Marc Maxson is GlobalGiving's Manager of Performance Analysis. This summer he traveled throughout Guatemala and visited a number of GlobalGiving projects. On May 28th he visited "Miguel Angel Asturias Academy." When asked what he would tell his friends about this project, Marc said: "Incredible: You need to see this!"

During the week of May 24 to May 31, GlobalGiving colleague Robert Dubois and I visited 8 projects in Guatemala and held two workshops about media. Miguel Asturias Academy agreed to host one of the workshops. This is what we saw there.

- Walking through Miguel Asturias Academy -

The Academy was clean and quiet when we arrived, yet students filled every classroom. If you have ever visited schools in Guatemala, this is an anomaly. All over the world, noisy classrooms distract students from learning. Not so at Miguel Asturias Academy.
“Where is Miguel?” I asked Steve, our American host, workshop coordinator, and school director of development. He looked at me funny. Miguel Asturias is not the founder. Miguel Asturias was a Guatemalan Novelist and champion of indigenous peoples. The founder, Jorge, who is an Ashoka Fellow and no lightweight himself, adopted Miguel Asturias’s philosophy to education. I gather that this means empowering the Guatemalan youth through respect towards one’s native culture. As Steve explained, “we the teachers are also learners. Everyone is both.” Also, students can wear either uniforms or embroidered indigenous dress. For many years Guatemalan elites used clothing to identify and discriminate against indigenous peoples.

At break time (3:20pm), students poured out of the classrooms into the central basketball court. Some headed to the snack bar, where an old woman sold pork rinds covered in ketchup and mayonnaise, a snack I mistook for pizza at first. Girls chatted on the stairs that led to another 10 classrooms on the second floor. Wandering up, I found one student typing a document in the computer lab. No one chaperoned my wandering or supervised this student; she was using the computer simply because she wanted to. This illustrates what the school’s stated mission of “breaking the cycle of poverty through education” looks like.

I descended and joined Steve in the main courtyard among the kids watching and playing basketball. “We’ve got this basketball tournament that’s going on now,” Steve said. “We played yesterday and actually, we won. I wish you’d been here to film it.”
Ducking into a side office, I found a student reading English aloud from a laptop, getting additional help from Kate, an American volunteer teacher. This academy had (I think) four American volunteer teachers. One of them (Amanda) had arrived at the school just that day to start a summer of service. School runs through the summer at Miguel’s academy.

- Taking Literacy to new heights in Xela, Guatemala -

Steve took us to the roof, where workers were adding a third floor. “Here we are building a public library. This will be the first one in Xela.” (population: 300,000)
“Really? The first one?”
“First public one. There are a few private ones and a government one, but the door is always locked. No staff ever open it.”
This was confirmed by Paul Guggenheim of the Riecken Foundation, whose organization builds community libraries in Guatemala and Honduras. [Riecken is in the process of joining GlobalGiving this month!]
We interviewed Jorge for a short video.

Robert asked him, “in one word, what does globalgiving mean to you?”
“Apoyo,” [Help] Jorge said.

Links:

• Flicker Slideshow
• http://tinyurl.com/kwpo3y