Can You Help Us Get School Supplies to Children in Costa Rica?

An Urgent Need & An Amazing Opportunity For You To Help Children Get the School Supplies They Need

It is February and February is the time in which families in Costa Rica head out to buy the $100 of school supplies each of their children need in order to continue going to school. Stores fill the newspapers with ads about special deals on what the students need. It is an exciting time for a country that has fought very hard to help their people be educated.

February is a little different if you are a young person living in a precario or squatter's settlement like the El Triangulo de la Solidaridad neighborhood we work in. With the average income per household being around $200 in the precario, most families can barely afford one child's $100 of school supplies and that is only if things are going well for their family.

It is easy to see why the average precario resident has only made it through the 3rd grade. It only takes one tough February economically where $100 might as well be $1 million and the boy or girl is forced to drop out of school, surrendering any chance of a life outside of poverty one day.

Fifty Young Peoples Lives Are Changed in the Precario

In 2007, our team began helping about nine families purchase the school supplies they needed. It was life-changing for them but, surprisingly, it was life-altering for us as well. Family members wept as we walked into hand them the supplies they needed.

In 2008, we went ahead and set aside $1000 to help 10 families get school supplies. We sent out an email to all of you and you responded by either donating $ or supplies. Your response was overwhelming. As a result, over fifty students received school supplies. The precario was dramatically impacted.

Over the course of the year, we took the program further. We opened tutoring centers in the precario (see photo above) where the students could also receive the tutoring support they would need to be able to do well in school. It isn't enough to help kids get into school. We have to help them do well once they get there. These tutoring centers have been a powerful tool, providing upper class private school students with the life changing opportunity to come and volunteer the tutoring that is dramatically helping the children from the precario.

This is a gift that keeps on giving.

How You Can Help A Child Have A Chance At A Future

So here we are in February again. Families are filling out request forms that we have designed where they are agreeing to report their child's grades each report card so we can track their progress and provide support for those who might struggle. We have just started collecting the lists and have already received 34 back with 59 in total having been requested.

I want to invite you into an amazing opportunity to help these young people and their families. If you can and if you are interested, please click on the link below to go to our website at www.boywithaball.com and make an online donation. You can also send in a check to our office at P.O. Box 14387, San Antonio, TX, 78214-4387. Your gift will help us to be combined with those who have brought down school supplies to fill these lists and help these students have the opportunity to stay in school.

Click Here to Go to Boy With a Ball's Online Donation Page to Make a Donation to Help These Students

One Final Exciting Update

A dream is coming true for the Boy With a Ball/FUNDADEJO team in Costa Rica as Auburn University's graduate design program has taken on the project of designing and coming to Costa Rica to build us a community/tutoring center for us in the precario. The group is currently raising funds for the project with our staff to design the building. To find out more, click on the tutoring center box below.


(Click here to enter the site and learn more about the center!)


Thank you so much for your ongoing investment in our work to reach and equip young people. It is great to work with you as we walk into seeing these young lives changed.

Jamie Johnson

Executive Director
boywithaball@gmail.com
www.boywithaball.com
210-858-5812

A Tour of the Precario

Here is a virtual tour of the Precario with the Boy With a Ball team last Saturday.

We will do this more and more regularly and with better and better video quality. Get in there and meet these amazing people with members of the BWAB team.

A Day in the Precario

Snow, Meetings in Miami & Outreach in Costa Rica

As the Executive Director of Boy With a Ball (this is Jamie writing), one of my responsibilities is to travel away from my work in helping to build the San Jose, Costa Rica team both to go and support of our San Antonio, Texas team, to help build BWAB's involvement in camps and conferences in the U.S. and then to continue to represent BWAB and our work to the academic, corporate and government world.

I left San Jose last Wednesday and headed to Miami, Florida to be with Joseph Holbrook, a longtime veteran of the kind of work we do as well as the founder of a work on the southside of Miami that I believe is extremely important. Joseph is doing graduate work at Florida International University with a focus on Latin America and is an important advisor and supporter of what we are doing.

Joseph and I had great conversations including meeting with a psychologist, Dr. Sam Lopez and meeting with several of the young leaders in his group there.

On Thursday I drove over with former BWAB Costa Rica Street Team member Ruth Holbrook and had meetings with Dr. Pantin and Dr. Muir of the University of Miami Center of Family Studies. I will make a seperate post on how those meetings went but I believe they will be vital in helping us continue to learn how to reach into Latin American families in a way that strengthens the family unit rather than weakening the role of the father and mother as we connect with their children. Some of what we heard on Thursday could very well mean that most of what is being done to help Latino youth in the U.S. and Latin America could be doing far more damage than good. I will keep you posted in the next few days.

Yesterday I flew from Miami in the early morning to LaGuardia Airport in NYC. I was supposed to catch an immediate flight to Columbus, Ohio for some planning meetings for the ACM Conference but I never got there. Snow and ice came before I could get back on the plane and before I knew it, I was trapped! As I talked to airline representatives, I found that I would at least be trapped in New York City until Sunday and probably Monday. I was in the airport all day yesterday before taking a cab to Manhattan to stay with Ben and Heather Grizzle in Central Park West who have been very kind to take me in.

While I was trapped in the airport and then trudging through the snow and talking to my taxi driver about what it is like to be a Puerto Rican young person growing up in Brooklyn and the Bronx, Costa Rican Street Team member Anna Currie was heading into the Precario for our women's group in the morning and then coleading a team with Costa Rican team members that headed out into downtown San Jose to give out coffee and cookies to homeless kids, teen prostitutes, transvestite prostitutes and the like as a way of connecting with them and building relationships with them. This morning as I write this looking out the window at snow covered Central Park, Anna is heading out with team members there again to head into the Precario to do door to door relational outreach work.

This is the daily life of Boy With a Ball as we fight to help young people. Snow and ice, coffee and cookies. Puerto Rican taxi drivers in Brooklyn, transvestite prostitutes in Parque Morazan in San Jose. Psychology professors in Miami one day, single mothers in the Precario the next.

I hope to see many of you as I finally get out of NYC in the next few days and continue this trip.