Media
Another recent volunteer, Debbie, has written about her experiences in Honduras with Project School Supplies on her blog. Read it HERE.
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Please read about the work Project School Supplies is doing on the touching blog of Jon, a recent visitor to Copan:
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Canadian high school student Noemie Dulac has recently been featured in her local newspaper Le Courrier de Saint-Hyacinthe for her fund raising efforts for children in rural Honduras.
After visiting the Copan Ruinas area and seeing first hand the amazing work Project School Supplies does, Noemie decided to dedicate her final year school project to raising money to help build a school.
Noemie has held a spaghetti supper and a Latin dance night to reach her goal of $5,000 for a new school. She will finish the International Programme of Education at Saint-Joseph Secondary School this year.
Read the full article (in French) HERE.
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Seattle-based author R.H. Sheldon recently published an article entitled Changing the Lives of Honduran Schoolchildren on the diverse website Suite101.com. Please click HERE for the full article online or you can read it below.
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In 2007, musician Ellen Finn moved to Copan Ruinas and founded Project School Supplies, a grassroots organization that improves schools and students’ quality of life.
When Ellen Finn first traveled to Honduras, she planned to stay for a week to study Spanish. Two weeks later, she flew home to Seattle, sold her belongings, and gave up a career in music. Then she returned to Honduras – three months after her first visit – with the intent to teach English.
It didn’t take Finn long to recognize the desperate conditions of the schools in the villages that surrounded her. Most of the classrooms had no books, desks, or blackboards. Often students sat on cement floors under leaky roofs, and many schools were without restrooms or adequate lunch programs.
So shortly after her move to Copan Ruinas, Finn committed herself to raising money for school supplies and building repairs. That’s when she founded Project School Supplies.
Project School Supplies in Copan Ruinas, Honduras
When Finn first founded Project School Supplies, her goals were to supply village schools with educational and building materials, but the organization evolved quickly and their mission grew to include the following services:
* providing school supplies, teaching materials, and books
* supplying materials for repairing existing buildings and for building new structures
* offering educational programs such as dental and self-care workshops
* providing scholarships for exceptional students in need of school supplies
And Project School Supplies has achieved great success in reaching these goals. To date, the organization can boast a number of accomplishments:
* buying school uniforms for more than 25 children
* building three schools and now working on a fourth
* starting a visiting doctor program in one of the villages
* implementing a four-month vitamin pilot project in a distressed school
* starting an emergency grocery delivery program for families in urgent need
* setting up a program that turns wood scraps into building blocks for kindergarteners
* coordinating a nutrition and vegetable garden program in impoverished communities
* establishing a scholarship fund for children with good grades in need of school supplies
* supplying more than 30 schools with instructive materials, games, and general supplies
* building a house and starting a garden for three orphaned children whose mud home collapsed
* setting up a dental hygiene program that included workshops and the distribution of donated toothbrushes and toothpaste
* repairing and restoring more than 17 village schools, which included installing restrooms, building water storage units, replacing roofs, and putting in electricity
It should also be mentioned that Finn has adopted two street dogs – Betty and Freddy.
Project School Supplies Current Ventures
By no means is Project School Supplies resting on their laurels. The organization currently juggles multiple projects that range from conducting book drives to building schools. The book-drive project, for example, is seeking donations of used books – in Spanish – to meet the needs of the next school term. As Finn is quick to point out, Amazon offers used books in Spanish for as little as 75 cents.
Project School Supplies is also trying to provide beds for schoolchildren. In the Copan municipality, 286 families don’t have beds for their children, which means they must sleep on the ground where dangerous insects reside. As a result, many of the children get sick and some die. However, Project School Supplies has found a carpenter who will build beds at a significantly reduced cost and a driver who will deliver those beds for free. With adequate funding, the children will no longer be forced to sleep in dirt.
Other current projects include providing school uniforms for rural children, gifting Christmas baskets to struggling families, adding restrooms and water storage units to schools, and continuing to provide the much needed school supplies and building repairs. In addition, Project School Supplies is now building their fourth school, something they can do for little over $4000 – thanks to volunteer labor, a free engineer, and discounts on material.
Helping Schoolchildren in Rural Honduras
Clearly, Project School Supplies has, in a short time, made significant inroads into the village schools in rural Honduras. Finn’s commitment to her work and the children around her has led to multiple successes and has brought her a sense of fulfillment unlike any other.
“It seems like the right thing to do,” Finn says in a December 2009 email interview. “I’ve been so fortunate in my life in so many ways and I want to share…Besides, I get hooked on the moments.”
And moments are what she has. Like the look on the kids’ faces when she walks into a schoolroom carrying boxes of books and supplies. Or getting a mother and her sick baby to a private clinic and paying the expenses, after the woman walked three miles down a mountain and found the free clinic closed. Then there was the village so eager to have a school (after five years of government promises) that everyone met the deliver truck at the village entrance – on horseback, on bicycle, on foot.
Supporting Honduran Children
The need in Honduras is as great as ever. With the downturn of the economy and its impact on tourism – as well as the current conflict as a result of the coup – more people are out of work than ever, and families are going hungry. This, Finn says, only makes her want to work harder. So she continues to expand Project School Supplies in order to provide schools with teaching and building materials. And she still delivers Christmas baskets to needy families. And provides uniforms for schoolchildren in the villages. For Finn and her organization, it’s about the children and their desperate conditions. And the smiles on their faces when she walks into a room.
