 | This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page . (Learn how and when to remove these template messages)
|
Safe Passage or Camino Seguro is a non-profit organization that provides school enrollment and after-school support for poor children whose families scavenge the Guatemala City Garbage Dump in Guatemala City. Safe Passage was founded in 1999 by the late Hanley Denning. The organization assists over 550 children. [1]
Safe Passage was founded in 1999 by the late Hanley Denning, a teacher from Maine who traveled to Guatemala to learn Spanish. While she was there, the woman with whom she was lodging told her that she wanted her to see the Guatemala City Garbage Dump. After seeing this, Hanley called home and asked her parents to sell her car, computer, and other belongings so that she could start a program to help the people of the dump. With around $5,000, she started a drop-in program in a church outside of the dump. Approximately 40 children showed up in the first week. People gave her a hard time at first, because others had tried to help them but given up. She persevered and about six months later gained people's confidence. Denning was killed on January 18, 2007, aged 36, when a bus with no brakes collided head-on with the car she was riding in. Her driver, a Guatemala native, was also killed. Two volunteers riding in the back seat of the car were injured. She was known by some as "El Angel del Basurero" or "The Angel of the Garbage Dump". [2] One of Safe Passage's most recent additions is the Early Childhood Education, program also known as the Escuelita, which hosts children from ages two through six, enhancing their health and school readiness, and ensuring the well-being of these children while their parents work. [3]
Safe Passage works to "combat poverty through education". The families of Safe Passage children scavenge through the Guatemala City Dump for items to resell. The organization works to enroll these children in the public schools. The public schools are technically free, but students must provide their own books, supplies, and uniforms, at a cost that is prohibitive for these poor people. The school day in Guatemala runs a half-day, so Safe Passage runs a support program for the other half of the day. Students come to Safe Passage for the half of the day that they are not in school. There they are separated by class level and do activities that reinforce what they are learning school. They receive a snack and lunch. If students miss less than three days of school a month and less than three days at the program, their family receives a food bag, with the equivalent of what money the child would likely have earned if not in school. [ citation needed ]
Safe Passage relies on child sponsorships to keep the program running, and many fundraisers have been held across the country. In November 2006, a fund raiser "Unmasking the Truth" was held at the Children's Museum of Maine, and an event called "La Fiesta" was held in Michigan. A school-supply drive in Maine was organized in December 2006. Many high schools have also held fund raisers for Safe Passage. Events include bottle and coin drives, school dances, badminton tournaments, bake sales, and presentations. In 2005, a 5k roadrace was organized in Cumberland, Maine, to benefit Safe Passage. The third annual was held on April 28, 2007. Over $22,000 has already been raised through this race.[ citation needed ]
Many support teams go to Safe Passage during the school breaks. For example, a group of Bowdoin students traveled to Guatemala for their spring break. [4] [5] There are also opportunities to travel to Guatemala as a long-term volunteer. These people stay for a minimum of five weeks, and many of them tend to stay longer.[ citation needed ] Another way to volunteer is becoming an Ambassador for Safe Passage. Ambassadors raise awareness and money for Safe Passage.[ citation needed ]
Hanley Graham Denning (March 9, 1970 – January 18, 2007) was the founder of Safe Passage. Born in Yarmouth, Maine, Denning graduated from Cumberland Center's Greely High School in 1988 and began attending Bowdoin College in Brunswick. She graduated from Bowdoin in 1992 with a degree in Psychology. After graduating from Bowdoin, she received her master's degree in Education at Wheelock College. [6] After graduating from Wheelock, she began her career as a social worker in North Carolina. Many of Denning's students were Spanish-speaking, leaving her frustrated because she had difficulty understanding them.
In 1997, [7] with the hopes of being able to improve her Spanish, Denning traveled to Guatemala to volunteer and visited a Guatemala City garbage dump. At the dump, children were digging through the piles of trash looking for anything they could eat, sell, or use for shelter. None of these kids were going to school because they could not afford the uniforms, supplies, and other miscellaneous costs. Denning sold her car and laptop and used the money to open Safe Passage in a nearby church. [8] Eventually, Safe Passage moved to a safer location. In 2007, First Lady Laura Bush visited Safe Passage and recognized Denning's efforts.
On January 18, 2007, aged 36, Denning was killed in a car accident when the vehicle in which she was riding outside Guatemala City was hit head-on by a bus with no brakes. Denning received commendations from the United States Senate and Maine State Senate for her work with the children and families of the Guatemala City garbage dump. [9]
The Academy-Award nominated short documentary Recycled Life by Leslie Iwerks and Mike Glad focuses on the lives of those who work in the Guatemala City garbage dump. Denning appeared briefly as herself in the film, and the DVD includes a special video tribute to her. The documentary was shown on HBO in late 2007. [10]
Bowdoin College is a private liberal arts college in Brunswick, Maine. When Bowdoin was chartered in 1794, Maine was still a part of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The college offers 35 majors and 40 minors, as well as several joint engineering programs with Columbia, Caltech, Dartmouth College, and the University of Maine.
Patricia Helen LaMarche is an American political figure and activist with the Green Party of the United States; she was the party's vice-presidential candidate in the 2004 United States presidential election, with David Cobb as its presidential candidate, and was one of seven co-chairs of the party’s national committee, and was elected to that position on July 24, 2005.
Wheelock College was a private college in Boston, Massachusetts, United States from 1888 to 2018. The college was founded in 1888 as the Miss Wheelock's Kindergarten Training School and was merged into Boston University as part of the university's Wheelock College of Education and Human Development in 2018.
Katherine Victoria Litwack, known professionally as Kat Dennings, is an American actress. She is known for her starring roles as Max Black in the CBS sitcom 2 Broke Girls (2011–2017) and as Darcy Lewis in the Marvel Cinematic Universe superhero films Thor (2011), Thor: The Dark World (2013), Thor: Love and Thunder (2022), and the Disney+ miniseries WandaVision (2021).
Greely High School is a public high school for grades 9 to 12 located in Cumberland, Maine, United States. The enrollment is approximately 715 students. It also has a professional teaching staff of 64 and 50% of the teachers have advanced degrees. Greely High School is a part of Maine School Administrative District 51, which serves the towns of Cumberland and North Yarmouth. Renovated and added onto over the years, the building originally opened in 1868. The school completed a 10-million-dollar addition/renovation in 2009. Another addition completed in 2018 added a new auditorium to the school. It adopted the International Baccalaureate (IB) program in 2009.
Frances Caroline Chamberlain was the wife of Joshua Chamberlain; she served as First Lady of Maine while he was Governor of Maine from 1867 to 1871.
Cynthia McFadden is an American television journalist who is currently the senior legal and investigative correspondent for NBC News. She was an anchor and correspondent for ABC News who co-anchored Nightline, and occasionally appeared on ABC News special Primetime. She was with ABC News from 1994 to 2014 and joined NBC News in March 2014.
Bowdoin is a historic schooner built in 1921 in East Boothbay, Maine, at the Hodgdon Brothers Shipyard. Designed by William H. Hand, Jr. under the direction of explorer Donald B. MacMillan, the gaff-rigged vessel is the only American schooner built specifically for Arctic exploration. She has made 29 trips above the Arctic Circle in her life, three since she was acquired by the Maine Maritime Academy as a sail training ship in 1988. She is currently owned by the Academy, located in Castine, Maine, and is named for Bowdoin College.
Smokey Mountain was the term coined for a large landfill once located in Tondo, Manila.
Terence Wheelock, a 20 year old Dublin native from Summerhill, in the city's north inner district, tragically passed away on September 16, 2005, under circumstances that sparked significant controversy and public discourse. Wheelock's death occurred following his arrest alongside three others on suspicion of car theft, a charge from which he was subsequently exonerated. After being detained at Store Street Garda Station, he was discovered unconscious in his cell just two hours later. The complexities surrounding his custody and subsequent death led to an inquest, culminating on 13 May 2007, when a coroner's jury concluded that his death resulted from suicide. The events leading to and following Wheelock's untimely demise have continued to raise questions about the treatment of detainees and the protocols followed by law enforcement, highlighting a critical moment of scrutiny and calls for reform within the Irish justice system.
Lucy Wheelock was an American early childhood education pioneer within the American kindergarten movement. She began her career by teaching the kindergarten program at Chauncy-Hall School (1879–89). Wheelock was the founder and head of Wheelock Kindergarten Training School, which later became Wheelock College in Boston, Massachusetts, and is now the namesake of Boston University's college of education BU Wheelock. She wrote, lectured, and translated on subjects related to education.
Matilda White Riley was an American gerontologist who began working at Rutgers University as a research specialist before becoming a professor from 1950 to 1973. Here she wrote a textbook and discovered her interest in aging. In 1973, Riley became the first woman full professor at Bowdoin College, where she worked until 1981. She spent much of her career as a sociologist specializing in aging at the National Institute on Aging, part of the National Institutes of Health. Additionally, Riley worked with the Russell Sage Foundation from 1974 to 1977 where she wrote works on the age-stratification paradigm and aging society perspective.
Alexander Cornell du Houx is an American politician from Maine and officer in the U.S. Navy. He Joined the U.S. Marines out of high school and was deployed to Iraq. He was elected to the Maine House of Representatives in 2008 and 2012, worked for the Truman National Security Project on energy security, received a direct commission in the Navy reserves and deployed to the Middle East.
Judith Magyar Isaacson was a Hungarian-American educator, university administrator, speaker, and author.
Lucy Miller Mitchell was an early childhood education specialist and community activist from Boston who was instrumental in getting the state to regulate day care centers. She is credited with modernizing the day care system in Massachusetts.
Laurie Gagnon Lachance is an American economist and college administrator. Since 2012, she has been the president of Thomas College in Waterville, Maine, and is the first woman to fill that post. She was previously the first woman Maine State Economist and the first woman president of the Maine Development Foundation. She was inducted into the Maine Women's Hall of Fame in 2014.
The history of Bates College began shortly before Bates College's founding on March 16, 1855, in Lewiston, Maine. The college was founded by Oren Burbank Cheney and Benjamin Bates. Originating as a Free Will Baptist institution, it has since secularized and established a liberal arts curriculum. After the mysterious 1853 burning of Parsonsfield Seminary, Cheney wanted to create another seminary in a more central part of Maine: Lewiston, a then-booming industrial economy. He met with religious and political leaders in Topsham, to discuss the formation of such a school, recruiting much of the college's first trustees, most notably Ebenezer Knowlton. After a well-received speech by Cheney, the group successfully petitioned the Maine State Legislature to establish the Maine State Seminary. At its founding it was the first coeducational college in New England. Soon after it was established, donors stepped forward to finance the seminary, developing the school in an affluent residential district of Lewiston. The college struggled to finance its operations after the financial crisis of 1857, requiring extra capital to remain afloat. Cheney's political activities attracted Benjamin Bates, who was interested in fostering his business interests in Maine. Bates donated installments of tens of thousands of dollars to the college to bring it out of the crisis.
Mary Partington was a retired schoolteacher and goat farmer who is best known for shooting and accidentally killing an intruder in her home in 1966 near Lincoln, Nebraska. The incident gave rise to her nickname, "Bloody Mary," and a series of rumors about her supposed cruelty.
Nyeema Morgan is an American interdisciplinary and conceptual artist. Working in drawing, sculpture and print media, her works focus on how meaning is constructed and communicated given complex socio-political systems. Born in Philadelphia, she earned her BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art and her MFA from the California College of the Arts. She has held artist residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and Smack Mellon. Morgan's works are in the permanent collections of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art and the Menil Collection.
Phebe Ann Jacobs was an American Congregationalist, laundress, and free woman. Best known for her posthumous biography Narrative of Phebe Ann Jacobs, Jacobs was born into slavery on the Beverwyck plantation in Lake Hiawatha, New Jersey.
