| First school for
Kuna children
Located in Arrajan, a tropical area twenty minutes drive
north of Panama City, in the midst of a shanty settlement, where several thousand
Kunas live in extreme poverty: their children uneducated.
|
| | The tribes of
Panama: Kuna, Ngobe, Emberá,
Buglé, etc.
Our contract
with them is to teach their uneducated children to read and write, but not do
anything to change their indigenous culture. |
| Getting Started in Panama - First staff, first steps |
 |
| Ana Tere,
Isabel (Facilitator), Nadiuzka (Community co-ordinator), First school (Arraijan
- 15 minutes from Panama City), Jan Van Erp (potential Co-ordinator) with Bruce,
& potential students. |
|
We
salute our Volunteers who keep returning |
| (While
many others still work with us in their home countries)
When we started our volunteer program we didn't dream so many kind talented people
would take up the challenge of aiding 's poorest children as their own personal
project. Thank you all. | |
|
Quiet Irishman
sponsors and names a school after his Alma Mater back home.
Gavin Molloy, with help from some generous friends has patroned "Scoil
losa"school
in the barrio La Esperansa | 
So far 24 children are attending. | | |  Volunteer
Life at Bruce - Photos of volunteers who have served or are serving
at the various centres of Bruce. Also photos of some of our children in class,
& at play. | They
will still go to bed hungry tonight.. |
| Panama
Open - April - With the participation of Kinder Zon we have opened our project
in in Panama, and started the first schools for indigenous children (& some
of their mothers). Our plan is to get enough schools functioning around the capital
city to be able demonstrate to the Government of Panama that the large population
of extremely poor children not in School must be urgently helped, as we are doing. | 
Our provisional
centre, in Arraijan - replaced by a hostel sharing in Old Town Panama City. |
|
|
HIV / AIDS pandemic thrives in Latin America |
The publisher of the book "What's a Virus, Anyway", is
coming to volunteer, and giving a quantity of these books in Spanish..
| The UN has declared
that the number infected with HIV/AIDS in Latin America is greater than that of
Europe and the USA combined. If you live in one of these countries you would
not know this - it is not reported in the media, talked about in the chambers
of Government. They are in denial. But we know it is there, children and families
in the communities we help are suffering: and there is little help available.
| |  For
over three decades Latin America has endured the unenviable distinction of having
more street children per capita than any place on earth. What is less known is
that for every child who sleeps in the street there are 300 more in practically
the same condition who live on the street by day but at night sleep under a plastic
sheet or in a woven read or adobe hovel with their siblings. Both are classed
as "Street Children", the distinction being 'IN' the street, as opposed
to 'ON' the street [those 'IN' are more likely to be addicted to drugs]. When
we first arrived in we worked with both types of Street Children, but for the
past two years we have concentrated our efforts and resources in helping the much
larger but less known population of Street Children who live On the street; those
abandoned in their own homes. During this time we have managed to open hub centres
in 6 cities, with 20 satellite children's centres located in the poorest barrios:
where we educate, feed, medicate and care for them.
Won't
you join us!. |
| On 9 January - We reopen
our programme to educate the poorest children in Cajamarca. When we left our original
project in the hands of ex volunteers it was with the understanding that they
would carry on this work;however they chose to operate a homework | 
club for children we had already goten into school over a year ago. So we have
returned. Above is our new, larger centre. |
 We succeeded in
enrolling all 27 children of our Las Palmeras shanty school into the local state
school. This was unique in our experience in view of the facts: it was
mid term, we only had a few months to prepare them, all entered into grades near
to where they would have been had they been regularly attending school all these
years. |
| The Ministry
of Education have invited us to install our little schools for very poor children
within sellected primary and secondary schools. We have agreed to operate a pilot
in one school, and if the relationship works: will consider others. | | |
...... 
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