Bellevue Christian Secondary Spanish teacher Alicia Taleno‘s Deep Hope is for her students to explore, enjoy, and admire culture together, showing selfless love to people of different color, race, and economic levels in our neighborhood and world. Alicia shares about the growing relationship between the Spanish students at Bellevue Christian and the students at Niños Tres Rios in San Salvador, a collaboration that resulted in the creation of books for the Central American school’s library

Three years ago, I was introduced to Niños Tres Rios, an organization in San Salvador that works with students who are not lucky enough to have a library in their school or community. We established a connection between my school and a school in San Salvador, and my students started writing letters back and forth with the students in this school. This year, we decided to create books for them since they do not have a library of their own. Students in Spanish 1, 2, 3, and 4 wrote stories according to their skill level, all aimed at an elementary school audience. Soon, this project expanded outside the walls of my Spanish classroom, as students from other classes and even family members helped to illustrate the stories my students created.
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My deep hope is that my students will explore, enjoy, and admire culture together, showing selfless love to people of different color, race, and economic levels in our neighborhood and the world. In my class, we reflect on this hope by using the storyline "Together we are stronger."  This book project allowed my students to show love and make connections with other people in simple little ways. As one of my students reflected, "We all made such beautiful little stories that will bring others lots of joy." We created things of beauty in order to build community—not only within our own school but also with the students in San Salvador. Another student said, "Through this project, we are…serving God by showing love to his children, even though we've never met them. This project was extremely fun and a wonderful, kind way of connecting with other people in other cultures on God's earth!"

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