Portland, OR / Antigua, Guatemala (PRWEB) April 5, 2005 — Speak Shop, an innovative website for live face-to-face Spanish tutoring, today announced a partnership with PROBIGUA (Proyecto Bibliotecas Guatemala – Guatemala Library Project), to create an online marketplace for Guatemalan instructors to teach Spanish to people all over the world through the Internet.
The partnership saves money for students and opens up new income opportunities for tutors who, for the first time ever, can sell their services through e-commerce.
The tutors are experts at customizing Spanish lessons, and students can learn about Guatemalan cultural issues by actually seeing and talking with a tutor who lives there. Speak Shop’s online marketplace provides the infrastructure to facilitate billing, scheduling, reporting and audio and video interaction. Students choose tutors based on qualifications and hourly rates and schedule private lessons, which they take from their personal computer.
PROBIGUA runs one of Guatemala’s best Spanish immersion schools, using proceeds to fund its country-wide literacy projects. Until recently, the Spanish school could only operate at capacity during high tourist season. With the Speak Shop partnership, PROBIGUA teachers have access to students year-round.
“Probigua will expand their teaching opportunities and earn more money, resulting in more jobs for teachers and more funds for libraries,” said Clay Cooper, co-founder of Speak Shop. “Speak Shop’s goal is to create an eBay of Spanish language instruction where teachers and students interact directly. This creates a fair trade situation where teachers manage their own tutoring business, set their own rates and are held to high quality standards through student feedback ratings. And it makes it easy for people almost anywhere to learn Spanish online.”
PROBIGUA’s Founder and Director, Rigoberto Zamora Charuc, believes access to books and the Internet is essential for improving lives in Guatemala, where poverty and illiteracy are rampant. His own life would have been much different had he not received an anonymous donation as a child that allowed him to go to school. As a result, instead of picking coffee in his remote village, he ended up building 16 rural Internet centers and 24 libraries throughout Guatemala that are changing the lives of rural children and their families. Working with Speak Shop, PROBIGUA takes Internet access a step further and creates economic opportunity.
“I am convinced that this innovative idea will consequently bring benefits for individuals and development in many poor Guatemalan communities,” said Charuc.
About PROBIGUA
PROBIGUA is based in Antigua, Guatemala and was founded by Charuc who saw reading as the path to freedom for Guatemala’s poor and isolated children and created 24 libraries and 16 rural Internet centers in Guatemala. For more information, contact Child Aid, PROBIGUA’s nonprofit partner in the U.S. www.child-aid.org
About Speak Shop
Speak Shop was founded by Clay and Cindy Cooper to increase access to foreign language education and to generate economic opportunity for people in Latin America. For more information on Speak Shop visit www.speakshop.com.
