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