The Program

The Asociación Victoria administers scholarships in Guatemala with the money donated to the Project Victoria Fund. Most of the scholarship recipients live with their families, who meet together regularly at Casa Victoria to discuss the students' progress and receive the scholarship funds for school tuition, bus fare, and school materials. The students are enrolled in high school/career track educational programs including bilingual education (to teach school in Mayan languages as well as in Spanish), bilingual secretarial work (English-Spanish), accounting, nursing, and others. Project Victoria has no one school of its own; instead, we provide funding for each student to attend the high school and program that best fits her/his goals.

Casa Victoria

Casa Victoria is the house we rent so that our students who come from the most remote areas of the country can have a place to live while studying in the city of Quetzaltenango. See our current report for information about which students are now living in Casa Victoria. Marielos Hernández, Project Victoria's coordinator, gives regular workshops at the house for all scholarship students. Each workshop has a theme, for example: the Mayan worldview, reproductive education, current events in Guatemala, traditional Mayan healing through the use of native herbs, and self-esteem.

Extracurricular support

Project Victoria students are awarded scholarships based on their academic motivation, but they were also chosen because they represent underprivileged groups. We give priority to indigenous Guatemalans and female students (who have traditionally been excluded from Guatemala's educational syste) and we recognize that they may face obstacles of discrimination in school and in future employment. For this reason, the workshops are designed with the goal of equipping these students with the intellectual tools to confront such discrimination, to learn how to prevent themselves from internalizing it, and to move toward breaking the cycle of poverty that is exacerbated by lack of access to education. Home visits by Project Victoria volunteers and board members also serve to reinforce the connection between students and role models in the community of Quetzaltenango. Academic progress is applauded and setbacks are met with renewed determination, support, and tutoring. Through this process, we build a social network that gives individual students strength in community.

A Focus on Health

Because Marielos has a background in healthcare issues and expertise in the healing traditions of the Mayan culture, she has taken advantage of Casa Guatemala as a forum to share that knowledge. Several of the Project Victoria students are expanding on the curriculum of their schools by studying traditional Mayan medicines with Marielos, and some of the students are considering the possibility of future careers as health professionals in Guatemala.

Scholarships as social action

For a country to develop in a direction that will serve the needs of its people, the populace must be empowered through investment in education. Guatemala has a history of political, economic, cultural, and ideological oppression, which has created conditions of submission of the general population to the service of landowners and the economically powerful. Since the Guatemalan state is not currently providing educational opportunities to all segments of the population, students with financial need are seeking financial support for their studies from international sources.

For more than 500 years, education in Guatemala has been characterized by classism and discrimination, since only the wealthy have had access to good schools. This has lead to the perpetual frustration and waste of the talents of the majority of Guatemalans, who, if able to study, have a very limited range of options and are very rarely able to pursue their chosen vocation. Education has also been tied to social status and ethnicity, with systematic exclusion of the indigenous population. Since 65% of the country’s population is under 15 years of age, the education of this age group is all the more urgent an issue. Guatemala’s current estimated illiteracy rate, 40% of the general population and a much higher percentage for indigenous women, impedes the country’s development and presents obstacles to the fulfillment of human rights standards. The illiteracy rate is a function of lack of access to education.

Thanks to the help of friendly governments and international aid, education has been promoted in rural areas through various projects. These tend to be short-lived, however, which is why we see the necessity to create a more concrete project with a vision toward sustainability.

Goals

Graduation: a personal victory for each student

The fact that the students who benefit from Project Victoria are receiving an education at all is a source of great pride for them and an achievement in and of itself. They have a deep and serious desire to realize the completion of their education, which, when graduation occurs, will be a true victory for them. It is with this victory in mind that Project Victoria was given its name.

A wider impact

Project Victoria is designed to have a multiplicative effect. By involving the families of individual students in our workshop programming and periodic gatherings at Casa Victoria, we extend the impact of the educational investment to their communities. We've already noticed a new enthusiasm in younger siblings and children in the communities where the scholarship recipients come from--they see now that Project Victoria students are benefitting concretely from the hard work in school that they've done up to this point. Thus, there is a reason to put effort toward doing well in school. Since Guatemala is a country little bigger than the state of Iowa, we cannot underestimate the importance of the example provided by Project Victoria students.

An international connection

Project Victoria acts as an international channel to connect people of generous spirit and social consciousness to one or more students who are poor, Mayan, and returned refugees—especially women who have been victims of Civil War and discrimination. Sponsors will be able to directly benefit Guatemalan students who want to study in a secondary school and who have career aspirations to attain a more dignified and balanced life.

We are looking for sources of aid and friends in solidarity, with the goal of continuing the project for at least six years in order to see the educational process through for individual students. These students may then return to their communities with new professional skills to offer.

Program Objectives

• • To promote and strengthen values, good habits of community solidarity, abilities, and skills through the organization and active participation of the students.
  • To engage Guatemalan and non-Guatemalan students in relationships of educational and cultural exchange.
  • To revive solidarity and cultural and social values among the scholarship students, their parents, and their communities, in order to contribute to better relations within the population.
  • To facilitate the education of a population that has been marginalized from the basic services that the national system is obligated to provide.
  • To contribute to the education of people, especially women, who have been victims of war, poverty, and ethnic discrimination.

Continue on for news about Project Victoria.

 Tax-deductible contributions to Project Victoria may be made to:

Project Victoria Fund
Greater Cedar Rapids Community Foundation
200 1st St. SW
Cedar Rapids IA 52404
319-366-2862