2017-2018 Service Projects update
The Rotary eClub of the State of Jefferson has two major service projects scheduled for the upcoming 2017-2018 Rotary year. Under the leadership of incoming President Jackie Oakley, the eClub is funding two service projects.
Navajo Solar Light project:
The Navajo Solar Light project is a continued relationship with the Durango Daybreak Rotary club, Durango, Colorado to provide solar lighting to select Navajo families.
The Navajo Nation comprised of about 27,000 square miles of land in NE Arizona, Southern Utah, and NW New Mexico, is home to about 180,000 members of the Navajo Tribal Council.
Approximately 16,000 people currently live "off the grid" with no access to electricity, sewer, or water supplies. Generators intermittently provide electricity. Since gasoline for their generators is frequently too expensive for these remote, mostly elderly tribal members, the illuminated portion of their day largely ends with the setting sun. The Chapter House trucks in potable water and outhouses meet their sanitation needs.
The Daybreak Rotary Club of Durango, Colorado, located near the reservation, became aware of the plight of these Navajo. A solar lighting kit, that utilizes a roof-mounted solar array, provides charging power to three lithium-iodide battery packs that provide power to a LED array. The included wiring systems place three lights in areas designated by the clients, while a fourth line provides a power option for charging cell phones.
Individual Rotarians provide all the labor, transportation, and miscellaneous tools needed to complete the more than 200 installations over the past four years. Current costs are borne by the Daybreak Rotary Club in Durango and the eClub of the State of Jefferson. Volunteers pay about $60 each for food and miscellaneous expenses.
This Rotarian work project provides volunteers with a cultural experience as Navajo elders share their history, language, customs, government, and dreams.
Rotarians conduct two installation sessions per year, in May and September. With efforts focused in Southern Utah (north of Kayenta, AZ) and the "Checkerboard" area of NW New Mexico near Chaco Canyon. The need across the reservation is virtually infinite, so we are starting in areas that provide reasonable travel time for the volunteers. Many eClub volunteers participated over the past four years. Roger Allen, Molly McCallum, Pat (eClub solar project coordinator) and Linda Crane have participated in all of the installations thus far. The May 2017 trip also included eClub President John Allman and eClub Rotarian Theresa DeFazio. Other eClub Rotarian participants include Hal and Francie Kibby and Bob Block.
The second is the eClub’s new “Signature” project, “Let’s Leave No Girl Behind.”
Proposed by eClub State of Jefferson honorary member Frances Dixon “Let’s Leave No Girl Behind” is an International literacy project in Guatemala, Nuevo San Ildefonso, a small Mam village in a remote cloud forest located about three hours from the Adopt-a-Village Maya Jaguar Educational Center.
Thirteen young women are participating in the “Let’s Leave No Girl Behind” project in which they are learning Spanish as their second language—the legal and required language of Guatemala.
However, as only 10% of indigenous girls have the chance to complete primary school, few ever learn to read and write in Spanish. Nor are there opportunities to learn to read and write in their native language of Mam.
“Traveling teacher,” Juan Diego, a graduate trained at the Maya Jaguar Educational Center, proudly heads up this prototype literacy project, which is supervised by two Guatemalan eClub Rotarians, Osman Castaneda and Selvin Rivas. Juan spends two days each week in the village, working with young women eager for an opportunity to become literate.
Few places in the world exist where one will find the level of glaring discrimination that indigenous Mayan girls suffer in Guatemala. They are by far the country’s most disadvantaged and vulnerable group. Indigenous girls are on the bottom rung of the literacy ladder in a county with the highest level of illiteracy in Latin America. Notably, only half of Mayan women are literate in comparison to non-indigenous women.
Due to the area’s extreme poverty, few parents can afford to enroll their daughters in middle school - the costs are prohibitive.
Adopt-a-Village in Guatemala, through its groundbreaking educational programs, is empowering girls to leave behind a destiny of child marriage, a life of childbearing and domestic servitude, and an endless cycle of grinding poverty.
Adopt-a-Village tackles this overwhelming problem from two positions:
Scholarships are made available for girls to attend the organization’s middle school and high school. Female graduates earn a dual diploma in academics and computer science, with certification in sustainable agriculture. Currently our female students are entering university, with several training to become nurses. The remarkable success that these young women have achieved stands as a symbol of hope and inspiration for hundreds of young Mayan girls in the region who dream of a better future.
Secondly, Adopt-a-Village tackles the problem of lack of education and literacy for Mayan girls through its outreach programs. For the hundreds of young women who lost their opportunity for education through early marriage, nutritional and agricultural training reaches them through our cadre of agricultural technicians. The training serves several purposes. Not only does it give them opportunities to practice sustainable gardening skills that result in more nutrition food for their families, but also it brings them out of the isolation of their huts and into the light of group learning where they can share new ideas and concepts.
The motto “Let’s Leave No Girl Behind” is our call to action that will give those thousands of indigenous girls a new beginning. Opportunities lost because of gender discrimination, poverty, and child marriage, can be regained. If we answer this call, these girls can win a second chance to live a more fulfilled, productive, and meaningful life.
Both of these projects are partially funded by Rotary District 5110 Foundation Grants.