Letter from Founder/N. McGirr Winter 2025

It’s the holiday season and Guatemala is crisp mountain air, the smell of pine needles carpeting the entrance to your house, the posadas where people walk around neighborhood singing and reenacting Mary and Joseph asking for lodging. The neighbors turn them down. But then arriving at the last house, designated as the posada, they ask all the singers to come in and give everyone hot chocolate and maybe cookies.

Christmas here is not a present-giving dominated holiday (just found out, this is no longer true!). The night of the 24th is a time for family and friends to get together to eat tamales at midnight. Twelve grapes, one for every month of the year, are eaten to insure good fortune. The night sky explodes with brilliantly colored fireworks, firecrackers like machine guns break out in a noisy, cathartic display the can last more than a half an hour.

Ah, the Holiday Newsletter, a time to recall some of the year’s highlights and to take the traditional look back into Fotokids historical files.

I have to say 2025 was a very good year! Under Evelyn’s leadership, the staff’s hard work and your support the project has gone forward in so many ways. We welcomed 65 additional students. This expansion brings our enrollment to 116 students for the year 2025, with 79 students in Santiago and 37 in Guatemala City.

©Fotokids2025 1. First year students posing for Holiday greetings 2. Back when they started with us in November 2024, and had to care 6 weeks for eggs in order to be deemed responsible to be given a camera.

We also graduated two classes of students, one class that completed our 8 year curriculum in Santiago Atitlan, and another that completed our 5 year vocational course years in the City (see below). In Santiago Atitlán, graduate Sandra Chicom, began her gap year working as a teacher’s aide with Fotokids in order to receive her 2026 university scholarship. She joins Juan Quieju and Juan Ixbalán who are already studying Communications at the Universidad San Carlos.

We had exhibitions at the Panza Verde Gallery in Antigua, another in Chennai India,and in the Kravis Center for the Arts in West Palm Beach. Other exhibits are in the planning for 2026 and even 2027-Stay tuned!

Technologically, we have been able to replace many of our aging computers with your generous support and to resolve our Adobe licensing expenses problem, the staff discovered a photo editing program that is similar to Photoshop, but free to nonprofits.

A partnership with the photography and video equipment business Picacia, in Guatemala City, has been wonderful in many ways; giving free professional photo workshops to staff and advanced/vocational students, supporting us with video help, as well as, celebrating us with an exhibition in their Gallery this March. Their in-studio workshops taught and attended by Guatemalan pros this year spanned the gamut from; product photography, artificial intelligence for video, studio lighting for portraits, documentary photography & filmmaking to the very practical, camera equipment cleaning and maintenance.

Children at Lake Atitlán were inspired by visits from local photographers and the students visited graphic design studios. Two different week-long workshops with international photographers, one taught black and white photography with color emphasis and with the other workshop we had three photographers teach illustration, storytelling, studio work and LightRoom that enabled the students to acquire new skills and push forward on challenges.

In the latter workshop we included alternative photographic techniques in illustration for the upcoming book we are producing covering the 36 year conflict here in Guatemala. Below are some photos, cover collages from their notebooks and drawings.

Personally, I couldn’t be happier with the way the project is evolving. You may have seen some of the really great videos Rocio and Berlin have created. Berlin has worked on our new website, fotokids.org, alongside the professionals from the website designers, Tribal, paid for by a generous grant from Board member Matt Strain. www.fotokids.org

We are still receiving email at fotokidsorginal.org but you know we are the originals, so we are switching over to info@fotokids.org.

Our project with children in a public school in a poor rural area of Florida continues and we have concluded 2 workshops this year with the generous support from the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts.

Our Christmas party this year in the City was oriented toward the family, with a free used clothes and toy bazaar (collected by Picacia), lunch and snacks made by the mothers who wanted very much to contribute, and all the little brothers and sister received presents as well as our students. Games of course, musical chairs, rings thrown on deer antlers and several piñatas were part of the enthusiastic participation!

This from Evelyn’s Executive Directors report , “This year’s Christmas celebration was especially meaningful. Through generous donations, we were able to provide clothing, toys, meals, games, and gifts to all families. Four Mac Mini computers, were raffled among all the students so they could use them at home. Although these models were too outdated to be useful at Fotokids, they are still very valuable for the students allowing them to work on school assignments, access the internet, and complete other projects. We provided each computer with a monitor, keyboard, and mouse—ready for use.

Picacia also donated a Canon 5D camera and requested that it be given as a special gift to one of the girls who stood out throughout the year. Nayeli received this award. It was a beautiful and emotional day that reminded us of the power of community.”

We also raffled off Christmas baskets. The chickens for Christmas eve dinner will be delivered this week for 90 families. Several returning alumni reminisced about how much the chickens had meant to their families and how they had looked forward to receiving them.

Speaking of alumni, so many returned this year both to the anniversary and Christmas party. They were interviewed and talked about what Fotokids has meant in their lives and we profiled many of them in the monthly updates we sent out to you-but in case they needed up in spam, here are three links that I found very touching.

And now for the historical excerpts from Christmas Past and I have selected this year material written by the students.. Some of you may remember these from old newsletters but I think that they bear repeating and I find a little levity helps during this season!

Logan’s creative writing class 1998 or our 7th anniversary – We had a contest for the best poem about the project. Criteria for judging was based on use of language, descriptions, images, metaphors, symbolism etc., the idea in general, and originality. Logan, after sifting through the entries remarked that, the kids seemed to write as if based on the degree of obsequiousness they could convey. Rosario’s the winning entry:

“HO Project! That shines like the sun of the day and moon of the night. With the hand of God, you have helped us in the good and bad situations of life, With the great benefits you give us very day we delight in the place where we study…”
It goes on, but I liked the Ho! at the beginning, kind of Whitmanesque. Actually, there were very few that used metaphors, so that narrowed down the competitive aspects entries a bit.

A class evaluation on the video class yielded. “I like video the best because I like to see people in front of the camera and their nervousness.”
On writing class- “I don’t like it too much because it’s boring to have to think before writing.”

Or this one a couple of years later in 2000,- from an essay titled, “Where I want to see the project in 3-5 years.” Seño Nancy left the country three years ago. Now we are heading up this project and we are realizing that although it all seems easy to manage a foundation, it’s a little more difficult, but to push ahead we must make it that the difficult appears easy. (I wrote at that time, ”This appears to be a coup d’état!).”

In my assessment twenty-five years ago on the students essays, as to what they saw as the future of Fotokids, I noted some common threads. They all wanted to teach, they wanted classes for other poor and handicapped kids, they definitely wanted to expand the program, and they want a bigger darkroom. I wrote, “All in all, sufficiently idealistic generous and philanthropic. I felt pleased with them and that we are on the right track.” And other than forgoing the darkroom, when it became impossible and too expensive to obtain chemicals, we have fulfilled their goals for many, many years.

Danilo’s (12 years old ) Look at the Future 1999 I want that my life in the future will be more ordered. In the future I want to accomplish all possible goals, such asn studying. I want to do advanced study and learn science. That’s because every thing or every animal that I look at it gets me to thinking, I wonder how they reproduce? or where they were born? I know that if one wants to reach goals, you have to make the effort. I don’t know what I will be, I don’t know if I will be a thief or a doctor. What I do know is to make the effort to obtain these goals I have to get past adolescence and that’s a lot and the best thing that I have is studying photography.

The kids later created an e-book on what they called the superstitions or the sayings of Santiago Atitlán. Here are some worthy excerpts that will doubtless be helpful in guiding your future behavior.

You shouldn’t eat the tip of the chicken wing because when you marry your husband or wife will be jealous as follow you around all the time.

A child should never eat inside a temescal (sweat lodge) because if they do, all their teeth will fall out when they reach adulthood.

It’s not good for a boy or teenager to put a wooden spoon in a pot of herbs, because when he is older, he will become a womanizer
A pregnant woman shouldn’t step on fish scales, or when her baby is born it could have scabies If a girl eats fish eggs, in her future she will have lots of children

When a child has a fall, the parents should go to the site of the accident, preferably under a guayaba tree, and lash him to the tree to ease the pain.

When someone loses their dog, they can get him back home calling his name into the water jug.

Take your clothes off when you come across drowned people (I thought there might be something missing with this one BUT it was followed by…)

On Drowned People’s Day (?! is that like a national holiday or just local?) the drowned take to the streets singing, but if you come across them at midnight, you must take off your clothes and lay in the dirt so that they will pass by without taking you.

And finally: When a person eats rotten beans, he always forgets things.

I will leave you on this last note of sage advice and wish all a Happy Holiday Season and of course I would be remiss if I didn’t point out this is your last chance this year to make a difference, so donate here or send a check dated before 12/31 if you want a U.S.A. 2025 tax credit.
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