SEMILLA NUEVA PLANS FOR AUGUST TRIPS TO GUATEMALA
Posted by John Biggs
on Jun 30, 2013
Howdy Everyone,
First I want to send you all a huge thank you for making our Global Grant a reality. Like I mentioned at the District Conference, Rotary has been the biggest thing behind our organization in 2013. With five new communities, and the funding to build powerful partnerships, including a recent one that brought high protein corn seed to over 2,500 families, we wouldn't be where we are without Rotary. We've been spreading the story everywhere we can, and we hope to make sure that when people see and hear about Semilla Nueva, they hear about Rotary as well. And now its more time for sharing!
We are looking for participants for our upcoming two trips to Guatemala. We will be working, planting pigeonpea in several of the communities currently being sponsored by Rotary in the second and third week of August. The trips were loved by the Rotarians who came in October of 2012! You can read about them from Beth Markley's (from Boise Downtown) blog: http://markley.com/manic/tag/guatemala/
With a new Rotary project beginning in 2014, we would love our partner clubs in the US to send representatives to meet our Guatemalan Rotarian partners as well as work in the communities their clubs are helping.
I'm including a trip description in the email. Essentially we have a one week immersion trip which will involve sleeping in the villages and becoming parts of the families for a week. The second trip involves staying in a hotel with a pool, wifi, and AC during the evening, and working during the days.
This is a great chance to meet the Semilla Nueva partner farmers, learn about rural development, learn about Guatemala, practice your Spanish or learn some, and learn about how the right kind of education can help families stay together on their land--and grow a better future: But for most of us, it's one of the most important opportunities to see how the rest of the world lives, how blessed we are in the states, and how easy it is for us to use our gifts to make the world a better place.
We also added some new videos to our website, which give great footage of the projects. They have some thank you's to Rotary at the end as well! www.SemillaNueva.org
If you have questions about the trip, please contact our trip administrator, Kristin Lacy at Kristin@semillanueva.org
Please do me a favor and forward to all the Rotarians you can.
Plane tickets are still cheap for this trip, and we've heard of a lot of interest--now we just need confirmation!
Wishing you all the best,
Curt
ps. I haven't been to Idaho for more than 40 hours this year--the new workload has kept me plenty busy! But I'll be back in September and hope to speak at a number of the clubs in the valley to let everyone know what we've been able to do and how thankful we are. In the meantime, I want to thank Mike Sieler for doing such a great job of sharing some of the triumphs of the project to a number of clubs in the valley.