It’s mid-March. The school year is about to begin after January and February’s summer break. Families spend what they earned in February to buy school supplies for the beginning of classes in March. For CUDA, new libraries are in place. We have geared up for our biggest year yet, ready to work with 4 new schools and 2 second-year Living Libraries schools: 55 teachers and 1300 kids.
And then the world falls apart.
At the end of 2019, we welcomed the Tulsa Christian Foundation and the Bell Trust to the short list of CUDA supporters that make our work possible. They join the Bobbie Solley Foundation, in its third year of supporting the Living Libraries team (Lucia, Nancy, and Julié) salaries—a tremendous gift. These foundations, along with several dedicated individuals and families and a couple of churches, donate on a monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis so that we can work toward justice, wellbeing, and joy in Arequipa.
We're about sustainable community development, targeting a huge hole in Peru’s education system: reading comprehension. We train teachers who are on the front lines working in public elementary schools, so that our humble team of five can multiply its impact with thousands and thousands of kids. We do this in the name of Jesus of Nazareth because we believe that, as God’s reign takes hold in Arequipa and God’s will is done here as it is in heaven, it means kids grow and learn and read and understand what they read and begin to experience justice, wellbeing, and joy.
We depend on your help now more than ever. Peru’s education system is in a flux. A lot of kids’ education is a TV show that runs every day on a public station. Good, not great. And while we long to get back in the schools and let kids get their hands on books made of real paper, we are hard at work training the teachers who had committed to learning about reading comprehension this year. It took a while for the whole country to make this transition. But as it looks more probable that the entire school year will have to be completed at a distance, the schools who had committed to being part of Living Libraries are now joining us in virtual training sessions in the evenings and working through our curriculum. We spent April converting our training program of reading strategies to a digital platform and getting that approved by the Regional Ministry of Education. And as of last week we have begun to meet with teachers.
I hope to share more as we work through these new opportunities and challenges. In the mean time, I’ll link to these reports from Alfredo, our executive director, and Lucia, our director of Education Development, as well as three examples of our new digital resources for teachers (in Spanish): Reading, Expanding Vocabulary, and Schema.
Thank you so much for your support of CUDA. If you don't yet support us and would like to, head over to our website to find ways to do so, whether it be a one-time or monthly donation. You can also give back without spending any extra money, either through Amazon Smile or Kroger My Community Rewards.
Thanks for taking the time to remember us when you shop—it adds up!