The community of El Zaite began as a refugee camp during El Salvador’s 12-year civil war. Families from the Eastern part of the country, where the fighting was the worst, left everything they had to escape and moved into tents on what was once a coffee plantation outside of the city of Zaragoza, 30 minutes from the nation’s capital. 15 years later, El Zaite is no longer a tent-city, but rather a thriving, developing community made up of concrete block and sheet metal houses, full of potential, yet still economically marginalized and in need of assistance. Some of the social problems community leaders face are a lack of a reliable water supply, a severely overcrowded and understaffed school, crime led by gang members, limited access to health care, and environmental issues driven by industrial pollution as well as lack of education among the community.

The Sister School Project has a close partnership with the public school of El Zaite, because we feel this is where true transformation can happen through the creation of confident, educated leaders among the community’s youth. The school began under a mango tree when Zaite was still a refugee camp, and has since developed to an institution that serves nearly 400 students with six teachers. The school receives little support from the government and many of the teachers have over 50 students in one class, so many that the students literally do not have room to move. Students only study for three and a half hours a day, because the school must split the day in half to serve all of its students from preschool to 9th grade.

The teachers at Zaite do the best they can under the circumstances, but each day they struggle to impart knowledge in an environment not conducive to learning. Unfortunately, more than half of the community’s children drop out of school before they reach ninth grade. Still, significant improvement has been made through the inclusion of a computation and English program at the school directed by the Sister School Project, and student learning and the drop-out rate have improved significantly in the last two years.

For three years the Sister School Project has carefully chosen 9th grade students from Zaite to receive scholarships to continue their studies, since the Salvadoran government does not guarantee education past 9th grade, and many of the students come from single parent families who cannot afford to pay for high school. We selected these students based on a combination of academic talent, economic necessity, and dedication to community development.

The Sister School Project has a scholarship coordinator, Saul Urquilla, who is a local young man finishing his studies in education at the National University. Saul serves as a big brother or mentor to the group of scholarship students and counsels them on academic and social difficulties, checks up on their grades, meets with their parents to ensure home support of education, and meets with the students on a weekly basis to give them tutoring services and help them develop community service projects which they realize as part of the scholarship program. Saul is the leader of the community, and shows the students, many of whom don’t have a male role model in their lives, that through hard work and studying, they can supercede the circumstances they were born into and transform themselves and the world around them.

The Sister School begins supporting these students’ education in the public school by improving infrastructure and opportunities at the school. From there, we support them economically and academically throughout their high school careers. This year, the Sister School Project would like to expand our support and send some of our most talented students to the University. With your help, we can do it.