Vanessa in Guate

Mission Impact has been serving in Santa María de Jesús through the ministry of Próximos Pasos for 14 years. Próximos Pasos exists to educate, meet basic needs, and share the hope found in Christ with Santa María girls and their families. Próximos Pasos had its first school year in 2003 with a total of 29 students in 1st through 4th grade. This year, there are 206 students in 1st through 9th grade! Glory to God! Another praise is that the parents of the students are more involved now than ever before, and students are leading devotionals and prayers. Guatemala's history would suggest that females are second-class citizens. Guatemala is very much a male dominated country, and the usual mindset is that if girls attend school, they will go until 3rd or 4th grade so that they can read and write. After learning to read and write, they can stay home, clean, raise the family, and begin selling produce and artisanal goods. Girls make up a majority of the Guatemalan children that do not a

Santa María de Jesús is the little town where Proximos Pasos, Mission Impact 's all-girls school, is located. This region is home to an agricultural community; it consists of men who are primarily farmers and field workers, and women who are homemakers as well as vendors of the harvest and their own handmade goods. When I make my way through the town at 6:45am there are small boys, young men, and older men who are probably grandpas who head out with their machetes, rain boots, and empty nets for a day of work. There are some boys and girls who go into the center of town to collect water from the public water reservoir (I guess you can call it?) because their home has no running water. There are women carrying baskets of food/produce/product on their heads to the market to sell for the day. Sometimes they carry their product to the microbús (big vans) to ride into the more populated city in order to sell to a larger population. This is the way that the community fun