Common Hope village visit
Last week, we went on another field trip, this time with a group called Common Hope. They help kids and families who are struggling with poverty and can’t afford to get their kids into school. Stacey wrote quite a bit about it on her blog, so if you’re interested, you might want to read about it there.
They took us to a small village called San Pedro where they have several families they’re working with. We visited the public school and then stopped in at the home of one of the families. I’m including pictures so you can see what it’s like. In some ways, it’s so familiar, while in others, it’s so very, very different from what we experience in the United States (especially in Valparaiso).
It was a very good visit. Little field trips like this are a great addition to our regular schedule of classes and wandering around Antigua.
By the way, I’m writing this from the school. We came a little before class to use the wifi.
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- San Pedro's church
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- it's right on the main square
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- along with a community laundry basin (lots of people here don't have running water)
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- visiting the school
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- one of the classrooms
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- inside view
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- another classroom
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- a couple of students?
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- it's not exactly fancy
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- home visit
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- it's two rooms made of concrete board
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- street view as we leave
A quick note about the house we visited: It’s designed to be possible to break it down and rebuild it on another site if necessary. Most of these folks don’t own their land, and if the owner notices they’ve improved the property (by, say, building a house on it), they often raise the rents to an unaffordable level. So the family has to move. You can read more about it on Stacey’s blog.
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