06.22.2010 - Time passes slowly in the village of Gancho Caoba in Guatemala. Slowly and not easily. If the sky does not deliver a generous amount of rain, hunger will come, and if a villager falls ill, medicinal plants will have to be gathered and prepared because the hospital is far away. The Che family lives there with seven children – a hard life, especially since the financial crisis.

Roberto, the father, rises before the sun and starts to work in a tiny field of corn and beans. He sees the branches grow gradually until they appear to touch the sky, according to him. When the crops are ready, he keeps the harvest in sacks and awaits Coyote, the man who goes from village to village buying corn.

But Coyote does not always have good news. Last year, when the financial crisis hit the world, he came with a new price: 80 quetzals, a little less than ten dollars per quintal.

Roberto did not go to school, he hardly knows how to read and write and his wife has not even learnt Spanish, the national language. His seven children go to school. The eldest, 18 years old, will graduate and become a teacher very soon. The future has taken the form of a school – the Xch'ool Ixim school, supported financially by Enfants du Monde.

The school has become everyone’s hope. In their class rooms, high quality education is offered, a lot better than that of government schools. 

Roberto sees his children running at school and return home everyday with much more knowledge than he ever dreamed of. In seeing them, he thinks of one of the children from the neighbouring village of Peña Blanca, who, thanks to the education given by Xch'ool Ixim School, obtained a scholarship to study at an American university. A shiver of excitement runs through him. His children are going to grow taller than the corn, they are really going to touch the sky.

Excerpts from an article by Marta Sandoval, journalist at the “el Periódico” national newspaper of Guatemala.

For more information on Xch'ool Ixim School in Guatemala