Peabody Award-winning journalist Laure Quinlivan was looking for a good story to tell when she heard about a Cincinnati nonprofit which provides books and scholarships to Guatemalan students.
Then she heard that Cincinnati’s largest Hispanic group is from the Central American nation bordering Mexico.
“I didn’t know anyone (from Guatemala) here,” says Quinlivan, the former WCPO-TV investigative I-TEAM who left the station in 2007.
Quinlivan says she wanted to go beyond the stories you typically see in the news: when someone is arrested or deported.
"I wanted to talk to them and get to know them.”
That’s the inspiration for her Connecting Communities: Cincinnati to Guatemala documentary premiering 8 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 12, on WCPO-TV. It repeats on Channel 9 at noon Sunday, Nov. 15.
A longer director’s cut version will be screened 7 p.m. Monday, Nov. 16 at Mariemont Theatre, followed by a discussion organized by Women in Film, featuring writer-director-producer Quinlivan; videographer Glenn Hartong; editor Jaime Meyers Schlenk; and Sara Drabik, Northern Kentucky University professor of Electronic Media and Broadcasting.
For nearly 30 years, Cincinnati’s Cooperative for Education (CoEd) has given textbooks to Guatemala students. CoEd also helps provide technology and scholarships to encourage them to graduate.
“Guatemala is one of the poorest and most illiterate places in the hemisphere,” says Joe Berninger, CoEd co-founder.
“Down in Guatemala we are helping thousands of kids learn to read, give them the tech skills they need to get jobs, and graduate from high school,” says Berninger, son of a former Elder High School science teacher.
“Ninety-five percent of the [rural] schools have no books. We pulled together a lot of people from Cincinnati to bring books to Guatemalan schools. It all really began as a bunch of Cincinnatians wanting to be connected to Guatemala to help education. And a bunch of people who, like my dad, believed that the solution to almost everything in life is education," Berninger says.
Victor Martinez, community pastor for Crossroads Church en Español, says CoEd is “genuintely transforming life (in Guatemala) by teaching kids how to read.”
To her credit, Quinlivan devotes the first 40 minutes to introducing the audience to residents in Guatemala and Greater Cincinnati immigrants before mentioning ICE arrests and immigration detention. One Guatemalan restaurant owner says her business dropped from $200 a day to sometimes just $40 due to ICE fears.
The Cincinnati to Guatemala connection includes:
- Rotary Club members Dr. Huxley and Ariel Miller and Michelle Starr visiting Guatemala schools and homes with CoEd last February;
- Coffee Emporium owners Steve Tausch and Eileen Schwab, who buy coffee from Olga Hazard’s Finca Los Andes farm in Guatemala;
- Drabik’s NKU students filming documentaries last spring in Guatemala;
- Barber Wes Diaz and multiple other Price Hill business owners;
- Walter Vasquez, Hispanic/Latino Outreach director of the Ola Immigrant Welcome Center, 4431 Glenway Ave., operated by Bloc Ministries.
- Fr. Alex McCollough saying Mass to a full congregation at Our Lady of the Rosary Catholic Church in Greenhills, part of the Queen of Apostles Family of parishes;
- Crossroads Church, which is very active in the Greater Cincinnati Guatemalan community.
Starr, also a Woodlawn Village Council member, says that “if more Americans visited more developing countries, they would see that what we have here. We’re almost living in luxury — and they are so comfortable where they live. And proud! It made me come home to not complain as much,” she says.
“There is something beautiful happening here in Cincinnati,” Martinez says, “that I think should be replicated.”
