For 25 years, an organization known as Safe Passage has operated a school in one of Guatemala City's poorest neighborhoods, supporting hundreds of students last year alone.
It was founded by Maine native and Bowdoin college graduate Hanley Denning, who was inspired by the children and families she met living around the Guatemala City garbage dump. When Denning was killed in a car crash in Guatemala in 2007, her work carried on.
And over the last two decades, Safe Passage has witnessed broad changes in the country, including deepening economic inequality and a sudden rise in organized crime. Ari Snider spoke with Safe Passage executive director Erin Mooney about how the organization is responding.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Snider: I want to start out with asking, how have you seen economic conditions in Guatemala change over the last 25 years?
Mooney: Guatemala has changed a lot in the last 25 years. I mean, 25 years ago, it was just coming out of a civil war. Guatemala is no longer a low-income country, as defined by the World Bank. It's actually a middle-income country. It just happens to have one of the highest income inequality rates in the world. It ranks 15th in income inequality.
Another thing I was curious about is how the rise of organized crime has impacted the children you serve in Guatemala, and how you're able to operate there as an organization.
We've seen a pretty abrupt rise in organized crime in the last year. It didn't catch us on our back foot, because it's always been a very challenged community and very much a gang-impacted community since the very beginning. And because of other geopolitical factors in the last couple of years, like the crackdown on gang violence in El Salvador. We've seen an overflow of gang leaders who have come into our community and taken over local gang factions. Because we've been working in the community for 25 years, the gangs have really left us alone for the most part. But we're seeing a shift in that. One of our external security guards, who was a father of a student, was extorted and murdered this year about a block from the school, and we've seen an increase in in violence directly around our building.
How does the rise of violence in the community impact the lives of the children that you're working with?
Many of our students experience things that no child should experience. When we hear about a murder, which we hear about regularly, it's almost assured that one of our students will be impacted. It's a cousin, it's an uncle, it's a neighbor, it's a friend. We are having to make room for conversations in the classroom that is really unlike many other schools, and Safe Passage is not just a school. We have psychologists, we have social workers. It's a lot of very intense trauma management and navigation and mitigation. And our students are growing and learning and becoming but carry a very, very abnormally heavy load.
So what are you looking forward to in the new year? I understand you're planning to open a new school.
Yes, we're under construction right now of a new middle school building, and that will give us four sites. We have an early childhood site. We have an elementary school site that's now shared with elementary and middle school, and they're really packed in there, so our middle school students will move to their own beautiful campus. And then we have a high school site as well. In responding to the to the violence issue, we need more mindfulness in the classroom, more meditation tools, more social work, more psychology, giving students a safe, loving, warm, trauma-informed place to process what they're processing. And, you know, really intentionally continuing to build the leadership of our students that see themselves college-bound or that see themselves as changemakers. That's what's going to break these cycles. That's what's going to change Guatemala. And then I think last but not least, it's our 25th anniversary. So we are going to take moments in 2025 to celebrate. And I think the next 25 years of Safe Passage is going to be more Guatemalan-led. Our students are really going to going to lead the way, and our Guatemalan staff. And so taking this opportunity to celebrate that and really be grateful.
