Scholarships

The scholarship program is the core development program of the sister school project. Though it is important to invest in infrastructure, walls and buildings are only tools to affect the medium through which all true change happens: people.

Investing in education, and thus investing in people, is one of the single most important acts of development in which a community can participate, and it is also one of the most difficult, because unlike buildings and walls, people are constantly changing, and they require continued support in order to focus their changes in a positive direction.

We have a group of motivated, sharp young graduates from Zaite and have offered them scholarships to study careers in high school, on the condition that they stay dedicated to their studies and work hard in school. I will be checking up on their progress and paying their tuition monthly, as well as offering them educational counseling to encourage them to stay in school and make good decisions.

This is our second year of the scholarship program, and our first group of students has done wonderfully in high school. Two of the students are studying science and have returned to their communities to do a research project on how the pollution of the river that runs through town has affected the local population.

The students who graduate will serve as role models for other students in Zaite, and will return to their community and help lift it out of poverty. In a nation that has only been a democracy for 15 years, the education of young leaders from economically diverse backgrounds is vital to help El Salvador move away from its class-divided, war-torn past.