Boothbay Harbor Congregational Church welcomed Safe Passage Director and Head of School Trae Holland and U.S. Office Director Anna Marie Klein Christie March 4. The church’s community has supported Safe Passage (Camino Seguro), a school for children stuck in poverty, for several years through individual sponsorships and group volunteer trips to Guatemala.

Holland said Safe Passage was launched in 1999 by Yarmouth’s  Hanley Denning who brought in 46 children from the Guatemala City highlands and notorious landfill. Denning’s inspiration came after volunteering to teach English in Guatemala City. Holland said that on Denning’s last day in the City, a friend asked her to help in “the dump,” the largest landfill in Central America. At the dump, families pick garbage for a living.

“The degradation and the Dantean hellscape she witnessed on that day changed her forever,” Holland said. “It's an incredibly devilish place to live and work. People disappear when the garbage shifts, the violence is rampant and the gangs are everywhere.”

So, Denning came back to Maine, sold her computer and her car, and returned to Guatemala to set up Safe Passage, said Holland. The program started with around 46 babies. The goal was providing them with food and a safe place while families went back out to work in the dump. The campuses are now in the city’s Zone 3 and is considered a “red zone,” which is among the most violent, Holland said.

“Then you think, years later, she grew an organization that served 100, 200, 300 – and not just the children, but their families – with food and medical care and eventually educational support … I can tell you now, in 2020, we have upwards of 600 students and serve 1,000 people.”

Denning died in 2007 in a car accident in Guatemala City. Holland said the organization could have easily died with Denning, but the board, teachers and community carried it forward.

Its scope continues to expand, said Holland. While the campus is at its capacity having spaces like the library dedicated as classrooms, the organization has broken ground for a new building as it expands its full-day programs grade by grade, year after year. In the kindergarten through ninth grade program, full-day was extended to eighth grade this year and will expand to ninth next year. Safe Passage also has a 10th through 12th grade and job placement programs.

The retention for most schools in Zone 3 is about 17%, Holland explained. Safe Passage's retention rate is 96% and all 40 seventh graders last year returned for this year’s eighth grade program. “Our learning philosophy is expeditionary learning. It's hands-on, collaborative, real-world learning.”

Holland and Christie said safety is always a concern living there, but Safe Passage’s importance is not lost on the surrounding communities and factions of gang warfare.

“Not one volunteer, not one employee has ever been hurt in any violent act in two decades and the reason for that's not luck … We provide an immense amount of support to that community … so if your cousin's a gang member and you're going to our school and you have a chance of getting out of that place? The gang members don't see us as a threat because if something happened to our school, everyone would be deleteriously affected.”

The best support to come out of communities like the Congo Church has been student sponsorships, said Christie. “It's super important in terms of the stability of the organization because people will make a commitment to the long-term education of the student. But I also think it's a part of who we are as a school as opposed to there being one big donor … It's a community love. We have volunteers who have been there since day one.”

Christie will continue to support Safe Passage at its stateside hub in New Gloucester while Holland returns to Guatemala City. Holland will go back in May.