Gurnee native leads drive for desks in Honduran classrooms

Gurnee native and Carmel Catholic High School graduate Christie George should be celebrating this week.

After spending months in Honduras, the agency she works with opened two new secondary school classrooms, making education more accessible to children in rural areas of the Central American country.

However, to George's dismay, the new classrooms lack one key ingredient: desks.

“The municipal government was going to provide these, but they simply do not have the funds for this,” George wrote in an email last week.

Since then, she and her co-workers have been on a personal mission to raise money to provide the classrooms with desks. They call their campaign “Take a Stand and Give a Seat.”

Already they have raised more than $2,700 of the $4,260 needed to provide 180 desks and three chalkboards to six new classrooms, which will serve children from seven surrounding communities.

For the last seven months, George has been working in Tegucigalpa, the capital city of Honduras, with the nonprofit organization Global Brigades.

She works for its architecture program, erecting schools and classrooms in communities that have limited access to education. In the rural communities where the latest classrooms were built — Santa Rosa and Zurzular — students had little chance to obtain an education beyond sixth grade, George said.  

Classes in the new schools were set to have begun Monday, which prompted George and her associates to mount the urgent fundraising campaign.

Working in Third World relief is an extension of her education, George says. She graduated from Marquette University with a degree in International Affairs that focused on Third World studies, and political science.

“In both high school and college, my schools put a heavy emphasis on service,” George says. “And after one international service trip spent pouring concrete floors in schools in Tijuana, Mexico, I was hooked.” 

During college, she worked on various international service projects in Guatemala, South Africa and Namibia. She continued performing volunteer work in countries around the world during a Semester at Sea experience.

George describes the chance to bring education to rural students simply as “empowering.”

To find out more about their fundraising initiative, visit: http://www.empowered.org/Take-a-Stand-and-Give-a-Seat. Or, learn more about Global Brigades, visit: www.globalbrigades.org.