Mission:
The Community College of Baltimore County and Carroll Community College will sponsor a service-learning project in Big Falls, Belize. The project is designed to address the needs of the Mayan community by offering a two-week summer literacy camp for children. The goals of this endeavor are to continue our tradition of raising the students passing rate on their yearly school examinations.
Project goals include:
Helping the community build educational foundations for its children who throughout the school year speak English in the classroom, but over the summer months lose much of their language skills since Mayan dialects are the predominant languages spoken at home;
Providing experiences for American students to discover the strengths of other cultures and to learn about other ways of living, different from their own;
Opening lines of communication through international exchange;
and Providing school supplies and teaching aides. The supplies we take down with us are often all the children have for the entire year, since the children of Belize have to purchase their own textbooks; this is truly a burden for the majority of their families and Big Falls is located in the most impoverished part of the country.