Two days after Edgar Elías Colop’s 15th birthday, he received an unlikely gift—textbooks from complete strangers. Like all of his fellow ninth-graders at Parracaná Cooperative School in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, Edgar had never used textbooks in class until the CoEd...
“I have always wanted to study and graduate from high school,” Berta Alicia says. While that might seem like a reasonable goal, it is anything but easy—in rural Guatemala, 80% of indigenous students drop out of school by the seventh grade. Thanks to Berta Alicia’s...
One out of every four adults in Guatemala cannot read, and the average education level is a mere 4.1 years—the second lowest in all of Latin America. It is no coincidence that 75.6% of rural Guatemalans live below the country’s poverty line, earning less than $4 per...
The enormous toothy grin he wears from ear to ear gives him away—Diego Set Cuc is thrilled. Today Cooperative for Education and the Guatemala Literacy Project is delivering all-new textbooks to Chumanzana Cooperative School in Chichicastenango, Guatemala, where Diego...
The pain was unbearable. Sitting still for more than a few minutes was an exercise in intense concentration, but Reyna Por Rodriguez had no other choice. She tried to block out the pain, instead focusing on the teacher’s soft voice at the front of the room and the...
In 2008, thirteen-year-old Carlos Francisco Pu was surrounded by books on a daily basis. In fact, he helped produce them at a printing company near his hometown of Choquí, Quetzaltenango. Yet, when he returned home every night, his shelves were empty. But at Choquí...
