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| Katie in Kentucky |
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| Estela in Guatemala |
This is my daughter Katie. She is twenty, a college student and a good friend to all who know her. She recently came home to use my kitchen so she could make a home cooked meal for her best friends who were in town for the holidays. Katie cooked everything from scratch in our well-equipped kitchen. She made stuffed shells with homemade sauce, Cesar salad, Texas toast, and her specialty: a pumpkin roll with cream cheese filling. Her friends had a great time catching up after months of not seeing each other. It was wonderful to have the girls over and see how they had matured into bright young women who will change the world, each in their own way.
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| Estela’s kitchen |
Two thousand miles away, Estella lives in the mountains of Guatemala. She is equally as beautiful as my daughter. And that is about where any analogies end. Estela’s home is not one that she could invite friends into. If she did, there would be no food to share. She is the oldest of six children who have no father in the home and a mother that scratches out a living doing laundry for a few dollars a week. The one thing she does have is hope. Finding Freedom has been fortunate to raise the funds available to send Estela to Adopt-A-Village Maya Jaguar School (http://adoptavillage.com/), where she will receive a quality education rarely available to girls her age in the community she resides in. Her family is targeted to have a donated house built by our organization in the spring of 2013, after which Estela will live on concrete floors and be protected from the weather. While attending school, she will be the beneficiary of good meals, fellowship with other good students in the community, and she will learn essential skills such as gardening.
Belief in herself and her ability to live a life of self-sufficiency will be her biggest benefit of these gifts. Finding Freedom through Friendship + education = hope.
