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The year prior, Rigo founded the first library in his hometown of Yepocapa, a small town located high on Volcán Fuego in the Guatemalan Highlands. Out of his parent’s living room and with a handful of books, Rigo opened this library based on his conviction that every child had a right to learn. And every child—no matter in what social class or ethnic group—had a right to an education.
One of eight children from a poor Mayan family, Rigo had witnessed first-hand the transformative power of education when he received a scholarship from an anonymous American donor to attend seminary school. This was a tremendous opportunity for a village boy whose sure future consisted of picking coffee beans and cutting sugar cane as did his father and his grandfather and nearly all the boys and men of his village.
So moved by Rigo’s vision to provide hope through education for the children of Guatemala, Nancy and Rick decided to partner with Rigo to grow his fledgling organization, Proyecto Bibliotecas Guatemala/The Guatemalan Library Project (PROBIGUA). This was Child Aid’s first foray across the border of Mexico and into Central America.
In the decade since, Child Aid has partnered with PROBIGUA to establish 28 libraries and 14 computer centers in impoverished communities across Guatemala. Working together, the two organizations have provided grade school scholarships to hundreds of children, trained teachers and librarians and established the only bookmobile in the whole of Guatemala.
In early 1994, Rick made his second trip to Guatemala to continue the library-building work with PROBIGUA. While there, Rick inquired around Antigua as to who else was building libraries and was given the name of Nancy Rittmaster de España an ex-pat living and working in El Tejar.
Nancy was introduced to Guatemala in the late 1980s, when she was sent by the Peace Corps to educate bee farmers on the dangers of Africanized bees. Bees aside, Nancy’s passion was education. She felt driven to do something to help the children living in El Tejar, a very poor brick-making town in Chimaltenago, where she had just spent the last two years. After her Peace Corps service was over in 1989, Nancy stayed on in El Tejar and turned her attention to building a community library.
Rick went to meet Nancy in El Tejar. By that time, the now very popular library had been up and running for several years, funded by cash and book donations from Nancy’s friends and family, the Saint Paul Foundation and various publishing companies. Rick, struck immediately by Nancy’s work, pledged Child Aid’s support to help the fledgling organization, now called the Fundación para Desarrollo Integral de El Tejar/The Foundation for the Integral Development of El Tejar (FUNDIT).
For the next few years, Child Aid worked with FUNDIT to distribute 70,000 books to local schools and libraries and develop methods of evaluating the impact of these books within these communities. Nancy had recently expanded FUNDIT in 1997, to include a Montessori-style preschool, daycare and feeding program for young children left home unsupervised or in the care of marginally older siblings during the day while their parents worked in the factories or fields.
After Nancy’s untimely death in 2000, Child Aid agreed to assume responsibility of the now leaderless FUNDIT. Since that time, FUNDIT has grown to serve 106 children in the preschool, 117 grade-schoolers in its scholarship program and thousands of visitors annually to its library.
In 1999, Child Aid hired its first paid staff member in the U.S. From there, the organization has grown to include a 12-member board of directors, two paid staff members in the U.S. and one in Guatemala and many, many volunteers. “We thought Child Aid was something we’d do when we retired,” Nancy Press says, “We never, never imagined that the organization would take off in this way. It’s been a wild, amazing ride.”
