Zihuatanejo-Ixtapa Message Board - New Kitchen at Primary School

The Judy White Memorial Kitchen
Sailfest sadly lost a beloved and respected volunteer when Judy Ann White unexpectedly passed away after complications from a fall. We will miss her.
Friends of Judy donated $2,850.usd to begin the construction of a kitchen at the Sailfest primary school, “Centenario de la Revolución”. Por Los Niños de Zihuatanejo, the Sailfest foundation, provided $5,000.usd in building materials and a supervising construction worker. The City of Zihuatanejo provided sand, gravel, foundation stone, a bricklayer and his assistant. Lic. Jorge Sanchez Allec, a local businessman and city official, donated the concrete for the floor, roof and patio. The school parents committee held raffles and a street fair to raise the funds for an additional worker, a stove, a refrigerator and cooking utensils.
With the completion of the kitchen, the school now meets all the qualifications to receive the coveted status of a “Tiempo Completo” (all-day) school, which adds 3 ½ hours of additional instruction each day. The State of Guerrero is providing supplemental nutrition – beans, rice, cooking oil, milk, canned tuna, cleaning products, and more – in support of the program.
The nine-classroom school, with a kitchen, bathroom, office and storeroom, was built over a four year period, on land donated by a private family, by a partnership that included Sailfest/Por Los Niños, The City of Zihuatanejo, 6 local and international Rotary Clubs, local Zihuatanejo businesses, parents of the students and generous individual donors.
The school now serves 234 bright-eyed young scholars.

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While this certainly appears wonderful to our foreign readers, anyone with any local knowledge of how our government operates sees that now the parents of these children will feel obliged to vote for the party of the PRI thanks to your association with the city government and the PRI pre-candidate for the mayor Jorge Sánchez. In other words, your organization was used to further political interests. I do wish you all were able to see more clearly how your good deeds are being misused by other people with ulterior motives. It's really the only reason why I hold back from offering you all my full support.

And as I've repeated ad nauseum here and to our local authorities, I see much greater benefit in reinforcing the infrastructure of a few large schools for which government funds and resources are available than in adding to the hundreds of tiny schools for which funds and resources will never be available. If I could walk a couple of miles to school every day when I was in elementary and junior high school then certainly some of our local schoolkids can walk a couple of kilometers if necessary. Who knows, maybe someday it'll even occur to local authorities to set up a system of schoolbuses? Because too many of those hundreds of tiny schools are being used to fulfill a technical requirement to get the zoning changed on lands invaded by squatters. That was a lesson locals learned from the Netzahualcóyotl School that the Rotary also supported thanks to well-meaning but uninformed foreigners, and that's where and when the land invasions began in earnest.

But I thank you all sincerely for your wonderful humanitarian intentions.

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2100 views

Bah! Humbug!

I get that there is corruption in the world. But sometimes it feels good to focus on the good in the world. I understand that you walked to school when you were a child, but have you walked a mile in these kids shoes? When you walked to and from school, did you worry if you were going to be fed that evening? Did your bed have a a mattress? Did you get a restful nights sleep in a home that was quiet? Did you have your own bedroom and was it quiet at night?

Children need to know that the basic needs, such as food, rest and safety are being met, before they can devote their energy on book learning. God bless them and the foreigners who aim to supply some of the basic needs so that in the future they will have the wherewithal to tackle political issues. The USA and Canada haven't figured out how to deal with corruption and politics. Why not celebrate some of the basics like a school with kitchen. The children are worth it.

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Thank you for misinterpreting my comments and attacking me. I am trying to educate people so that their good deeds remain good deeds instead of being turned into something else they never intended. But your criticism of me isn't very helpful or relevant to those of us who have to live with the consequences of your well-intended but poorly informed actions. Our town just had to close a public beach due to pollution and we will lose millions of pesos in income, and a main source of that pollution is communities of squatters illegally invading public lands on our bay's hillsides and who have no plumbing and for which the municipal government will NEVER have the money to provide basic services for. I prefer CONCRETE LONG LASTING actions that truly do good for our COMMUNITY as a whole instead of cosmetic actions with limited benefit that mostly serve only to make a few donors feel good. Don't you?

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2093 views

I wasn't attacking you. It was you who stated, that if you you walked to school then so should the local children. I was just trying to point out that many of these children have other, more basic needs, that consume their energy. The fact that you took my points as a personal attack says a lot about you. Maybe you're a little too defensive. Anybody who has hiked the hills around Zihau will see the basic struggles these families have to face each day. I am sorry you took my points as criticism. I thought your comments did take away from a feel good story about a life, Judy, and the people who knew her, and the feeling of making a difference in a child's life. As far as the pollution in the bay goes.....where does all the dog poo go? Yes, fecal contamination comes from many sources. As a wastewater specialist with years of dealing with government rules and regulations on water quality, pollution is a complex matter with many solutions. Dispersal of fecal matter over a hillside, may be less of a contaminate than cramming people together, and directly discharging everybody's wastewater out of a pipe. Now I'm being defensive and off topic.

Let's celebrate a life lived and the hope that somebody...a child today...will have a chance for a brighter future. That was really all I was trying to say. Peace!

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2018 views

Yes, I walked the hillsides before they were invaded. They were beautiful. But now what washes down from them during the rains sickens a great part of us lowlying residents. The fact that you would try to compare my life to locals says more about you than my comments say about me. Sorry if the feel-good part of the post is lost on me. The cold fact that the beach in front of my home is currently labeled as the most polluted in the country and has warning signs placed on it warning off swimmers the week before one of the biggest vacation periods of the year doesn't leave me or many other locals feeling too good right now, and even less so about hillside communities partly responsible that shouldn't be there but only exist due to corrupt governments and even a little help from foreigners.

But I'm sure the children at the school will appreciate Judy Ann White's contribution at least for the day the politicians come to have their photos taken, though I'm skeptical about all the foodstuffs promised by the government actually being supplied since as far as I know they aren't supplied for other schools.