“Mano Amiga is our house of culture and formation, where we help students with love and service to build their life projects and become more resilient to the realities they face. We sow foundations that many families no longer have, such as prayer. The school is a protective environment, a meeting place and not a place of conflict,” says Walfran Olarte, director of Mano Amiga Bello (MAB), located in an area where illegal groups, micro-trafficking, poverty and a crisis of values persist.
As an educator for more than 16 years, he affirms that the greatest contribution of the educational institution has been to provide quality education based on human, intellectual, spiritual and apostolic formation of children and young people with fewer opportunities, emphasizing human, moral and religious values and constant support to families to rebuild the social fabric of the sector and the municipality. Today, 828 students and 740 families benefit from the program.
“Catholic schools should be centers of evangelization. Just as our students receive, they share their faith with others, participate in youth groups and bring hope to homes for the elderly and foundations that care for other children; the teachers, in their cordial treatment with them and the parents, also make the Gospel visible, and the families feel welcomed, trying to replicate outside what they live here,” adds Olarte.
In addition, the presence of schools such as Mano Amiga Bello contributes to narrowing the educational gap in the country, more so with the increase in dropouts in the pandemic. In Bello, the second most populated municipality in the department of Antioquia, the net coverage or proportion of schoolchildren in the corresponding age and grade has ranged between 70% and 87%, according to different analyses of available official data, which in any case does not exceed the 92% of the national average.
A story that transcends by Mano Amiga Bello
In 1996, Mexican priest Sergio Córdova, LC (r.i.p.) and a group of parents from the Cumbres School, also a Regnum Christi school, arrived in the El Trapiche neighborhood with the dream of opening the first Mano Amiga (Helping Hand) in Colombia. In that sector they had built housing for widows of police officers and uniformed disabled victims of retaliation, so the opening of a Catholic educational institution would also help to “heal” the wounds generated in the community after several years of conflict in the municipality and the department.
The school began operations on May 10, 1997 with 30 kindergarten children in a small house granted on loan and the following year, with 180 students, moved to a large plot of land donated by the Antioquia Presente Corporation, where three blocks and other spaces were gradually built for greater coverage.
“I remember the days when we had classes under the trees, eating fruit, when the parents” school organized clean-up days to keep the green areas beautiful, and the Christmas celebrations," says Estefanía Hurtado, a graduate of the first graduating class of Mano Amiga Bello (2008) and a social communicator and journalist. The school already has 609 high school graduates and their lives continue to be transformed, most of them as professionals, entrepreneurs or parents, several of them with their children in the school that saw them grow up.
Education with a Catholic identity has been a decisive reason for parents to seek a place there, because if anything characterizes Antioquia and its Paisa culture, it is the deep-rooted faith of its people (this department already has a saint, the first in Colombia: Mother Laura Montoya). While Catholic formation is increasingly weakened in public schools, private institutions are usually expensive, and that is why donations from companies, foundations and families have allowed the school to fulfill its educational and evangelization mission.
Mano Amiga is also present in rural Colombia, in Zipaquirá (Cundinamarca), and in eight other countries through non-profit Catholic schools promoted by Regnum Christi, which benefit more than 22,000 students from vulnerable populations in Latin America and Asia.
Source: Communication Office of Regnum Christi of Colombia.
You may be interested in: Some ladies of Mano Amiga Chalco are associated with Regnum Christi.
