By Thomas Chalk

The holiday season is upon us again and it gives us the perfect opportunity to reflect on 2010. Discover Latin America has been busy this year with numerous events including the recent Discover Latin America Film Festival which took place last month as well as DLA Rhythms, and DLA Visual Arts Festival. An incredible amount of money has been raised which has provided several charities with healthy donations to improve countless lives in Latin America.

Every year all our volunteers participate in the selection of the charities or projects that we support thorough our cultural events and fundraising activities. Every year when you buy a ticket to one of our events, you are contributing directly to making a difference in one or more countries in Latin America.  DLA selects the charity or project that the festivals and events will fund on an annual basis. This year we have decided to contribute to:

SALCET: a UK registered charity seeking the relief of poverty, sickness, distress and the preservation of good health of children who are suffering as a result of earthquakes and other natural disasters in El Salvador. The organisation provides teaching and training on health related subjects, safe building provision, sanitation, medical clinics, etc.

This year Salcet has used donations to work on the 'Agua Negras' project in the village of San Carlos, a poor suburb of the capital, San Salvador. The village is situated on a hill and was damaged in the earthquakes of 2001 and also hurricanes Stan 2005 and Ida 2009. Salcet is constructing a seismic -resistant community building in San Carlos and one of the architects used to work with Over Arup (the architects that designed the Sydney Opera house). The community building will provide a safe and strong place of refuge in the vulnerability to natural disasters found in El Salvador. They have frequent earthquakes, floods, storms and volcanic eruptions.
Donations will implement the drainage and sanitation for the village, which has poor water supply and inadequate drainage and sewerage systems and open sewers in the streets. The community building needs to be plumbed in to a proper cesspit/drainage system too. The building is also being used for community activities including medical clinics, immunisations for children, music lessons (guitar) for the children and table tennis/table football.

War on Want: A UK-based international NGO that works against the policies and structures that causes poverty. The organisation's vision is a world free from poverty and oppression, based on social justice, equality and human rights for all. We will support a campaign in Honduras aiming to improve living conditions and livelihoods of female garment workers by educating, building their capacities and empowering these workers to exercise and defend their rights, face policy makers, employers and multinational retailers.

This year War on Want has been working on several projects including trade justice, the fight against supermarket power, issues regarding Iraqi oil, banks, mining, sweatshops and also fighting against the troubles in Palestine.There are a sweatshop issue. Garment workers pay a high price to produce cheap clothes for the UK high street. Factories produce clothes for retailers like Primark, Asda, or Tesco, and garment workers working there struggle to survive on extremely low pay, suffering poor working conditions, arduous hours and a complete lack of trade union representation in the factories. Change will not happen overnight; however, they hope to put a real dent on this problem by 2012.

Raleigh: A youth and education charity working for sustainable development based permanently in Costa Rica & Nicaragua. The aim of this project is to build a primary school for the children of Ximiri in the Chirripó Indigenous Reserve in Costa Rica. Here are examples of the projects hat Raleigh has been working on this year.

La Calera, Achapa, Nicaragua
High in the hills above Achuapa, in one of the poorest most remote areas of Nicaragua, Raleigh has been working on a project to bring clean and safe drinking water to 14 families in La Calera. At present the local people get their water from the river which often dries up in summer or comes from polluted water sources. Raleigh volunteers are working with the local population to dam small streams, build tanks to collect the water from where it can run through pipes to all the local houses. Volunteers are living directly with families in the village and will help out with their day to day tasks.

Miraflor Community centre project, Nicaragua
The Miraflor reserve is 206sq km of beautiful mountainous terrain with various different ecosystems such as tropical savannah, dry tropical forest and mountain cloud forest. The local people have few resources and lack access to basic services such as health and education. On this project volunteers are building a community centre / preschool in the community of El Zacaton where currently there are no facilities for very young children to learn. The community centre will also act as the hub of the community proving a space for meetings, training sessions and social events.

So as the year draws to a close, from all of us at DLA we wish you Happy Holidays and good luck for the New Year in which we will continue our hard work and hope to continue improving the lives of those in need in Latin America.