A personal note from Bill
Dear Friends,
A few years ago, I traveled up a dirt road into the mountains of Honduras to visit a village most people will never hear about. What I found there (and what we were able to do together) has stayed with me ever since. I want to tell you that story, and I want to ask for your help.
About a decade ago, a first responder from South Carolina went to Honduras on a trip that changed his life. He fell in love, married a Honduran woman, and in the process discovered something troubling. The northern region around San Pedro Sula — home to the southernmost major Mayan ruins at Copán — had almost no medical services for its rural communities. Children were suffering the most. He went home, raised money, funded an ambulance, and built an organization called Paramedics for Children.
When he reached out and invited me to see his work firsthand, I said yes. We drove up into the mountains to a small, quiet village, the kind of place where neighbors know each other's names and grandparents are buried in the hillside behind the house.
Children from the mountain village receiving school supplies and snacks, delivered monthly by Paramedics for Children, funded in part by BCF donors like you.
The village was poor but stable, because once a year residents would walk down to a coffee plantation and pick beans for two months. That income was enough. With it, families could stay on their small plots of land, surrounded by their ancestors and a strong faith community. The children could go to school.
Then a hurricane destroyed the coffee plantation. Overnight, the economic foundation of the village was gone. Families faced an impossible choice: abandon everything including their land, their neighbors, and attempt the brutal 4,300-mile journey north to the U.S. border. Or find another way.
If they had some health and educational resources, they would have stayed. If they could hold on for six years, the coffee field would be ready for harvest.
Paramedics for Children stepped in with medical care. But there was still nothing for the school. So they reached out to the Bill Cook Foundation, and to you.
Bill with two students and a U.S. volunteer during a supply distribution visit to the mountain village.
Together, we now provide monthly deliveries of school supplies — books, notebooks, pens, paper, snacks — and food assistance for one mountain school. It isn't a grand intervention. It is pencils and crackers and the message that someone, somewhere, gives a damn whether these children learn to read.
Almost everyone stayed.
We have all watched the television coverage of migrants making that desperate trek north, filled with dangers, violence, and uncertainty—especially for children. Every family that stayed in that village is a family that didn't have to face that road.
We send $2,500 three times a year to support this school. Your gift — of any size — goes directly to school supplies, food assistance, and the monthly deliveries that keep this program running.
If you'd like to designate your gift specifically to Honduras, please note that when you donate. The Bill Cook Foundation also supports refugees in Bangladesh, a school for deaf children in Equatorial Guinea, and children with Down Syndrome in the mountains of Peru. Your unrestricted gift helps wherever the need is greatest.
We cannot save the world. But we can make all the difference in the world for the children of one mountain village in Honduras. Thank you for helping us try.
With deep gratitude,
Bill Cook
Founder, Bill Cook Foundation