Hello All,
I hope this Friday morning finds you all well. This update will include a brief progress report and our thoughts on the growth and direction of the JRF.
In great news, our children have had by far their best year in school. Students brought their latest progress reports and proudly showed all of the JRF teachers their improving grades. Learning in French has been a challenge for our children as none of our children were familiar with French before arriving in Jacmel. Through the hard work of Catherine, the children and our French teachers, our children have finally more or less caught up to the rest of the students in the school. Our children continue to study hard and take advantage of the opportunity the JRF is providing them, and for that we are grateful. Our first high school graduates and college attendees are still about three years out, but we are more confident than ever that the majority of our children will be able to attend college and become professionals in Haiti.
Having fun with a musical parade outside of the JRF
Things at the JRF have been extremely tight since our move back in 2015. This is partially due to the significant expenses we had to incur to move to Jacmel and partially due to a drop off in donor support. Our hope is that now that we are more or less done with infrastructure and move related expenses and have our core educational staff in place, we will be able to help more locals and take on new projects later this year.
Any new projects we take on will comply with our goal of providing impoverished children the opportunity to succeed. The criteria we will use when considering new projects are:
- What is the immediate good this would do
- How great is the need
- Is there a long-term benefit or goal involved?
For example, an expansion of our feeder program, which is the first area I would like to focus once we have some resources to spare, provides an immediate good in that it fills the belly of a starving child, fills a need as the vast majority of our neighbors’ children go hungry regularly and has the long-term benefit of improving the health and physical development of the child being fed. Another way we believe we could broaden our impact is through providing more scholarships and creating a system that helps us find the pre-teens and teens that will benefit most from those scholarships. We also believe something like a mixed martial arts gym or soccer league could be successful and would comply with these criteria.
Rose Myrtha and Dieulica
As always, thank you all for your support, none of this would be possible with you.
