DARRINGTON — Children from this small, economically depressed town in the Cascade Range foothills went all out last spring to help establish a community library in the mountain village of Zacatecas, Guatemala.
Darrington Elementary School students collected school supplies, puzzles, multiple sets of Lego toy building bricks and money for books. They made English-Spanish vocabulary flash cards, painted postcards, printed photos and wrote letters to send to the children in the village.
Their efforts recently won recognition from the federal government of Guatemala.
Ana Ordonez DeMolina, the Central American country’s minister of education, sent her thanks and a framed certificate from the Republic of Guatemala for the support given to the Zacatecas Library.
Students got their first look at the certificate last week in their school library. Now the kids have vowed to keep up the relationship with their sister library and are planning another drive for supplies in the spring.
Sixth-grader Shasta Howe, 12, said she has enjoyed the project because it involved a lot of fun art activities.
“And we got to do these things for other people,” Shasta said. “The award is really cool because you don’t usually get certificates from different countries.”
Shasta and her friends also were pleased to look at recent photos of the children in the Guatemalan community.
“I would like to meet the kids in Zacatecas,” Shasta said. “But I am not sure I would visit for long, because there’s no TV there.”
Darrington adults involved in the Zacatecas Library project include parent volunteer Litza Lovell, school librarian Mary Quantrille, community volunteer Martha Rasmussen and Catherine Austin.
Austin, 27, works for the U.S. Forest Service in the summer and is a certified emergency substitute teacher for the Darrington School District in the winter.
Fluent in Spanish, Austin also volunteers for the nonprofit organization Avivara, which was responsible for delivering the supplies from Darrington to Zacatecas. Her mother and stepfather, retired teachers, are Avivara volunteers in Guatemala.
Avivara, whose mission is to improve access to education in Guatemala, reports that about 70 percent of those in rural areas live in poverty and only about 25 percent of the people know how to read and write, Austin said.
Every elementary class spends a short period each day in the library, and so the library became the staging ground for the Zacatecas project, she said.
“It was an intimate, informal setting where the kids learned about Guatemala and life there. They also learned a little bit about the Spanish language. Then we brainstormed about how they could help the children in Zacatecas,” Austin said. “They formed a real connection with their sister library.”
Shipping the supplies and contributions to Guatemala was too expensive, so they were stuffed into the suitcases of Austin’s folks when they came for a visit.
The Kiwanis Club of Darrington contributed money for dictionaries for the Zacatecas Library. Rasmussen, a club member, also gave a personal contribution. Her father, the late Marvin Gharet of Everett, loved libraries and would have been pleased to donate to the cause, she said.
Lovell, who led the Darrington students in making postcards and flash cards, said Darrington families were generous in their contributions.
Quantrille agreed.
“It was an awesome project involving the school and the community,” Quantrille said. “The library in Darrington has more than 10,000 titles, while the library books in Zacatecas fill just one bookcase. Our students live in a community where we don’t have much. Now they feel much more fortunate.”
Gale Fiege: 425-339-3427; gfiege@heraldnet.com.
Source:heraldnet.com
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