Everything started at 6 pm on Tuesday April 17th with 39 degree Celsius weather. There were 1216 books for elementary grades to be carried from the Gran Pacifica office to the pick up truck and we were only three CHESS staff members. Thankfully Carlos Jerez from Gran Pacifica was still around and helped us carried dozens of books. The text books were bought by CHESS with funding from Programa Alianzas para la Educacion y la Salud (Programa Alianzas in short) and the support from Gran Pacifica. Different components of the CHESS project are funded by one of the following partners: Programa Alianzas, Gran Pacifica and Rotary Clubs.

On Wednesday morning we arrived in VEC at 8 am and the unloading was less difficult because we were six or seven people. Here is a picture of the unloading / organizing process of the books.

The books were well received by the Delegate of the Ministry of Education in Villa El Carmen, Lesbia Rosales. Helio Alfaro, Social Projects Coordinator for Gran Pacifica and myself hand in officially the books to Ms. Rosales.

As a total, CHESS donated 1216 books in five different subjects Social Science, Natural Science, Math, Spanish and Civics. Through our visits to the schools we were able to confirm how old and destroyed were the books the children were using in these key five areas of study. Below is a picture of the director and sub director of Santa Rita #1, the largest school that benefited from this donation.

On May 7th personnel from CHESS (Helio Alfaro, Manuel Marenco, Aracely Sanchez and myself) and Cristina Pereira from Programa Alianzas went to distribute books to three of the rural schools. It is important to mention that even though teachers were on strike asking for an increase in their salaries, teachers, students and parents organized and came to the schools. Below is a picture from Buenos Aires school.

Here is a picture of students from San Miguel school with their Science and Math books.

In this edition of the Newsletter I have also added a short video of a girl from fifth grade reading from the Civics textbook. To download click here