy complications last fall.

Peter, Jim, and I talked with the people at Proyecto Fe last week--excellent folks. They have been helping us channel our donations through their 501c(3) and asked us to contribute a little bit to their overhead, so we're going to contribute $150 per month, which seemed right to us. (About 10% of our monthly fundraising.) Peter is also going to be helping them with their bookkeeping and financial accounting.

Francisco, the head teacher, has said that the school would like to install a computer classroom soon. Anyone out there interested in helping with that project during this next year?

Also, we have dreams of adding three grades some day to make Colegio Bethel, Panyebar a six-year middle school + high school. It would be the only one in the area (big area). To carry these things out, we'll need more Mayan Partners and donors, and I want to highly encourage everyone to talk to friends about joining our team, and even bringing them down with you to visit the school in Panyebar. Pray that the ministry might flourish!

The Routine in Panyebar: Kent and Ann

Above is the town of Panyebar. Below you see the two story building. Our "house" is the little one at the corner of that building facing us.

You never know what you might find outside your door when you walk out in the morning… the other day, it was a big pile of corn cobs; yesterday, a cow’s jawbone with teeth intact; everyday, plastic bags that have blown into the little dirt yard. Regardless of what arrives, it is usually a surprise.

But Panyebar is small enough that there aren’t usually too many surprises. We have settled into a routine that works pretty well so far. A shower followed by a cup of coffee while we sit in the sun…a nice start, esp. since the coffee is what we call “local-grown, plancha-roasted, stone-ground by hand, Guatemalan best” which we found at a local house where an ancient woman prepares the coffee as needed. This, as opposed to what everyone drinks (a couple of tablespoons of instant and a bunch of sugar in a couple quarts of water), wakes us up!

Routine includes school for me, where I now remember why teaching was so hard! My plans of using science to teach English have pretty much disappeared, as the level of kids’ English is at the learning-colors level. So, in addition to the actual preparation of 3 classes of science materials, I translate words into Spanish, even simple words like “pour,” “container,” “magnet,” etc. You get the drift! And we all have to suffer through my massacre of the Spanish language. I tell the kids that we are all learning together and they correct me as needed, which is often! I do give them English names as well as Spanish names for materials, so we’re working on it, but I realized that English is a foreign language for them and it is not like kids in the States learning English as a second language.

The other day we dissected a cow’s eye in one class, explored magnetism in another and 2 days ago (Monday the 9^th) I started chemistry with the youngest class of 7^th graders. The latter was a disaster. If I were teaching at home, I would call it the “class from Hell!” You know, kids aren’t trained yet in how to behave in class, they can’t sit still (especially since the class is from 5:35 pm – 6:15 pm), and of the 27 students, 75% are boys, immature ones at that. You can imagine… One of those classes that makes you feel like a failure. So yesterday I shut down the materials introduction and we took notes instead. Makes a teacher’s heart cry. One more shot at it today and perhaps I will choose not to do hands-on with them. As a visiting teacher who is not 100% conversant in either language or culture, it might just not be worth it and the kids just might not be ready. (UPDATE: kids

moved easily if noisily into groups and we are proceeding apace! Yes!

Kent has quickly endeared himself to many, including the family we are living with, the local carpenters and

contractors, and the school staff. He fixed the broken shower water-heater and fixed other water leaks at home. At the Colegio, he has fixed broken lights (one class had no working lights, so when the fog rolled in around 5, it was hard to see your hand in front of your face, let alone try to write!), is replacing broken windows and fixed the school bell which now rings out through the entire town.

The bano is now making serious progress. As one who had to use the “provisional bathroom” (read “pit toilet surrounded by cardboard blown apart by the wind”) in a moment of desperate need, I can hardly wait!

Wading through various misunderstandings and miscommunications has been challenging, but Kent’s Spanish

ability is up to it and already he has gained the trust of the local contractors.

For me, I would wish for a little more freedom. A teacher’s day is a scheduled day and I have to be at the

Colegio. But last weekend, we accepted the invitation from the dad of 2 of my students and we hiked to the spring that is the source of all of Panyebar’s water. This was, may I say, a killer hike.

The kids never complained and were spirited fun the entire 9 hours. Crossing into the nature reserve called Panan, the forest, now only a shadow of what it used to be, still had the power to amaze. Flowers, trees, bromeliads, even freshwater crabs at the spring made the hike memorable. Those and the aching knees and quads!

We made it home in time to eat dinner with the family where we are staying, as is the routine every night before

going to bed.As long as the neighbors aren’t playing their music super loud, or the wind isn’t trying to blow the corrugated roof off, or the dogs aren’t having extensive conversations, it is a blissful drop into sleep.

The girl above in the black is the daughter in the family we are staying with. The two playing are friends and the three below are the brother and sisters of the kids we walked into the forest reserve with.