Project - The Jungle School

The Jungle School
www.helpinghonduraskids.org/

Read their report of the completed classroom.

The Jungle School was started in response to the need for children who lived outside the city's borders to have access to education. Started at first for the lower grades, it has expanded to meet the needs of the children through 7th grade. Recently the Honduran government has required that children complete the 9th grade before receiving a certificate of completion, so the school is scrambling to create two more class rooms to accomodate it's soon to be first grade completing 7th year. With funds from the Forix Foundation an 8th grade classroom will be completed before the next school year begins. In that year they hope to acquire further funding to complete the 9th grade so that their children can then attend the public high school and complete their educations.

The Jungle School is located on the outskirts of La Ceiba, and as appropriately named, in the Jungle on one side of the Cangregal River. Children in this area prior had little to no access to school, certainly not a free school, so the school here and it's tuition free status is a much needed addition to the area. The homes along the river are in general faced with massive poverty and a lack of basic services. Childhood pregnancy is not uncommon for girls as young as 12/13 and male figures are scarce at best; this sometimes being a good thing because there is more than one story of fathers and brothers taking liberty with women in the family. In terms of providing for the family and creating a stable environment, this is of course, a disaster.

The Jungle school provides these children with transportation to the school, a place to learn and earn a certificate with which they can advance to high school, a mid morning snack and lunch, and a hope to escape an adolescent pregnancy and a life of poverty.

Students are also provided with uniforms, school supplies, backpacks, personal items, medical care, vitamins and a daily hot lunch. This one lunch meal is often the only nutritious meal the children receive all day long. Most of these children would never have the opportunity to attend school, if it was not for this program. In many Honduran families, only some children in the family are given the privilege to attend school due to financial hardships. Children from the associated Hogar (orphanage) in La Ceiba are also transported to the school. They rise at 3:30 am in order to bathe, eat something and board the bus which takes them along the route where they pick up other children to complete the 112 children currently attending the school.