El Lustrador Foundation Inc

We will buy computers for the classroom but more important, first, we will feed the students and their families and will continue feeding them during the school year. We will hire a physical education and English teachers because at the present they don’t have any.

We will build a roof for the school playing area, at this time the kids don’t have a playing area during the rainy days. We will buy uniforms for all the mire than 500 kids for this school and do the same to other schools from the area because at the moment we can help only 150 children. We  will be sure that the school kids and their siblings if possible also have a warm meal everyday.

I was born in a little village in Guatemala, when I was 8 years old I was working on the streets as a shoeshine boy, we were so poor that I had to eat from the landfill. Because the 33 years of civil war in Guatemala and extreme poverty, I migrated to the USA only with 6 grade of elementary school. In the USA I went to school to learn English and later took regular clases, now I am a biologist. I want to give the children of the landfill in Guatemala the opportunity I didn’t have there to go to college that way they don’t have to migrate. My Foundation is helping in small scale in education since 2015 giving small scholarships to 150 children every year, we want to to continue giving full scholarships and eventually been able to help several schools in the area and in several states of the country. We want to send as many children we can to college that way they can change the future of the country, we want to educate that way they don’t migrate. None of the schools we are helping have computers and I think they are very important.

An estimated 60% of Guatemalans live in poverty and the sixth highest rate of chronic malnutrition in the world and the highest in Latin America.  Guatemala is still recovering from a deadly, decades-long civil war that ended in 1996.  

Only 40% of Guatemalan families enjoys food security. Chronic childhood malnutrition affects children of various age in Guatemala.

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the already severely low food security. Many people are sick, some are dying, and countless others are losing their livelihoods because of the disease itself and because the quarantine prevents them from working and earning money. 

We believe every child should have a chance to education. Guatemalan children who live in poverty don't have privilege to go to school because they have to earn a living. El Lustrador Foundation is working to help children who live and work in a local landfill in Guatemala City to be able to have access to the public school. There are about 30,000 people, living in the landfill area. 

El Lustrador Foundation has worked in several areas in distributing food, clothes, scholarships, other essential necessities and hope throughout Guatemala where people live in extreme poverty and when natural disaster strikes. 

The new approach is that we only operate with volunteers, we don’t have any pay employee, many of the volunteers were raised in poverty and now they are professionals and some of them are teaching at this school, that way kids can see that education is the way to end poverty. All donations are going direct to the children education. Our work is unique because I was one of these children, I know what are they suffering and how they think. I talk to all the kids and tell them my life history, I give them hope because they are seeing me a real person that was and us one of them. I am the one who travel to Guatemala and personally give the scholarships . We eat together and talk about education and the future, they trust me and accepted me as one of them, they need somebody to trust. It just to tell them what to do. They saw me on tv or the newspaper and because I get close to them, they see it is possible for the to do the same.

I am sure to visit the schools in Guatemala 2 to 3 times a year and talk to the children. I often have video calls with the teachers (some are ELF volunteers) and ask for the progress of the children and find a way to help them if they are behind. I think visiting them in their school is effective because they see that I care about them and I am coming back and was not only one time help. I believe these kids need the personal touch because many of them don’t have a father and they see me as their own father and believe that I really want to help them, believe on them and love them. I believe having some teachers volunteers on site help give the kids more trust.