Help The Little Children: Guatemala

Guatemala is a country in Central America. Famous for it's volcanos, scenery, wildlife, culture, and mountains. But there's something that's going on behind the scenes that most of us don't know about.

Friday, 8/9/13

Poverty In Guatemala - Why Hasn't It Changed

By, Charlotte Milliken

Poverty in Guatemala is severe, people are malnourished, illiterate, and have severe problems with inequality. With the population increasing, which means more mouths to feed, will things just get worse? And why aren't things getting better? To answer those questions we need to look a little deeper.

With 75% of the population below the poverty line, most only making a dollar a day. How can they afford to feed themselves, or their children? How can they get an education? How can they fix serious health issues? That's why so many people are starved, sick, and illiterate. How can the companies they work for afford to pay them, when they themselves, aren't in the best of financial situations? They can't. That's the simple fact of the matter.

Poverty is especially prevalent in the in the rural areas of the north, north-west, and south-west. A lot of the poorly educated and poor are the indigenous people.

The social indicators also effect poverty, as well as the lack of government control. 50% of the children are malnourished and have serious health issues. So now that we know the problem, how can we fix it?

Poverty in Guatemala isn't going to change on it's own.

"Unless someone like you cares an awful lot, things aren't going to get better.They're not."

- Dr. Seuss

Guatemala's situation isn't going to get any better. Not unless people change, people give, and people have an active vision for this country. Giving isn't a one time thing, you need to give your time, attention, prayer, and blessings. It needs to be an active mission, only then will we see a change.

Someone needs to step up to the point of leadership, the question we need to ask ourselves is, will that someone be me?

Friday 8.16.13

The Guatemalan Dump

The Guatemalan dump is a dark place, with thousands a families living in the dump with houses made of trash. They mine for left over pieces of metal, or anything else they can sell. With mudslides, contaminated rivers of water mixed with gases, rotting animals, food, and sewer drainage. People slosh around in this stuff to find things to live off of, the Guatemalan dump is a dangerous place to live.

Children there help mine for things in these terrible conditions, and don't know anything else. Sometimes the women and children will sell tortilla's in order to get there daily means.

With gas tanks, medical syringes, rotting animals, this is no place for people to live.

With most of them earning under $1 a day, others less than $2. The buzzards fly around them as they work, hunting for some rotting morsel to eat.

The women hide their babies under tires so the dogs that roam around the dump won't find them. They dig around in the trash to find food for their families, something that someone else just dumps out becomes their next meal.

More than 10,000 people live in the dump, trying to survive in these conditions.