Spanish Moms: Mothers of Spanish Schoolchildren Attempt to Counter Austerity Measures with Sultry Calendars

Apologies to The Clash, of course.

I realize it's a touch late [or REALLY early- NANESB!] for another 'amateur women strip for calendar to raise funds' blog entry replete with some gratuitous eye candy, but I came across this story from December lurking in a sidebar during an unrelated search for an article about Russia's partially privatized GAZPROM of all things and since the fruits of these women's labor is apparently still available I figured it would be worth a mention.

With an unemployment rate topping 26% and austerity measures in place thanks in to the ongoing Eurozone crisis, some women in rural Spain are getting creative when it comes to ideas for raising funds to restore services that were cut.

In the eastern village of Montserrat, regional authorities decided to suspend school bus services to children that lived within 1.8 miles of the school. But due to the mountainous terrain and twisting roads in the area, some children end up having to walk more than twice that distance from school to home even if they only lived a mile and a half from the school as the crow flies.



After some brainstorming, Maria Gilabert and other local moms came up with the same idea that certain out-of-work stewardesses in Mexico came up with- take off their clothes for a sexy calendar.

The calendar, which shows the mothers in various states of undress posing along the bus route, has already sold thousands of copies and raised awareness of the cuts to the education system across Spain.

In September authorities cut public school bus services for students living within a 1.8 mile radius of the school but parents argue that has left many students having to walk almost four miles over unpaved roads to get to class.

The project aims to raise some of the 43,000 euros (£35,000) needed to restore the bus service and has already raised enough to pay for three months of daily buses.

This isn't strictly a Latina or Iberian phenomenon, as there are a number of fundraising calendars featuring amateur pinups in the UK designed to raise funds for everything from cancer research to the Royal Marines Charitable Trust.

The women decided to incorporate some of the terrain that their children had to negotiate on the walk to school with the bus services slashed. Included with some of the images of the saucy, lingerie clad Iberian cougars are spanish-language slogans such as "Scale the mountains of Montserrat to go to school".

The calendar emulates earlier fundraising calendars that feature amateur models posing nude or topless, such as the laid off stewardesses at Mexicana airlines or University Equestrian clubs in England. However, similar efforts have backfired- in 2008, a group of housewives in the rural Spanish village of Seradilla del Arroyo embarked on a similar effort as the moms of Montserrat. However, the women in the mountainous region along the border with Portugal quickly found themselves owing a printer roughly €10,000 and stuck with 5000 unsold copies after sales of the calendar quickly dried up.