Over nearly eight years, longtime supporter Jane Gallagher said she’s seen the direct impact of the Yarmouth-based organization, which educates children in slums outside of the Guatemala City garbage dump, through two students she began sponsoring in 2002.
“One of our students graduates high school next fall and he wants to be a doctor,” Gallagher said. “It’s unbelievable to think that he may have still been scavenging through trash at the dump without Safe Passage.”
More than 550 students are now enrolled in the after-school program that began in 1999, according to organization spokesman David Holman. With a sharpened focus on younger students, expanded training for teachers and the establishment of a formal pre-kindergarten program, Holman said, Safe Passage now reaches more students and helps more mothers who work at the city’s dump.
Single mothers working at the dump have no option but to take their children to work with them, Holman said, “and that’s why we started working with such a young age group because the alternative was so horrible.”
Accepting children as young as 2 years old into the day-care program “gives them such a huge leg up in school,” Holman said. “The younger we can start with a child, the better the impact in the long run.”
At the other end of the spectrum, Gallagher said she was impressed with growth in the organization’s adult literacy program during an August 2011 trip to Guatemala, her fourth visit to the program.
Nearly seven years after her first visit, when Gallagher said there was no formal program for the adults of the dump community, she sat in on a meeting of approximately 24 women who had begun a micro-credit jewelry business.
“It gave me goose bumps to see these confident, strong women making decisions and going out to represent themselves to department stores and other markets,” Gallagher said.
On her first trip, many students had already been enrolled for years in Safe Passage, “but it was a different story with the mothers.”
“Now these women are really in control of their lives in a way that they couldn’t be before,” Gallagher said. “Their self-esteem and sense of purpose is a remarkable change.”
Holman said the organization also has begun expanding services beyond education, including collaboration with other non-governmental organizations to provide screenings for cervical cancer for 26 women, detecting two cases early enough to start treatment, Holman said.
“We’re moving into a full spectrum of services we can provide so people can live their lives and get ahead without facing debilitating health situations,” Holman said.
Those health conditions were what inspired founder Hanley Denning to start the organization during her first visit to the dump after her stay in Antigua, Guatemala, in 1999.
“The conditions that these children and their families live in are almost indescribably horrible,” supporter and Casco Bay Friend of Safe Passage Michael Jones said. “With the smells, the vultures and the environment around the dump, you see how much good Safe Passage does with the kids.”
Jones said his first visit to the program was life-changing.
“It’s kind of an oasis for (families), where they can make some progress in an environment that would otherwise throw them into crime or just break them,” Jones said.
Apart from his visit, Jones said he feels a particular affinity for the program for its Maine roots.
Those roots continue to spread out from Yarmouth, where Denning grew up, Gallagher said. When she started volunteering with Safe Passage in 2002, Gallagher said her mention of the program always required further explanation.
Years later, while in line at the supermarket, Gallagher said a friend asked her if she was returning to Guatemala during the summer.
“And someone from the next line said they had a nephew who had just gotten back from Guatemala,” Gallagher said.
The cashier, too, had a relative who had visited the Central American country with Safe Passage.
“I realized how far we’d come — in that grocery line — and how many people had been involved,” Gallagher said.
The continued growth of the program after Denning’s death “was a remarkable testament to what Hanley built” in Guatemala City, Gallagher said.
Supporters hope to spur even more involvement with the Friday night concert at Bowdoin College’s Pickard Theater.
For more information and tickets, visit safepassage.org/concert or any Bull Moose Music store.
dfishell@timesrecord.com / @darrenfishell
¦ SACO NATIVE and folk-rock songwriter Catie Curtis will play a benefit concert for Safe Passage on Friday at Bowdoin College.
Safe Passage operates adult and youth education programs serving more than 550 students in a community adjacent to the Guatemala City dump.
¦ THE CONCERT begins at 7:30 p.m. in Pickard Theater. For tickets, visit safepassage.org/concert or any Bull Moose Music store location.
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