Fabretto Children's Foundation

Everything Sandy Learned, She Is Passing On

BY: Misty Lopez

Sandy in the field with Xch'ool Ixim in Guatemala — Sandy in the field

When Sandy’s mother passed away, she stopped going to school.

“I stayed home to take care of my siblings,” she says. “I didn’t go to school for three years.”

She told herself that her five siblings needed her. That was reason enough. And in San José Peña Blanca 1, a rural Q’eqchi’ community in Cobán, Alta Verapaz, that choice wasn’t unusual. “A majority of the women don’t have the opportunity to study,” Sandy explains. “They stay at home to take care of the family and learn how to do household chores.”

With her father’s encouragement and her sister’s support, Sandy finally returned to school.

Finding Her Place

Sandy shares that she grew up without much experience in agricultural production. Even though her community is primarily driven by an agricultural economy, she didn’t know how to grow crops, how to manage a harvest, or how to share that knowledge with others.

When she returned to school, she joined Fabretto’s Capacitación Técnicas (CaTec), an agricultural training and youth development program implemented alongside our Impact Partner, Asociación Xch’ool Ixim, a Q’eqchi’ community organization in Alta Verapaz that has been educating indigenous youth for decades. CaTec is designed to do both: build agricultural skills and develop the confidence, leadership, and teamwork that young people need to create change in their own communities. In 2025, CaTec reached 452 students across Guatemala and Honduras, more than half of them girls.

Sandy arrived ready to learn. What she found was a place where something in her began to shift.

“CaTec is where I started to change,” she says. “I learned to share with others, to work as a team, to participate. I started to believe that I could change things in my own life.”

4 students standing side by side in a field — Sandy (second from right) with fellow CaTec students at Xch'ool Ixim, Alta Verapaz, Guatemala

A Different Kind of Classroom

In CaTec, Sandy discovered what it meant to learn with her hands. She gained experience growing crops that weren’t typically harvested in her community, new possibilities brought home and planted in family gardens.

“I love hands-on learning in CaTec,” she says. “Being able to plant and cultivate, to actually do it and not just hear about it, means a lot to me.”

She discovered she especially loved growing cilantro. She had tried it at home, just a small plant here and there, but finding it here felt like a small but steady thread connecting who she had been to who she was becoming.

Knowledge That Travels

CaTec doesn’t stop at the school garden. The program is built on the idea that agricultural knowledge should move through communities, not just classrooms. Students bring what they learn home. Families gather. Neighbors watch the gardens grow.

“With my family’s support, I was able to plant some crops [at home] because they gave me the land to do so,” Sandy says.

Fabretto team member Annie Hall witnessed this firsthand during her visit to Xch’ool Ixim, where she met Sandy. She wrote about the students she met: families waiting at their doors for them to return home, younger siblings sitting beside them with new notebooks, neighbors coming over to watch what they were planting and how they were tending their gardens. “Everyone benefits from this work,” Annie observed.

Sandy feels that same pull. “Everything I have learned has given me so much knowledge, and now I have the opportunity to share it,” she says. “I believe we go much further together than alone.”

Sandy and her peers with CEO Kevin Marinacci — Sandy (second from right) with Fabretto CEO Kevin Marinacci (far right) during his visit to Xch'ool Ixim

Sandy Is Passing It On

Sandy recently graduated from high school. She is now preparing to become a CaTec facilitator.

“Thanks to Fabretto, I am going to be a facilitator for 52 students,” she says. “I am excited to be able to pass on what I learned to other young people.”

She is staying in San José Peñablanca 1, in the community that raised her, and she is preparing to invest in it.

For the young women in her community who never had the opportunity to study, Sandy is proof that another path exists. One she is building for herself and for those coming after her.

That is what Fabretto’s work in Central America is about. And Sandy is exactly what it looks like when it works.