This is a time of year when many local individuals and families are struggling — trying to make ends meet so that they can provide material bounties for their children during the holiday season while still being able to pay utility bills and put groceries on the table.

Taking that into consideration, it is difficult for us to ask family and friends and neighbors to consider donating to a nonprofit, but for those that are able, and so inclined, we would like you to consider helping to fund a project that is near and dear to us.

Please also consider that Guatemala is the 2nd poorest country in the Western Hemisphere (behind Haiti) and there are many families there that struggle every day, and utilities and tables aren’t even a factor — they have no electricity or water, and they have no table.  Their condition appears to be cyclical in nature… parents keep their children home from school so that they can work to support the family’s existence.  Because the kids aren’t educated, they do not acquire job skills that produce larger incomes and when they have families of their own, they put in place many of the strategies that their parents used.  Their struggles are real, but we aim to make a difference!

Up through August of 2017, we at Guatemala Service Projects Inc will be raising funds to make a huge impact at the Rio Camanibal elementary school in Guatemala.  We are going to be giving the school the gifts of a reading and technology library, two things that they do not have in the slightest way at present.  We have already raised enough funds to cover the equivalent of two large bookcases and have collected more than half towards our goal of 500 Spanish language library books!  There is still a long way to go, though, including funds for 25 tablets, a RACHEL Server, and one PC.

Do you have $400 to spare?  (Wow!  I know… that’s a hefty price tag!  Let me explain…)

Many of our friends work for I.T. companies or institutions of higher learning.  We thought that perhaps one of you might want to have bragging rights and be able to say that your $500 allowed us to deploy the first of many Rachel servers — I know we will want to do many of these in the future!  Don’t know what a Rachel server is?  Neither did we until just recently!

A RACHEL (Remote Area Community Hotspot for Education and Learning) server acts as a Wi-Fi file server that will sync with up to 50 tablets and provide server-based educational apps without requiring licensing, download, installation, etc. It includes 300GB of pre-loaded content including Wikipedia, Khan Academy, interactive world maps, textbooks,  400 books from Project Gutenberg, Medical Encyclopedia, music apps, math games, OpenOffice suite – TONS of stuff.  Everything is in Spanish and it does NOT require access to the internet!  Each tablet receives content from the server as a shared source.  Plus, the school teachers can add content to what is provided on deployment, and adding content to the Rachel server makes it instantly available to all of the tablets that connect to it!

What’s more?  It is pre-approved by the Guatemala Ministry on Education and includes curriculum materials that mesh at all educational levels from preschool to baccalaureate!

This is PERFECT for a rural highlands school and is small enough that we can easily transport it to Guatemala when we go!

Now, if you don’t have $500 to spare, but would like to contribute any amount of money towards this project, we have set up a page that shows eight different funding amounts and a 9th option to donate any amount that you wish.  Even $5 is not too little, as donations in that amount can buy Spanish language books, school supplies, or be pooled with other small donations to have a big impact!  We are more than 25% of the way to our goal, but need some help yet.  Click here!

We are a 501c3 charitable organization, and any donation will generate an acknowledgement letter that you may reference at tax time.