Begun in 1989, the Palo Alto Friends El Salvador Projects now works in four communities on education projects that further community development consistent with Quaker values. The communities are: El Barío, Apulo, Sueños en Jocoaitique, and El Gigante en Perquín. Programs include support for K-12 education, college loans for qualified students, as well as several other initiatives described here. Please contact us about opportunities to visit there, do volunteer work, or contribute to our education projects.

THE STORY OF THE EL SALVADOR PROJECTS

When Carmen Morán Broz left El Salvador in 1940, she always knew she would return someday to help her country. In the United States, she became a Quaker, and was convinced of the power of non-violent community action.

In 1986, she joined an international group to accompany struggling peasants back to their pueblo in a war zone, El Barío. In the belief that education can transform a nation, she helped them start a school. “It’s the quickest way to lift people out of poverty,” she observed. Illiteracy was widespread, and schooling unavailable past third grade.

After retiring from teaching in California In the 1980s, she returned in 1989, in the midst of the Salvadoran civil war, to establish education projects.

A committee was formed in the Palo Alto Friends Meeting to assure that she have the support, financial and logistical, needed to keep the projects going.

Besides El Barío, she worked with other struggling communities. In San Salvador, she started a nursery school for marginalized families. She made the difficult journey many times to Morazán, a remote area, to bring a health worker and educational aid. The communities there are Sueños in Jocoaitique, and El Gigante in Perquín. Another community she aided was Apulo, a poor community by Lake Ilopango.

The most effective way to help, she learned, was to work with strong community leaders, ones who wanted education for their children.

With them, she convinced families of the importance of keeping their children in school. Before the war, few people in the countryside had gone past third grade.

To provide help, she would return to the United States to ask Friends meetings and other interested communities to give donations. People from Palo Alto to Boston heard of her projects and gave support.

To keep children in school, she provided funds for childrens’ shoes and uniforms and teacher salaries in these communities. She did everything she could to expand the schools. Now after many years, El Barío has a high school with computer lab and library. It is a magnet school for the surrounding communities.

Carmen believed sending peasants to college in El Salvador would be a profound change.“Sending campeisino children to college is an authentically revolutionary act!” She likened it to sending former slaves to school in the U.S. in 1865.

She obtained sponsors for students eager to continue. This became the student loan program, which now boasts more than 50 graduates. Business Administration, liberal arts, teaching, medicine, law, these are some of the degrees they have won.