Joshua DuPuis
Staff Writer
Throughout the past week, the Spanish Club has been selling handmade bracelets from Nicaragua who don’t have a market at home in celebration of foreign language week.
The Pulsera Project is an international non-profit organization helping to find a market for products made by artists in Latin America.
The project buys bracelets from artists in Latin America, where no market for their work exists, before shipping them off to American schools to be sold to students and teachers.
Each bracelet, with its unique, intricate design, is sold for $5 with all of the proceeds being sent back to Nicaragua or Guatemala to help fund “secondary education, university scholarships, housing programs, healthcare, workers’ rights advocacy, gender equality, and funding for environmental initiatives,” as stated by the Pulsera Project website.
“I’ve made bracelets before but nothing like these,” said junior Mollie Bowman, “the detail is crazy.”
“Initially I found this project online. I was looking for a way to get our club more involved, not just local affairs but also the world as a whole. This way we can do that through arts and through a good cause,” said junior Emily Carder, president of the Spanish Club.
After Emily’s discovery of the project, she and Sarah Snellings, the Spanish Club sponsor and Spanish teacher, endured a long process of applications and approvals in which they needed to get permission from not only principal Andrew Mey, but also the project itself.
“The Pulsera Project team [evaluates] your school [and] how well planned out you are [in order to] make sure that the project is going to be successful. You apply, write an essay, they ask you how many kids are at your school to determine how many bracelets they want to send, and they approve you or not,” said Ms. Snellings.
However, now that Freeman is approved to sell bracelets, the Spanish Club plans to continue the project in future years
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