Agros Blog

Agros International is featured in this article at Modern Woodworking. The focus is on the “Journey With A Village” partnership between Pacific Crest Cabinets and the Agros Village “La Esperanza” in El Salvador. Here is an excerpt:

“I’ve been in third world countries before, but when you add appalling living conditions with desperation and lack of hope, it’s a very, very discouraging outlook. I remember the women and children wouldn’t look us in the eye, and the men all had a downtrodden attitude. There was one public bathroom and one water faucet for more than a thousand people. I saw two little boys playing in the dirt pretending sticks were cars and making car noises. I had a flashback to my own childhood when I would go outside and play with my toy cars in the dirt and make the same noises. But what was different was that I had the potential of realizing the dream. I started wondering about these little boys and how old will they be when their dreams get crushed — when they realize they’ll never have that car or that truck and they’ll never have anything – that they are poor and they will always be poor and basically there’s no hope in life. To be honest my heart was broken.
“The next day we visited two fairly new AGROS villages. The people were living in their little tin houses in the remote parts of El Salvador, and frankly, they still had nothing materially, but they had everything that you need to be happy in life because of hope. Each of these farmers was proud to share his story and show us his field of beans and corn all planted by hand. I remember one woman who was so exuberant about the chance that the village children would now have an opportunity to live a dream that she could never realize herself. It was very moving. This woman said she used to go to sleep and dream about opportunities or ways to make things better for her family, but now she could dream with her eyes open. It was a moving experience.”

Read the entire article here…