Sponsor's update letter from San Cristóbal
26/09/2008
Update from June 2008
Dear Sponsors:
Once again receive our greetings on behalf the SOS Children´s Village family of San Cristóbal in Guatemala. We had grown up as a family in every aspect, thank to the support we receive from you.
We are pleased to share with you the experiences performed along this year. Within the particularities of our Village is that we are at 6 kilometers from Mixco where education, shopping groceries at a better price and Health Centres are available. Thanks to your support it was possible to extend the budget for transportation, which allows us to transport children at a low cost to their schools without exposing them to the risks of the public buses, danger and delinquency. And taking into consideration the difficulties families can have in order to transport to their daily activities as going to school, made us decide to change the strategy for every morning.
Once again happiness arrives to our SOS family, with the graduation of two SOS mothers from our Village on March 27th, 2008, now we have 9 graduated SOS mothers, in less than a year 5 aunts finished their studies as SOS mothers and accepted the challenge of forming part of this project in a undefined term. Along many years the difficulties of finding women willing to accept this commitment and the challenge of educating children of our SOS Family has been a tough goal to reach. In two years many women have experienced the responsibility of being an SOS mother and had preferred to undertake better paid jobs to fill their own families needs and to strength their future, making obvious their lack of vocation for being SOS mothers.
A mother's role
Each year the SOS Mothers as well as the SOS aunts have more understanding their roll as Mothers and about their autonomy inside their SOS families. This year six of the twelve families went out on summer vacation. Four families visited the biological family of the SOS Mother, where they are recognised and accepted as sons and daughters of the SOS Mother, and also visited the recreational places of the region. The other families of the Village visited other places in the city.
It is common that nowadays the climate changes affect each they more the health of the children. The colds, stomach infections, and other sickness had become in part of the growth of all the children. We have a special case which requires the attention of all our SOS Family, there is a young girl of 11 years of age that is suffering of Leukemia. The specialists have not determined the reason, because her blood platelets had not mature in order to have the optimum level to reach the cure of any hemorrhage. A surgery will be probably necessary to accomplish a complete recovery. We expect her to recover soon with God´s help.
In two years the community of San Cristóbal has grown with the integration to our SOS Village of 22 girls and 25 boys which is a 46% of our population which implies greater challenges in the attention of each one of the children.
We fill immensely grateful for the support you give us in order to be able to reach our objectives and goals which are the dreams of our children, we send you our blessings, and hope to fill all your expectations with the present letter with which we want to share with you all the experiences in our SOS Children´s Village.
Sincerely yours,
Carlos Luis Sánchez
SOS Children´s Village Director
San Cristobal
Relevant Countries: Guatemala.