Support the School 4 Mayan Orphans!

IMPORTANT NOTICE:

This campaign has received donations via our webiste and so we have taken the decision to move our campaign there. All donations made through this site have been transferred to the School account so they're safely stored. You can still help build the Dream School by donating at the following link: www.amorguatemala.org/donate Thank you!

Please note:Help Mayan Genocide Survivor Arnulfo Build An Education Centre for Orphans and Vulnerable Children, And Realise His Dream For His People In Guatemala

We invite you to be a part of a very special project which has been an incredible 24 years in the making!

Help Arnulfo Oxlaj, the only survivor of a child massacre in his village in which 115 children perished, realise his dream: the Afretlain Centre, a Centre of Education and Community Transformation  for indigenous orphans and vulnerable children which will also serve as an Adult Training Centre in the K´iche´ Mayan village of Chiul in Guatemala. 

With the help of hundreds of caring people from around the world, we are planning to start building later this summer. We're extremely excited that this is finally going to happen!

"What we need is a revolution, not with weapons but with love and generosity" - Arnulfo G. Oxlaj



CHIUL

Chiul is a beautiful but war-devastated area in the remote Cuchumatan Mountains where only one in ten children attend school, the majority obliged to work from the age of five by an extreme poverty imposed by the policies of successive governments. According to the WHO, Chiul has one of the highest rates of chronic malnutrition and illiteracy in Guatemala and the world. Still today the people, scarred by rape, splicing of pregnant women, massacres and confiscation of their lands, are afraid to speak fearing more violence. 

The Peace Accords were signed in 1996 after 36 years, yet the holocaust continues. Today, the weapons are poverty, malnutrition, illiteracy, marginalisation and fear. Twenty years later, the indigenous people still suffer discrimination, human rights abuses and are drowning in a lake of extreme poverty, where education is a million light years away. 



A NEW FORM OF EDUCATION

The Afretlain Centre is home to the non-violent movement for justice and freedom for the 22 Mayan ethnicities, for the preservation of their critically endangered knowledge, heritage, lands and lives. The Centre will champion rights and support agriculture, entrepreneurship and leadership.

Moreover, the Centre will provide a holistic, innovative education that doesn´t seek to programme but to liberate. It will develop gifts and literacy in mind, heart and soul, producing purpose-filled peacebuilders and a pathway to equality, peace and a green world. It will also act as a catalyst for the national campaign for justice for the genocide, officially denied to this day.

The Afretlain Programme will form a network of Centres throughout Guatemala whose mission is to free the Mayan people, for millennia slaves in their own land and today threatened with extinction.



THE DREAM

This Centre is the lifelong dream of AMOR Founder Arnulfo Gómez Oxlaj. Born in Chiul in the midst of the brutal armed conflict, when he was eight soldiers rounded up all the children in Chiul and threw them one by one into a deep well to perish. The soldiers´ plan to burn them alive was thwarted when they ran out of matches and they left. Four days later, Arnulfo was rescued by a woman. Of 116 children, he was the only survivor. Little by little, he transformed this tragedy into peace, into a determination to help his people rise up out of the ashes of genocide and contribute their gifts and talents to the world. In that moment, the dream was born in him to build a Centre that would be a model of peace in his country, a dream which matured over time. He began to take food, medicine and words of peace, justice and hope to people in need, the first action of AMOR.



THE CENTRE

The Afretlain Centre will provide an education for 180 vulnerable children of both primary and secondary age. The school will also serve as an Adult Literacy and Skill Center outside of school hours, improving the capacity of 220 parents to feed their families.

The Afretlain Centre will provide girls and boys with a humane, multilingual education that preserves their K´iche´ Mayan culture and language, for a village without culture is without foundations; an education that doesn´t programme children but instead helps develop their gifts and talents, providing a pathway to building equality, peace and a green world.

The Afretlain Centre, already designed, will have two storeys, with 17 classrooms, a kitchen, an art studio, a sports court, bathrooms, and a teacher´s room. A clinic will serve the health needs of Chiul where there are no doctors. There will be a vegetable garden and livestock to help provide healthy meals for the children.

ABOUT AMOR

The non-profit organisation AMOR was founded by Arnulfo in 1993, and registered in the UK in 2012. AMOR works for justice in the indigenous communities of Guatemala devastated by genocide. In 2014, The British Ambassador classed AMOR as “the NGO with the potential to make the greatest impact on the lives of indigenous women and children in Guatemala”. A key benefit is that the project will be carried out by a highly trained local team led by Arnulfo, a qualified Construction Manager. AMOR´s President of the Board, Sandra Hannen M.Ed. (that's me!) will supervise curriculum development and school management. AMOR will voluntarily manage the implementation process, together with a local parent-teacher committee.

“Dear friends, Greetings and a hug from myself and my people. On behalf of my 115 companions in the well, I ask you to be like angels from heaven and give a glass of water to the children and women of Chiul.” – Arnulfo Gómez Oxlaj

For more information please visit www.amorguatemala.org or contact us .  You can also donate directly from the website via Paypal . Thank you for your drop of water to make this project come to life!

Each donor will receive regular updates on the project. All donors over £100/$150 will be included in our widely cross-promoted publicity materials and acknowledged on our website.

THANK YOU for helping transform the lives of the Mayan people, one child at a time!