May has brought especial success to two of our students, both of them from the compañías, that is, from the poorest rural outskirts of the municipality. On 9 May, our English student Evelin was one of only nine to be selected nationwide for the Opportunity Funds programme, which is run by the US embassy in conjunction with the CCPA (Centro Cultural Paraguayo Americano). The aim of this programme is to give intensive preparation and funding to outstanding students of limited resources for the university entrance exam of the USA known as SAT. It sounds incredible, but the people who run it are expert in knowing which colleges give full scholarships, and have had extraordinary success in placing students for undergraduate degrees. They also pay the necessary initial costs such as the airfare out and the visa costs. We are collaborating with the programme in giving her preparation classes for TOEFL here in Santa María. (You may remember Evelin from our January news: we gave her a scholarship to study Journalism, which will be suspended until we know if she has won a place at a US university.)
On 18 May our law undergraduate Nacho was voted President of the Centro de Estudiantes at the Universidad Católica, San Ignacio, where there are over 400 students. This is the equivalent of a UK President of the Students’ Union, and we are proud to see once again how our scholarship students from SMEF are taking the top honours at a university where we were once regarded as little more than poor country cousins. On the same day, he also received the news that he has been selected as the one and only Paraguayan rep for Jóvenes Iberoamericanos – an organisation devoted to empowering young people from all over Hispanic America, through democratic participation based on Human Rights and Freedom of Expression. In this role he will be attending international meetings with other high-flying young people from all the Spanish-speaking countries of America, as well as Spain itself.
