Schools that are beacons: La Palmera and El Espartillal
The two rural schools where it all began in 2019 — roofs, equipment and the conviction that a dignified classroom is a pillar of peace.
On the mountain, a rural school is much more than a building: it is the place where the whole village meets, decides and dreams. When it rains inside the classroom, more than the floor gets wet.
That is why the first donation of Lotus Children’s Foundation in Colombia, in 2019, went exactly there: to the rural schools of La Palmera and El Espartillal, in the countryside of Pijao. New roofs, school equipment, a refrigerator to keep food fresh, a solar panel where the power supply was too weak.
They were small works in budget and enormous in meaning: the school community chose what it needed, and the help arrived without intermediaries or fanfare. That method — listen first, help second — became the hallmark of everything that followed.
From that seed grew the Classrooms for Peace programme: the conviction that a dignified, dry, well-lit classroom is a pillar of hope in a territory that has learned to overcome conflict and natural disasters. The La Palmera school, perched in the high mountains, remains for us what it was in 2019: a beacon.
Today the work with schools continues wherever infrastructure is needed, complemented by the yoga and wellbeing strand. Because peace is also learned — and it is learned best under a roof that does not leak.