Project School Supplies Equips Rural Students

By R. H. Sheldon
When Ellen Finn first traveled to Honduras, she planned to stay for a week to study Spanish. Two weeks later, she flew home to Seattle, Washington, sold her belongings, and gave up a career in music. Then she returned to Honduras -- three months after her first visit –- with the intent to teach English. It didn't take Ms. Finn long to recognize the desperate conditions of the schools in the villages that surrounded her. Most of the classrooms had no books, desks, or blackboards. Often students sat on cement floors under leaky roofs, and many schools were without restrooms or adequate lunch programs. So shortly after her move to Copán Ruinas, Finn committed herself to raising money for school supplies and building repairs. That's when she founded Project School Supplies.

When Finn first founded Project School Supplies, her goals were to supply village schools with educational and building materials, but the organization evolved quickly and their mission grew to include providing school supplies, teaching materials, and books; supplying materials for repairing existing buildings and for building new structures; offering educational programs such as dental and self-care workshops; and providing scholarships for exceptional students in need of school supplies.

To date, the organization can boast a number of accomplishments. It bought school uniforms for more than 25 children. It built three schools and is now working on a fourth. It started a visiting doctor program in one of the villages. It implemented a four-month vitamin pilot project in a distressed school. It started an emergency grocery delivery program for families in urgent need. It set up a program that turns wood scraps into building blocks for kindergartners. It coordinated a nutrition and vegetable garden program in impoverished communities. It established a scholarship fund for children with good grades in need of school supplies. It supplied more than 30 schools with instructive materials, games, and general supplies. It built a house and started a garden for three orphaned children whose mud home collapsed. It set up a dental hygiene program that included workshops and the distribution of donated toothbrushes and toothpaste. It repaired and restored more than 17 village schools, which included installing restrooms, building water storage units, replacing roofs, and putting in electricity.

Project School Supplies is not resting on its laurels. The organization currently juggles multiple projects that range from conducting book drives to building schools. The book-drive project, for example, is seeking donations of used books in Spanish to meet the needs of the next school term. As Ms. Finn is quick to point out, Amazon offers used books in Spanish for as little as 75 cents.

Project School Supplies is also trying to provide beds for schoolchildren. In the Copán municipality, 286 families don't have beds for their children, which means they must sleep on the ground where dangerous insects reside. As a result, many of the children get sick and some die. However, Project School Supplies has found a carpenter who will build beds at a significantly reduced cost and a driver who will deliver those beds for free. With adequate funding, the children will no longer be forced to sleep in dirt.

Other current projects include providing school uniforms for rural children, gifting Christmas baskets to struggling families, adding restrooms and water storage units to schools, and continuing to provide the much needed school supplies and building repairs. In addition, Project School Supplies is now building their fourth school, something they can do for little over US$4,000, thanks to volunteer labor, a free engineer, and discounts on material.

In a short time, Project School Supplies has made significant inroads into the village schools in rural Honduras. Ms. Finn's commitment to her work and the children around her has led to multiple successes and has brought her a sense of fulfillment unlike any other.

"It seems like the right thing to do," Finn says in a December 2009 email interview. "I've been so fortunate in my life in so many ways and I want to share... Besides, I get hooked on the moments."

And moments are what she has. Like the look on the kids' faces when she walks into a schoolroom carrying boxes of books and supplies. Or getting a mother and her sick baby to a private clinic and paying the expenses, after the woman walked three miles down a mountain and found the free clinic closed. Then there was the village so eager to have a school (after five years of government promises) that everyone met the deliver truck at the village entrance –- on horseback, on bicycle, on foot.

The need in Honduras is as great as ever. With the downturn of the economy and its impact on tourism -- as well as the political conflict as a result of the overthrow of President Manuel Zelaya last summer -- more people are out of work than ever before, and families are going hungry. Ms. Finn says that this only makes her want to work harder. So she continues to expand Project School Supplies in order to provide schools with teaching and building materials. And she still delivers Christmas baskets to needy families. And provides uniforms for schoolchildren in the villages. For Ms. Finn and her organization, it is about the children and their desperate conditions. And it is about the smiles she sees on their faces when she walks into a room. (10/18/10)

Note: This article was reprinted with permission of the author. It was originally published at www.suite101.com.