A Special Thank You!

A special Thank You to my colleagues at MATC from students in the La Pedrera Project

On Thanksgiving day, these students sent a special thanks to friends at MATC for $1000 in donations. These donations will insure that an additional 4 students will be able to attend at the start of the new school year in January.

A special thanks to the following people who donated money or materials for the program:
Anne Steineberg, Ay Moua, Bob Stocki, Diane Kercheck, Dorothy Sciammas, Francine Waldhart, Lucy Betz, Marcia Blackman, Margaret LaSalle, Stan Urbaniak, Susan Retzer and Tony Garza.

We are still seeking donations to the project. There are still close to 30 students in the community without sponsors. Here is a special holiday offer. If you would like to present a donation of $25 or more as a holiday gift to a friend or someone in your family, I will send you a beautiful card depicting hand-woven textiles from Guatemala (See attachment) that you can send to your loved-one.

We reached another milestone this week when we were finally able to establish a (weak but working) internet connection at the La Pedrera project building. Our first action was to try and download updates to the anti-virus software. One of my next lessons is going to be about SAFE internet use. It seems to be a serious problem here.

We had a pretty good week with our advanced students, getting them to assist us in installling software and testing share-ware typing tutors. Finally, we installed a printer in the lab that was generously donated by two volunteers.

Also this week, I attended a community Festival in the nearby town of Zunil. Here are my photos.

This week's report is a bit late because I took the weekend to travel to the rural community of Canton Vela to start hooking up a computer lab. It turns out that the community has the computers but not a secure building in which to keep them. They need to secure the windows and door a little better. They also need to restore electricity. But, using an old router, we cut and made connecting cables for the future computers. My hope is that the presence of the wiring will motivate someone to take the other steps.

If you've never stayed in a rural community where chickens and ducks roam the house along with all the grandchildren, it's pretty interesting. Here are a couple of photos. The first is just some kids and pigs playing where the "paved" road ends to Canton Vela. The second picture shows the community building in the background.








Here are links:
Direct link to the project site: http://www.lapedreraschoolproject.com/
Link to Casa Xelaju project site: http://casaxelaju.com/pedrera/
Link to my Blog for updates: http://thomerwald.net/travel/guatemala/
Link to Photos of Zunil Festival: http://thomerwald.net/travel/guatemala/Zunil/

THANKS!

David Thomas
Instructor, Visual Communications
MATC