Scott Moore, who works on the marketing strategy of Hop Springs Beer Park in Murfreesboro, has done a lot of work over the years to help the youth in Guatemala with the organization Athentikos, which he founded with his wife, Amelia, in 2008.
“We started Athentikos to give back to Guatemala, the birth country of our sons,” Moore said. “We were so grateful, we couldn’t just adopt our sons and go on with our lives. So we gathered creative friends and started a nonprofit to use creativity as a mission to empower and heal.”
They took three trips to Guatemala beginning in 2009 to produce Reparando, a feature-length, award-winning documentary that depicts the country’s 36-year war and reconstruction.
“Less than a three-hour flight from Atlanta, Guatemala is a land of incredible diversity—ancient Mayan ruins in the lowlands, centuries-old Spanish Colonial architecture in the highlands, beautiful beaches, volcanoes and lush rain forests,” Moore said. “Among all of this beauty is a people with great needs. Seventy-five percent of the population lives below the poverty line. There are an estimated 20,000 children living in orphanages and at least 6,000 more live in the streets of Guatemala City alone.
“Gang culture, chronic malnutrition, poor education and lack of resources,” Moore explains, “prevent countless Guatemalans from rising above their oppressed condition.”
In January 2008, Moore visited a maximum security prison with a missionary friend to meet some gang members. In the prison, he was surrounded by hundreds of men covered in gang tattoos.
“Yet behind the frightening war paint were the eyes of young men with stories—stories of struggle,” he said. “While many of them had committed horrible crimes, I couldn’t stop thinking about the circumstances that limited their choices in the first place. That night I had difficulty sleeping. I realized that in different circumstances, either of my Guatemalan sons could have ended up in that prison . . . and honestly, so could I.
It wasn’t enough that I adopted two sons. My mind was captivated by what I witnessed and my soul demanded that I respond.” Moore says he then gathered a crew and traveled back to Guatemala to explore the stories he had heard. “I began to ask questions,” Moore begins. “Why do people join gangs? Why do children live on the street? What caused the rampant poverty? What caused the enormous slums? When did all of this begin?
While seeking answers, Moore learned that the majority of issues in Guatemala today are connected to a 36-year civil war that ended in 1996. “Fathers were killed. Families were destroyed. And people fleeing violence created some of the largest slums in Latin America,” Moore says.
“But hope is rising. In the midst of incredible odds, victims have been transformed into champions who willfully embrace the pain of their past to help repair the next generation.”
The fruits of Athentikos’s labor are the children the mission gets to work with, said program director David Lee.
Working with street youth inspired Athentikos to create an arts program called “I AM ART” to empower at-risk kids through creative arts. Since 2014, the organization has hosted over 20 camps both domestically and abroad and worked with over 2,000 at-risk youths in Guatemala.
“I’ve worked with children in extreme urban settings like a slum neighborhood in Guatemala called La Limonada, which is one of the largest slums in the world,” Lee said. “It is massive.”
In La Limonada, at young ages, children fall into factioned gangs that are divided by region.
To bring these kids together, in 2016, Athentikos led kids from these different regions to work together on a mural, and now years later they are able to look at their art as a reminder that they are able to work together toward something new.
Athentikos also looks at opportunities for healing through art. In their curriculum, the mission does a lot of group projects. One such project involved having all of the campers create ceramic tiles and then, in the process of breaking them, process through some of the things that have happened to them that are heavy and difficult.
Then they take all of those pieces from the tiles, put them back together and make a mural piece.
“We can take all these pieces of our lives and put them together into one beautiful piece,” Lee said. “I think self-expression and the creative arts allow these children to process the situation they are in in a healthy way, and we are just a part of that. We are seeing good work happen, and we have a large volunteer base in Guatemala.”
Athentikos is looking for volunteers to help in the United States as well. In East Nashville, they have painted a mural with the local kids with Front Porch Ministry, and they have had multiple small art activities around town.
“In 2020 we hope to expand our I AM ART program into other locations in Guatemala and around the world, including Middle Tennessee,” Moore said.
For information about upcoming opportunities to volunteer locally or in Guatemala, visit athentikos.com.
___
You can also view the documentary Reparando on Amazon Prime; Athentikos has a second documentary, called Becoming Fools, the story of Italo Castro, a professional clown who earned his living entertaining children at parties, but who also removed his makeup and cared for street children in his spare time. Becoming Fools can be seen on YouTube:
