Giving Tuesday, 2024

Dear Rex,

Thanksgiving has passed. I hope it was a happy time for all of you. I enjoyed a traditional dinner with a group of ex-pats here in Guatemala.

I watched Tactic's Christmas parade on Sunday night. The busy holiday season has begun!

Which means: It’s Giving Tuesday!

I’ve been in Guatemala since late October and will stay until early January, both to see our impact first-hand and to teach a class or two. I was proceeded and followed by about 50 laptops. Together with two very generous donors who purchased fifteen each, about twenty others stepped forward to meet their matching challenges and bought twenty more computers. It was a great outcome for our programs. I’ve asked Guatemala Director Byron Cap and Chaptops Board Member Fredy Oxom to describe your impact, present and future, at our center in town in Tactic and at Instituto Maya Comunitario Kamolbe in remote Nimlahakok, and how we can help you advance our shared vision of digital equity.

-- Rex Dwyer

Cofounder and Executive Director

To donate:

https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=MJJSK5VW4QSY4

Tactic

Chaptops and the alternative around the corner:

A different worldview.

We’re making great progress in our mission to make computers accessible to more students and teachers in Tactic. We have been renting all available computers. The number of renters grew from 94 in February to 105 in September, peaking at 108 in August. Because the school year ends in October, the number of renters will stay around 70 until February comes, so it’s a bit of a lean time. 

We are sure demand will continue to exceed supply in February, even with our new computers. All our computers now include off-line versions of Wikipedia in Spanish and Simple English, among other resources. Rents range from $8 per month for a standard laptop to $13 for a Microsoft Surface Pro. For comparison, a nearby commercial internet café posts a rate of $0.50 per hour to use a computer in an unappealing environment (at least for study).

Our discounted print and copy services are valuable to both students and underpaid teachers, who must pay out of pocket to copy 60 or more exams for their students. For them, we typically reduce our $0.065 price even further to $0.05 per page versus $0.13 (Q1) at market price. 

We’re very grateful to our donors in the US who have made it possible to increase our inventory to serve nearly 150 students and teachers when the school year is in full swing in February. Our immediate focus in Tactic now is to raise funds for supplies and scholarships for more classes to be taught by Julio Herrera, our new Outreach Coordinator. (More about Julio next time.)

You can help Julio and the rest of the team advance our mission by donating here:

https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=MJJSK5VW4QSY4

-- Byron Cap

Cofounder and Guatemala Director

Nimlahakok

IMaCK's 2024 Graduating Class

IMaCK Faculty

(Rex Dwyer lurking in the background)

The 2024 school year has just ended for us at Instituto Maya Comunitario Kamolbe in our village Nimlahakok, and it’s been an exciting year. 

• Our enrolment increased to 46, or 50% more than in 2023. We think computers played a significant role in our recruiting effort.
• Asociación Q'eqchi' Xch’ool Ixim, IMaCK’s parent organization, received a six-figure education grant from the Tinker Foundation, relying partly on a letter of support from Chaptops. All of this will help us increase enrollment at both primary and secondary levels. Our target for IMaCK this year is 80. (Please keep your fingers crossed!)
• Thanks to computers from Chaptops, in 2025 we are authorized to offer a new career track in Accounting with Computational Emphasis to our high-school students. Government approval is not an easy process, so we are very proud of the efforts of our faculty. 

IMaCK was certainly a different place before our first computers arrived.

The culmination of our year was, of course, graduation. We were pleased that Chaptops donors were represented by Executive Director Rex Dwyer, who helped pass out diplomas to our fourteen graduates and symbolically presented a new grant of 30 computers. Rex spoke briefly and noted the sense of pride in the hall. He relayed our donors' sense of pride in the students' accomplishments.

We are so grateful for the generous support of Chaptops donors. But, to increase our lab capacity to support 80 students, we will need to call on your generosity again. Giving Tuesday is a great time to donate since it helps us plan for 2025. 

https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=MJJSK5VW4QSY4

Fredy Oxom

Chaptops Board Member and IMaCK Cofounder