It is an honor for us to announce a new addition to the Lemonade International Board of Directors, Rebecca Caswell.

Rebecca was raised in Florida and extreme south Georgia in a large family. She decided to head north for college in Spartanburg, South Carolina where she met her husband, RJ, and graudated with a degree in Special Education from Converse College. After marrying in 1998, they took a tour of the southeast while Rebecca taught children of all ages with special needs preferring to only live in towns beginning with “Ch”, Charleston, Chattanooga and now Charlotte, NC.

Rebecca and RJ are the parents of four children all adopted internationally. Gannon (7) and Ruthie (6) were born in Guatemala and their five year old twin sons, Andrew and Peter were born in Ghana. After bringing Gannon home from Guatemala in 2004 Rebecca has been a stay-at-home mom. While at home her passion for advocating for children in need has continued to deepen.

The Caswells became connected to Lemonade International when searching for a small relational Christian ministry in Guatemala. They began sponsoring a student at Escuelita Mandarina and with each passing month Rebecca became more impassioned by the work of Lemonade International. In her quest to do and give more to Lemonade, Rebecca ran a half marathon to raise funds to support Mi Casita Safe Home in December 2011. She continues to feel closest to God and has a deeper understanding of the Gospel of Jesus Christ when being an advocate for those she feels have been forgotten.

Rebecca began her tenure as a board member on February 15, 2012. We are thrilled that she has agreed to serve in this capacity. We believe her heart for God and for the people of Guatemala, along with her passion, knowledge, expertise and vision will serve us well. Please join us in welcoming her to the Lemonade International community as she serves in this way.

Do you have a ton of good ideas but have a hard time actually getting around to making them a reality? A very good friend of Plywood People is Charles Lee and he is dedicated to solving this problem. He has just written and released his first book, Good Idea: Now What?

Charles understands what it is like to have a great idea, but then get so bogged down in the details, questions, self-doubt, and resistance that it becomes a monumental task to actually see it through. There is a way through it! Going from inspiration to execution is hard work. Many steps stand between a good idea and the hit product, profitable company, or social change you envision. Your initial “aha!” moment provides the key to begin this process, but it’s the way you make your dream happen that truly defines your success. We believe that this book is an incredible tool to consider in the pursuit of your idea.

We have joined up with our friends from Help End Local Poverty to co-host a great event, with Chalres Lee, author of Good Idea. Now What? If you’re in the Raleigh area, you don’t want to miss this opportunity for leaders, idea-makers and social entrepreneurs.

More Information & Registration

Schedule:

8:30 Registration
9-10:30 Session 1
10:30-11 Q&A – Break
11-12:30 Session 2
12:30-1PM Q&A – Break
1PM Networking Lunch

Cost: $10 at the door ($25 including Charles Lee’s new book)

“Sitting around thinking never helped anyone. Charles Lee understands that until you ship, nothing happens. Fortunately, he’s not going to leave you alone until you do precisely that.” – Seth Godin | Author of Poke the Box

We will be hosting a trip to Guatemala exclusively for those who sponsor children in La Limonada through Lemonade International.

The plan is to have participants fly from their hometown airport and meet in Guatemala City with other sponsors from around the country to spend quality time with the child/teacher you sponsor!

The trip will include personal visits, time at both of the schools in La Limonada and a special field trip with the sponsored child/teacher.

When:  April 25 – 29, 2012

Schedule:

Wednesday, April 25:  Arrive in Guatemala City
Thursday, April 26: Visits with children/teachers at schools and homes
Friday, April 27: Field Trip with sponsors and child/teacher
Saturday, April 28: Day in Antigua
Sunday, April 29: Depart for Home

Cost:

• Airfare: $300-700 (to be booked after you receive confirmation from a Lemonade International team member)
• Food & Lodging: $120 per person at the Lemonade House (includes three meals per day)
• Administrative Fee: $200 per person (covers LI fees, facilitation of trip, transportation, support for team on the ground that will serve you during your stay)
• Activity Fee: To be determined after the field trip is planned (approx. $10 per person)
• Personal Spending Money: $50 is suggested (including lunch at your own expense on Saturday)

Please Note: Typically for each group member there is also a cost of $300 per person which helps to provide sustainable support for our programs in La Limonada. The child/teacher sponsorship trip is set up differently than other trips through Lemonade International but we would still like to challenge you to raise this additional amount to help support the programs we support in La Limonada.

If you are interested in this exciting opportunity please email Cherie at cherie@lemonadeinternational.org. You can also review the Short-Term Groups Important Information document for more details.

-Cherie Cummings

Miriam is a new social worker for the “Mi Casita” Safe Home in Guatemala City. She and Victor, her husband of 34 years, are Christians active in their local church in Zone 5 (near La Limonada), and committed to family values. She also provides training for the Mandarina and Limon teachers, and Victor is the values, Bible, and sexual education teacher for both schools. This past week they delivered messages of hope to the parents of the kids who attend these schools.

The monthly “parent’s meeting” is compulsory for parents as a condition of their children’s attendance, and in this first meeting of the school year Miriam talked about conflict resolution in the home, broken marriages, and the impact of male-figure influence in the lives of their children.

Most of the moms who were in the room are single, and listened closely as Miriam painted a not-so-pretty picture of what happens when multiple men enter and exit a family environment (often as boyfriends of the single moms). She then described the best “model” of a male-figure influence – Jesus. She told the adults that the most important answer is the introduction of Jesus to their children, and the important role they play in this introduction. It was a simple message outlining the importance of teaching their children Biblical principles, how they must be kind to their children, and how they must also be open to them so they don’t have to learn all their life lessons on the street.

We appreciate and love Miriam and Victor, and the burden that God has placed on their heart for the children (and parents!) of La Limonada.

-Rebecca Gant

-Photos: Tina Breshears

The following appeared in the January 29th Sunday edition of Nuestro Diario – Guatemala’s number one newspaper (pictured above). Just two pages before this article, there was a write-up about Diego Chic’s death and major violence in La Limonada. This article follows by bringing hope to the community as a whole. Featuring Priscila Yool – the psychologist at the Mandarina School.

The constant risk isn’t important to a group of volunteers that are available to the children of this neighborhood.

The life of Priscila in La Limonada wasn’t like just any child. When she was ten years old she had to walk more than fifteen minutes to get out of the neighborhood to get to her school, in Jardenes de la Asucnción, Zone 5. But no one went alone, her parents, Miguel y Cadalina del Yool, always accompanied her because of the great fear of all of the crime that lurks in the area.

She always enjoyed studying, she always saw groups of men smoking around her house in the alleyways – groups of young people smoking marijuana, sniffing glue or committing crimes. As the time went on, there were more young men living like this, listening to music with the volume all the way up, jumping across the laminate roofs of the houses after committing their misdemeanors.

In order to not be their victim, her life consisted of being inside her house and inside the evangelical church, only 200 meters away. “After six in the afternoon I couldn’t go out of my house- not even to the store. If it was very urgent, my dad had to go with me,” Priscilla remembers. These were the hard days of the colony ‘El Esfuerzo’ in 1995.

Miguel Yool laments the fact that he didn’t have the resources to give Priscila and her three older siblings a better life, but he always motivated them to study. “Education is the only inheritance we can give you,” he would tell them before going out to work as a bus driver, while his wife took care of the house.

Not everything was bad in La Limonada. Other citizens of this ravine went to work to earn their “daily bread,” just like her dad did. This motivated her to graduate as a teacher in 2003, the year that her family decided to move to Santa Catarina Pinula, because every day there was more violence. Her current goal is the University, studying for her Masters Degree.

La Limonada is a ravine that was gradually invaded in 1958. Between 60 thousand and 100 thousand people live there. Forty percent are children and adolescents under 15 years of age, according to the study Asentamientos precarious in la ciudad de Guatemala, written by an Urbanist, Francisco Rodas Maltez.

Now, the municipality of the city has this designated sector as ‘neighborhood status’ with ten colonies. The first to be occupied was part of the continuation of the stadium Mateo Flores and was named “15 de Agosto”- it was this date of 1959 that the Military let the people make houses there, by the order of the president Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes. At this time, there were 11,700 people.

With the passing of the decades and because of the abandonment of the government – the area became overpopulated and the violence gained momentum in the community, to the point where the gangs marked their own colonies with boundary lines and to date the rivals of the other neighbors are not allowed in. Even less the people from outside.

Tita Evertsz came to this reality in 2000, when she founded a support center for children in the ravine. She gave spiritual help to a gang member from La Limonada – who she had met, while he had been hospitalized for a gun-wound, in the hospital San Juan de Dios, where she was his social worker.

She started by giving food to 13 children, their parents left them during the day (at this time there were few laws to regulate the start-up of the care program) while they went out to work. “They have passed through many hard times and people see them as monstrous. But it’s the result of not being attended to like a child deserves,” Evertsz confirms.

It turns out that although almost no one can go into La Limonada, the gang members value the sincerity of those who really want to help them. She won their confidence and now has two schools: The Limón, in the colony Loudres I, and Mandarina, in Loudres II. We were able to enter La Limonada simply because we were with her.

Between the two schools, the team of 50 workers attend to over 300 children that are sponsored by international organizations with food, schooling support, psychological attention, and fine arts.

Priscilla Yool was studying Psychology in the Universidad de San Carlos when she met Tita in 2008. She gave classes to Tita’s son and Tita invited her to be a part of the project to help children. Now, she’s 26 years-old and is one of the two psychologists that attend to the children between 4 and 15 years of age.

The young girl ensures us: “If God permitted me to grow up here, and to get ahead in life, it’s to show that this place doesn’t only have bad people. These little ones deserve to have trained educators and that’s why I returned to La Limonada to help.”

Although Mandarina has suffered recent theft and bomb-threats in the past two years, the gratefulness of the parents for the actual work and to see a distinct future for their children, the danger hasn’t pushed out anyone from the team. The team lives off of offerings that don’t always supply their personal needs or even the needs of the schools.

-Translated by Rebecca Gant

The three youngest students at the Mandarina School take a train ride during class

We’re excited about our new community development pilot project – installing solar lightbulbs made of recycled soda bottles in homes in La Limonada. The photo above is the first one which was just installed today. Our Community Development Director, Hubert Bendfeldt Vásquez, has been working on this for the past several weeks with the intention of helping people from the community start a small business installing the solar bulbs.

The bulbs are composed of nothing more than one-liter plastic bottles, water, and bleach.

This innovative technology was developed in Brazil more than a decade ago. It is installed through a sealed hole cut in corrugated tin roofs that are commonly found throughout the developing world. It produces light equivalent to a 60-watt bulb and can be installed in less than an hour. The bulbs provide a surprising amount of light simply by diffracting sunlight through the water and spreading throughout the house instead of focusing on one point. The bleach keeps the water clear and microbe-free.

The project holds much promise for the La Limonada community. It will help to provide an extremely low-cost alternative solution to electricity, providing light for families to cook and clean and for children to do homework. It also has the potential of re-purposing thousands of soda bottles.

Follow our blog for updates on this exciting new project.

We know that God is near in times of pain and loss. We can be comforted by this fact when remembering the dual characteristics that La Limonada has: hope and pain.

Diego Chic, a new student in the Mandarina school this year, was playing outside with his siblings this Saturday while his mother kept an eye on them from her door.  There was a tragic situation in the small street in front of his house, which eventually took his life. He was wounded, taken to the General Hospital, and passed away a couple hours later.  His three older siblings have been attending the school for the past year and have a good relationship with their teachers. Our hearts and prayers go out to this family during this devastating time, while they try to make some sense of the unexpected death of the youngest of the family.

Diego wasn’t the only one to suffer from the incident. Two other young men from the community also lost their lives and one man is still hospitalized. Many of the team members are also hurting to have lost a student, neighbor and friend. May we share in their grief as we continue to pursue solidarity with the community.

We respectfully and formally send all of our condolences to the families that are affected. We ask that you join us in prayer as we plead and work for peace in La Limonada.

-Rebecca Gant