Giving

December 5, 2017 – Colorado Gives Day!

Support GuateStar on December 5, 2017 – Colorado Gives Day!

Colorado’s largest one-day online giving movement, presented by Community First Foundation and FirstBank, is coming up and we need your support.  

On Tuesday, December 5, 2017, thousands of donors will come together to support Colorado nonprofits like ours. Our goal is to raise $35,000 for a clinic and $23,500 for scholarships. Your support helps us continue to provide education and meet the needs of the underserved youth in Guatemala. 

About Colorado Gives Day

Colorado Gives Day is powered by ColoradoGives.org, a year-round website featuring more than 2,000 nonprofits. ColoradoGives.org encourages charitable giving by providing comprehensive, objective and up-to-date information about Colorado nonprofits and an easy way to support them online.

$1 Million Incentive Fund

Thanks to Community First Foundation and First Bank, Colorado Gives Day features a $1 Million Incentive Fund, one of the largest gives-day incentive funds in the country. Every nonprofit receiving a donation on Colorado Gives Day receives a portion of the Incentive Fund, which increases the value of every dollar donated.

To donate to us on Colorado Gives Day, Visit: ColoradoGives.org/GuateStar Or, beginning November 1, 2017, schedule your donation early!

Thank you for your consideration.

Club Extra

Club Extra Is The Link To Learning.

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Each Saturday morning dedicated teachers from Colegio Juan Wesley load the pickup with tables, chairs, and equipment before they visit Club Extra sites located up to an hour’s drive away. Student hosts invite neighbor kids into their home. Each site has 12 – 15 kids. David a host that just graduate has a larger home, he has 30 kids.
The team brings many devices: tablets, Chromebooks, laptops, a printer, a mini projector and the essential Rachel router. Most devices are battery powered.

Each Saturday, teachers and the Rachel router deliver content to students seeking extra learning.

The club serves a wide range of kids, pre-school, never evers, dropouts and those still in school. Some of the students are daily commuters to Colegio Juan Wesley, some go to local public schools and some should be in school but don’t have the opportunity. Their needs are varied. Some want help finishing homework, others work on English. The structure is loose, focused on self paced learning and designed to cover the gaps or feed the curiosity that each student has.

There is no internet. The programs and digital information are served from a battery operated router with storage called RACHEL (Remote Area Community Hotspot for Education and Learning). Rachel uses wifi to broadcast Khan Academy lite, Wikipedia and other programs to nearby computers. Much of the content is relevant to Guatemalan kids.

The clubs have been organized in close collaboration with parents and community leaders. Recently the Ministry of Education heard about the program. They recognized quickly the common goals and collaboration has begun. Club Extra facilitators have been invited to a workshop with the public school teachers. Together all educators agree that there are major deficiencies in the system and a great deal needs to be done to raise the bar especially in math, science. In one center the Club Extra resources are used to help students pass a mandated computer course for which the government can’t provide equipment. The alternative is for the student to walk to an internet bar. Several have walked up to an hour to get their homework done.

Club Extra brings computers and instructors to the home to fill a void in education. Club Extra satisfies the curiosity kids in Guatemala have to learn. Club Extra is a God sent.

Director Timoteo Chocoy says “ We can’t stop. The kids expect us every Saturday and are waiting for us when we show-up.” Visit Album.

But can it continue? All stakeholders agree the program needs to continue. Expansion is dependent on replicating the process: more personnel, another truck, more computers and Rachel routers. More resources will enable more clubs to be established.

Club Extra was born meeting the needs of the community. Consider helping us help the next generation of Guatemalans today.

Development

Clinic Buildout

One of the specific requests from the leadership of the Quiche tribe we work with was for a hospital. We all agreed to start with a clinic. Basic healthcare services are severely lacking in Guatemala. Many doctors at the national hospitals are still trying to get their 2014 wages.  One hospital organized their employees to bring in food for the patients. The most basic services are desperately needed.

This building is being converted to a sun filled clinic.
This building is being converted to a sun filled clinic.

An existing building on the school campus is undergoing extensive renovation on it’s way to becoming a functional clinic. This will be staffed for limited days by volunteer doctors and nurses from local churches until the full schedule and expanded slate of services is  developed.

A team from DeMotte, IN has replaced the roof with a clear story design that allows light to flow into the interior rooms. This January 2017 this same team will return to add a waiting room.

Help cover renovation costs.

Club Extra

Club Extra – Leaves The School Building

This past week as the 2016 school year wrapped up, the Club Extra team hosted a camp in a community about 40 minutes away. The event was organized with the help of the mayor.

Listening to the teachers excitedly recount the week-long experience was evidence that the camp was a rousing success. They made statements like:

Club Extra goes on the road.
Club Extra goes on the road.
  • “The kids were humble and eager to learn.”
  • “Forty-seven children attended, even though many had to miss a couple of days to help with the harvest.”
  • “The children were early.”
  • “Some had never touched a computer.”
  • “This provided the spark to love learning.”

The camp recharged the teachers’ batteries and was a fitting end to their long year. Now they are on vacation until classes resume in January.  

The camp started with a devotional time and then split into groups that rotated through the sessions. The children worked on Chromebooks to learn English, assembled robots and made crafts.

For many of the participants, this was a big deal: A first look at robot kits, and a first chance to see a computer and then use it to hear and learn English. The Google Chromebook computers received programs from a customized local router. This device broadcast the programs to the computers in use. All teaching content was pre-loaded because there was no internet service.

Next year the team wants to take this wonderful camp experience to five communities. Their dream is to offer “Techno Camping” to communities that will provide a place to host the week-long event, and then a smaller place that can act as a permanent and supervised study center. The router and five computers would be left in the new center. Frequent updates to the router would provide content consistent with the users and their needs – Wikipedia, Khan Academy and other quality programs that can be used in independent study.

It’s remarkable to see the teachers take the lead in this program. If these satellite study centers reached 50 students each, it would only take six centers to double the reach of the school at a remarkably low cost. Stay tuned for more on this exciting project.  

Join the pilot project.

Giving

Think of us on Colorado Gives Day

Support GuateStar on December 6, 2016 – Colorado Gives Day!

Colorado’s largest one-day online giving movement, presented by Community First Foundation and FirstBank, is coming up and we need your support.

cgd-2016_master_rgb-1On Tuesday, December 6, 2016, thousands of donors will come together to support Colorado nonprofits like ours. This is our first year to participate and our goal is to raise $35,000 for a clinic and $23,500 for scholarships. Your support helps us continue to provide education and meet the needs of the underserved youth in Guatemala. 

About Colorado Gives Day

Colorado Gives Day is powered by ColoradoGives.org, a year-round website featuring more than 1,900 nonprofits. ColoradoGives.org encourages charitable giving by providing comprehensive, objective and up-to-date information about Colorado nonprofits and an easy way to support them online.

$1 Million Incentive Fund

Thanks to Community First Foundation and First Bank, Colorado Gives Day features a $1 Million Incentive Fund, one of the largest gives-day incentive funds in the country. Every nonprofit receiving a donation on Colorado Gives Day receives a portion of the Incentive Fund, which increases the value of every dollar donated.

To donate to us on Colorado Gives Day, Visit: ColoradoGives.org/GuateStar Or, beginning November 1, 2016, schedule your donation early!

Thank you for your consideration.

 

Technology

New Life for Old Laptops

New open source software allows old PC’s to take advantage of the many apps that are available for Android devices. One of the programs we are experimenting with is Remix OS

Like running an Android Tablet on your PC.
Turn your PC into an Android Tablet .

When installed onto an old laptop this allows the old hardware to run many of the the Android app. It is like running a tablet on your PC.  Giving a new lease to old machines allows us to make more computers available to schools. More devices accessing the content we broadcast from the router expand the goal to digitize more schools that have little or no  connection to the web.

You can help us give the latest to many that have nothing. Old laptops are now very usable. If you have any send them our way. 

Development

BUCKET BRIGADE BUILDS SCHOOL – 3/6/16

Update: 12:30 pm Finishing up now. Work completed! The deck (25 x 9 meters) is poured.  View the archive (available for a few days).  Join in

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Update: 11am  About 75% of the job is complete.

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Update: 7:30am   75/350 bags have been mixed. The present crew  of 85 persons (all ages) has paused for a breakfast break and now work has resumed. Join in

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Begin Original post: On Sunday, March 6th you will have the opportunity to see a motivated Mayan community literally build their own school.

Work will begin at 5AM MT and continue until the entire second floor deck is poured. That is about 43 bags of concrete per hour; more than 350 in all will be mixed then lifted into place via a good old fashioned bucket brigade.

Watch the live and  archived video here. 

Watch hundreds of members of this unified church move closer to their goal to one day have a completed school. This is community in action. Take a minute to tune in and see this heartwarming site.

More about the project here .

A viewer note: The Ustream service is  ad supported. Viewers will be asked to view a short ad before gaining access.  If the feed is live you will see a small red “Live” button (see picture above) otherwise you will be connected to an archived show.  If you watch an archived show and the “Live” version comes back on you will not be notified. Refresh frequently to again join the Live show. Another ad will play each time you revisit.

Club Extra

GEEK SQUAD HELPS ANOTHER SCHOOL

The high schoolers at Juan Wesley have been learning how to clean and repair computers.  Some of these skills were learned in after school sessions of Club Extra.

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Learning to clean a computer

Several of the students had an opportunity during a recent outreach to help a public school in a nearby town. They cleaned and repaired the machines to get them up and running. 

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Director Timoteo- with a student of the neighboring school.

 

Club Extra

Little Router Does Big Things

Many of us are familiar with the lack of resources on the job. This is quite common in Guatemala where you frequently don’t have enough printed material and the web is slow or non existent.

Using a modified router during Club Extra
Using Router during Club Extra

To solve this problem take a router and create  a “Broadcast Router”. This device is an off the shelf router with modified firmware, software and a USB memory device containing content.

The final result is a functional wi-fi web server that fits in your pocket and anyone with a wi-fi capable device  can  connect to it. Most kids in Guatemala have a phone in their pocket. Once connected they simply open up a browser and select any available file to stream or download files.

The parts cost less than $50 per unit. Thirty (30) simultaneous users within 300 feet of this battery  powered devices can access all content their device is capable of processing. Think of the possibilities.

This is important because there are many uses of this device.

The broadcast router is based on the open source, Library Box project.  Our device was perfected by attending a Code for the Kingdom hackathon  where many gifted folks were trying to solve real world problems that ministries and NGO’s have. Our team won a prize for the work done on this device.

We are excited about the practical applications of this award wining device. These include sharing multiple versions of the Bible, videos, audio files etc. This will also be great for many classrooms that don’t have access to the web.

The teachers understand what it can do and are already putting it to good use. One teacher suggested we use it during the last Club Extra to let the robotics class access a large PDF instruction manual. This left other classes with more bandwidth.

If you want to know more about this amazing little broadcast radio router device or how to buy or build your own, let us know.

 

 

Club Extra

Club Extra – an after-school learning program

The second Club Extra is being offered each afternoon this week at the Juan Wesley School. This is about teaching the love of learning and providing the latest to those with the least. This totally optional program starts with a lunch (kids go to regular classes in the morning) then a time of praise and a short Bible lesson. Five classes are offered, rotating each 35 minutes. The topics offered are: art, music, math, English language and beginning program. Learn more.

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