Help Maria Rivera continue her studies @UWC Mostar

Maria Rivera Calleja was born in Mexico City in 2005. Since her early childhood, she has been a very bright, hard-working girl with a passion for social causes and the well-being of the planet, always trying to find ways to help people around her.  After finishing 10th grade at The Woodlands Highschool near the top of her class, Maria entered an international selection process that culminated in her being chosen to attend The United World College in Mostar, Herzegovina.  This prestigious school brings top students from 60 different countries, each selected on the basis of their individual academic and personal achievements.  Currently, there are 16 United World Colleges (UWCs) in the world, and their stated mission is “to make education a force to unite people, nations, and cultures for peace and a sustainable future. UWC believes that to achieve peace and a sustainable future, the values it promotes are crucial: International and intercultural understanding. 

The tuition and associated expenses for the two years at Mostar are USD $45,000 dollars, and given our current financial conditions, we have sought to raise funds via GoFundMe. Fortunately, our friends and family all over the world have responded with generosity, allowing us to raise more than half of the funds required for the two years that Maria will -God permitting- study at UWC Mostar. Thank you for your continued support, and thank you for keeping Maria's dream alive. Regards, Sergio Rivera, Maria's father.

OCTIBER 22, 2021 UPDATE, by Sergio Rivera Vazquez, Organizer

As we approach the end of October, it is time for an update on the initiative many of you have invested in, and that still has such an interesting (and somewhat challenging) road ahead: Maria's dream to attend UWC Mostar.

Although everyone in our family has been a mere witness of the amazing adventure Maria (the protagonist in this story) is living, it seems to us that the experience Maria has had so far in Bosnia & Herzegovina has been even more profound and life-changing than anything we could have anticipated in the early summer, when Mostar was only the name of a medieval, far away city, and the promise of a school full of motivated, rather unique kids from 60 different countries was only that, a promise...

To put it in very few words, the past seven weeks have been magical and very real for Maria, at the same time. UWC Mostar seems to be a community fully embracing the ideals of international understanding that the founders of the United World College movement had in mind when they first opened Atlantic College in 1962 (the school in Wales I was lucky to attend from 1978 to 1980...) which is in a sense wonderful and magic, but UWC Mostar has also shown Maria and her schoolmates what it means to be in the middle of a city divided by ethnic differences and social hardship, which could not be a more realistic portrayal of the world we live in.

Maria is doing very well at school, and she is taking great interest in the subjects she is taking, which include Global Politics, Anthropology and Environmental Science. Last week she completed something called "Project week", during which she chose to go with some of her schoolmates on a hiking trip around the beautiful mountains of Bosnia & Herzegovina.

As far as the funding campaign goes, we took a break during the summer, giving our sponsors and friends a much-deserved brake, but we are back, with renewed faith and enthusiasm this time, hoping to arrive to our goal of raising USD$ 45,000 before the end of the year. As I have said before, no contribution is too small for this great enterprise. Thank you in advance for your continued support, and please share this campaign with any noble friends and family members you can think of.

Wishing you all a great weekend, I leave you with a quote from the great Sir Winston Churchill: "“We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give."

Love,
Sergio
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SEPTEMBER 22 UPDATE - Dear friends: UWC Day is the annual global celebration of the United World Colleges' mission and values, which takes place on 21 September every year, to coincide with the UN International Day of Peace.  The pictures above were taken during UWC Day at Mostar. Maria is taking full advantage of her first days at UWC Mostar, making many friends from all over the world, and she is already working hard at the subjects she chose as her fields of study at the International Baccalaureate (Global Politics, Psychology, Environmental Studies, Math, besides English and Spanish). Today, Maria is participating along with a French schoolmate in a workshop organized by a local museum in Mostar... Thanks again for your continued support!

Dear friends: Greetings from The Woodlands, Texas.  The first phase of the fund-raising campaign for Maria achieved wonderful results, and thanks to the solidarity and generosity of many of you, we have been able to raise nearly 60% of the funds needed so far. Maria is already in Mostar, and her first days at the United World College in Mostar, an amazing medieval city in Bosnia-Herzegovina, have been filled with amazing discoveries and a brand-new,  wonderful, diverse community in the making, as this picture shows.

What makes studying at a UWC unique?  UWC's Mostar official Website describes how the learning process takes place: We learn in Mostar through late-night talks in rooms, on walks from residence to school, sharing coffee with refugees in service activities, collecting oral histories for Balkan Studies projects, in buses traveling around the region for project weeks and, of course, through inspiring classes that aim to reimagine our relationships with facts and ideas that shape these worlds outside the classroom. While the International Baccalaureate forms the foundation for academics, any UWC Mostar student will tell you that the intellectual and emotional growth you undergo here cannot be contained by the IB. We are committed to the fact that learning takes place in the every day".

As I said during the first phase of the campaign, no donation is too small. Maria is now starting her two-year academic life at Mostar, and knowing her, she will overcome every obstacle, and she will also help others resolve every challenge that life will put before them at Mostar. With your help, we will all be able to overcome the financial challenge set by this campaign as well.

With our most heart-felt thanks in advance to those helping Maria realize her dream,

Sergio Rivera