Five years ago we traveled to El Salvador for the first time. We worked with a rural health organization, Asaprosar. We performed in most of the twenty-five Pre-Schools Asaprosar has built throughout the country.

On that first trip, the founder-director of Asaprosar, Dr. Vicky Guzman de Luna, asked if we would teach some magic tricks to a group of children who were doing particularly well in school.  These children participate in a program called “The Barefoot Angels.” A few years earlier, many of these children had been living and working barefoot in a garbage dump (See the story “Chalchuapa Dump” on our web site.) After spending a day with this group of children teaching them magic tricks, a fourteen year-old boy named Jaime Zumba asked Tom, “When are you coming back?”  We had no plans to come back or not to come back.  Tom thought for a moment and responded, “How’ bout May?” “Great,” Zumba shouted. Since then we have traveled to El Salvador fifteen times. September 2009, Zumba and Peter (another of the children present that day five years ago), traveled with Tom and another magician to Guatemala.Peter and Zumba performed for 4,500 Mayan children.  They have become very accomplished magicians regularly performing in orphanages and schools, as well as paying gigs. Magic gives these children something to feel passionate about. It has helped them stay out of the gangs and has increased their sense of confidence and self-esteem. The magicians tell us these skills have helped them immensely in school. The last night in Guatemala Peter said:  “On the bus ride here I was afraid it would be difficult to fit in here in Guatemala, but I realize now what is really difficult is connecting with all these wonderful people and now having to leave.” 

This trip to Guatemala was a dream come true for both the young Salvadoran magicians and us. For five years we have told these young magicians our dream is that some day, if they continued to develop as magicians, and do well in school, they would travel with us to the refugee camps and orphanages around the world. Hopefully this trip to Guatemala will be the first of many trips. There is a trip to Guatemala planned for January 2010 with three of the girl magicians.

Many marvelous things have happened these past five years in El Salvador. One of the most wonderful things is that dreams have begun to awaken within these young magicians.  We like to think that magic makes the impossible seem possible.  At various times these children would say to us, “I want to be a nurse,”  “I want to be a veterinarian,”  “ I want to study computers.”  In response to these awakening dreams, to the passion and grit of these children and to how well they were doing in school, we created The Barefoot Angel Magicians Scholarship Fund. The junior and senior years of High School in El Salvador cost $450/year, an impossible amount for the struggling families of these children. The Scholarship Fund as of November 2009 is  paying for a half dozen high school scholarships and two post-secondary students  -Wendy who is about to graduate from Nursing School  and Jaime Zumba is studying computers at the best electronics institute in Santa Ana. These children are making their dreams come true. These are dreams they could not even dare to dream when they were living and working in the dumps of Santa Ana. 

We are thrilled with what these young magicians are doing in El Salvador.

They amaze us all the time. Thank you for helping us to continue this work in El Salvador. Donating today helps make dreams come true in El Salvador.