Our project is all about pushing boundaries of what people see as possible with a large family. (Our five children currently range from  1.5 to 12 years old!) As a family, we have taken the leap and moved to the remote town of San Juan La Laguna, Guatemala.

On May 26th, 2021, we arrived in Guatemala with the simple goal of assessing where our family of seven could be of most use volunteering. The vision became clear. Together with a committee of 5 Mayan women, we founded a kid's club aptly named "Children for a better San Juan." 

As a community project, we are taking baby steps towards investing in the inheritance of the next generation. 

"Children for a better San Juan" is an environmental/educational club that focuses on teaching children to take the initiative of cleaning up the lakeshores of the beautiful Lake Atitlan. The children are fed a hearty and nutritional lunch and we have an incredible craft time with them each week where we make art out of the plastics collected from the beaches!

Our first day of club

Club now

The committee consists of two trained school teachers, a cook, an accounting student, and a mother of some of the children involved. The programmed weekly lessons are themed around environmental care, sanitation, and recycling by making art out of the materials collected!

As with all experiments we started with a simple question. "How much of a positive impact can a young family have within a problem as large and overwhelming as plastic waste?" We had no idea! However, we are coming to realize that movements towards a solution always start with baby steps. As more and more people get involved we are seeing tangible changes on the shorelines we clean. Most importantly, the club has developed into a safe place for these kids. There is hope here.

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This project is a human experiment with ourselves. It is trial and error at it's finest!

9 months in, we are so excited about where this is going!

The Daily Scroll is the latest addition to our project website! We plan on updating it regularly as a family, like a journal of sorts. As the blog is to stories and bigger thoughts or events, The Daily Scroll will serve our community as a window into the raw daily life of a Canadian family with 5 kids living in Guatemala. Click on the icon to check it out!