As you arrive at the general public school in Terra Nueva, a neighbourhood on this city connected by bridges to Guatemala City, the high-pitched babble coming from the opposite side of the college wall, if you happen to close your eyes, could possibly be coming from pleased, excited children anywhere.
But Terra Nueva is a troublesome area. Potholed roads make journeys difficult. Shops on the predominant thoroughfares are rundown. Many families have endured poverty and disruption because the time of the nation’s civil war, which lasted nearly 4 many years and led many rural families to maneuver to the metropolitan area’s relative safety. But the cities have a high level of crime, much of it linked to gangs.
Many children within the Guatemala City metropolitan area leave school at 14; in rural areas it might be as young as eight. For those that do attend, there’s often a shortage of teaching materials, including textbooks and modern reading devices. In Mixco, 650 pupils share just 12 computers.
In response to those challenges, Mixco school administrators have introduced a programme created by the Bible Society within the United Kingdom, called Open the Book, that dramatizes Bible stories, with students singing and dancing along as a way of learning each reading and the Bible.
As the Open the Book actors arrived for one among their bimonthly visits last fall, the classroom stuffed with students in red uniforms, from kindergarten to middle school age, burst into applause. The tale that unfolded, “Free at Last,” was based on the Exodus story of the Israelites fleeing Egypt, with the parting of the Red Sea ingeniously but simply depicted with a big blue cloth decorated with fish that then closed over the Egyptians as they pursued the Israelites.
Some of the scholars were drafted into the telling of the story, with impromptu costumes, including crowns and headdresses, comprised of paper and towels.
After the dramatization got here a mirrored image and a prayer. “I liked that God had freed me,” said Justin, 11, who played an Israelite. “Bible stories help me to be smarter and to find out about God.”
The 220-year-old Bible Society, a part of a movement founded by British evangelical Christians, is an element of the worldwide United Bible Societies, which incorporates the American Bible Society and the Bible Society of Guatemala. The Guatemalan group, which has 50 staff members, relies on 1,000 volunteers to assist take its programmes into schools.
Cesar Sanchez, the Open the Book project manager, began as a volunteer. “I met them through the work they do with vulnerable children and communities, and that is what attracted me to the work they do,” he said. “I’ve seen it make a difference.”
The Guatemala City slum of El Mezquital is perched on the rim of several ravines within the south of the town, where some 4,000 families from the countryside settled within the Nineteen Eighties. With the assistance of UNESCO and the Catholic Church, housing and schools were built and water brought in. The national government, with World Bank funds, is connecting El Mezquital to the electrical and sewer systems and putting in a predominant road, however it stays one of the vital deprived parts of Guatemala City.
The El Mezquital Public School was a correctional facility, and its past seems to haunt it: The older children recall a gang shootout that killed a lady at the college’s gates. The staff have tried to melt its edges with plenty of images and a lot of plants. “The gangs attempt to get young boys to hitch,” said Annalise Palma of the Bible Society of Guatemala. Because they know children won’t be sent to jail, the gangs give them cell phones and teach them the best way to extort money by phone.
“Parents won’t let their children out at night since it is just too dangerous; even when it is a church service they do not go,” said Palma.
Evelyn Divas, 47, head teacher at El Mezquital’s public school, was hesitant about bringing Bible studies into the college — for one thing, she said, she was the one practising Christian teacher in the college. “I used to be anxious they’d all think I used to be there simply to impose my beliefs on them,” she said. “At first everyone was hesitant of the project, and it’s hard for people to warm as much as it.”
Now, she says, people have accepted it, and the kids enjoy it.
Alison Estefinea Gutierrez, 11, said she has lost three cousins to gang violence and that the Bible Society lessons, that are held within the assembly hall at the college, have helped her take care of the violence. “Reading the Bible,” she said, “helped me forgive, and I’ve turn into less aggressive.”
Another El Mezquital schoolgirl, Mayerly Martinez, said: “Living here, you see a number of conflict and also you hear gunshots on a regular basis. You get used to people being killed. It’s how things are.”
Teenage boys who get caught up in crime normally find yourself on the Etapa II Detention Center, in a woodland clearing outside Guatemala City, where 108 prisoners, ages 14-18, are kept in cells surrounded by guards and barbed wire. They are charged with offenses corresponding to carrying illegal weapons, extortion and murder, however the judicial process is so slow it might take as much as seven years for a case to come back to trial.
Classes are held within the detention centre, and the kids also can enroll in correspondence courses. The Bible Society also comes fortnightly to carry Open the Book sessions, which result in discussion about values and honesty. The boys also can request prayers. At a recent session held on a baseball court ringed by cells, boys with shaved heads, wearing white T-shirts and sweatpants, stared through their cell grilles.
Among the boys was Wilson, 15, whose older brother died in front of him. “I heard the gunshots after which saw him bleed out,” he recalled. “I wanted revenge, so once I was 14 I joined a gang.” One day he was sitting with a friend who, Wilson said, had a gun, however the police arrested Wilson. After three months in detention and attending Open the Book sessions, he said his view is changing. “It’s not for me to hunt revenge,” he said.
If young boys from the barrios are likely to get pulled into crime, teenage girls are apt to get pregnant. The age of consent is 15, and there may be little by means of sex education or access to contraception for teens. Abortion is against the law. Children Having Children is one other outreach connected to the Bible Society that works with young teenage girls under 18 who’re in this example, teaching the ladies about parent-child relationships. “We give them a course for 3 months to coach them, to point out which you can raise kids without punishment or hitting them.”
The father of 15-year-old Nally Lavery’s child persuaded her to sleep with him because he claimed he couldn’t father children. When she told him she was pregnant, Lavery says, he said it couldn’t be his child. Children Having Children has been a lifeline, providing support and encouragement for her to proceed her studies.
“Coming here motivates me,” said Lavery, “and knowing that I’ll keep my baby and take care of it.” Her mother was offended at first, Lavery said, because she wanted something different for her daughter – Lavery’s mother was first pregnant at 16, and her own children all have different fathers.
According to Palma, the Bible Society of Guatemala’s project manager, “There is a cycle happening with young girls in this example. They are stigmatized for having children, while the boys responsible get away with it, they only walk away, but the identical thing happens again in the subsequent generation. We need to interrupt that cycle.”
In January, Guatemala’s latest president, the anti-corruption reformer Bernardo Arévalo, took office after months of unrest following the country’s August elections. He guarantees to alter the fortunes of young Guatemalans with a concentrate on education. GT News, the federal government news agency, reported in February that the minister for education planned to refurbish 10,000 schools within the administration’s first 12 months.
Far harder will likely be countering crime networks and deeply embedded corruption, the platform on which Arévalo was elected. Sophisticated money laundering schemes, smuggling and fraud help blur the road between the drug trade and politics, based on the think tank Insight Crime. Those who are suffering probably the most are likely to be the poorest, with predatory gangs involved in extortion in poor urban neighborhoods.
Arevalo believes education is the reply here, too. Visiting a faculty renovation project, the president said, “For an extended time, now we have not invested in the identical strategy to bring development to all communities within the country. The way forward for the kids is at stake in the colleges, and the longer term of the country is at stake in the kids’s education.”
But for now, it’s the teachers who must operate on the border between education and the world of gangs and the drug trade. Divas, the pinnacle teacher in El Mezquital, said a few of her students are the kids of gang members. Some parents are in prison for murder, kidnapping and extortion.
According to Divas, the Bible programme is about showing the kids values which might be different from those of the gang culture. “I see this project as planting a seed … inviting them to live a life that is nice. They may not even understand it right away, but I do know they may someday.”
And, says Divas, those values can work their way into the broader culture.
© Religion News Service
