The Guatemala Literacy Project is working to reverse the country’s low literacy rates and keep children in school
By Diana Schoberg Photography by James Rodríguez
When Rotary International President Jennifer Jones visited a primary school in a farming village in Guatemala’s highlands and asked who wants to become the country’s president, the students’ hands shot into the air. Before a Rotary-supported reading program began in the village of Chajalajyá, students would often drop out after a couple years of school. “Reading will change our society,” Principal Vilma Nizeth Moreira told Jones during an April visit to the school. “These are powerful tools we are giving children to eradicate ignorance.” Schools often teach in Spanish, but about 25 languages are spoken in the country, and there are few written materials in local languages.
The Guatemala Literacy Project has worked for 25 years to improve reading rates. In 1997, Joe and Jeff Berninger, brothers from Ohio, were volunteering as English teachers at a Guatemalan school that had no books. The two launched a project to solve that. The day the books arrived, there was a huge celebration, and a Rotarian dentist volunteering nearby heard the noise and asked what was going on. “He said this would be a perfect project for Rotary,” says Joe Berninger, now a member of the Rotary Club of Pathways, Ohio, which coordinates the project.
