Educate 400 adults in rural Mexico

This summer we successfully took the Campaña de educación para adultos ¡Alfabetiza! to the field, as we do every year. For this purpose we divided into two groups.

The first group worked for a second successive year in Súchil, a community located in the Maltrata-Orizaba mountain range in Veracruz. There we worked directly with 190 adults who signed up to take classes, 80 of which were illiterate. These people were organized in 83 groups which worked in the people's houses, at the local elementary school, and anywhere in town where it was appropriate. The 26 voluntary teachers, who had been training and gathering resources since January, spent six weeks living in the elementary school and working with the enrolled students. With the community as a whole they developed different activities like a workshop for the young people (part of our Tlalana project), a talk about human rights whit about 60 attendees and practiced several sports. They also leave behind a public library with its own place in town.

The other working group went to the municipality of Tochimilco, at the flank of the Popocatepetl Volcano in Puebla, for the first time. 25 literacy teachers, both male and female, worked there with 117 students (49 of which required literacy improvement classes) in two communities, San Miguel Tecuanipa and Tochimizolco. There were 47 groups in these towns, and besides the classes the volunteers performed several activities with the locals for community integration and diagnosis. We will go back to work and live in these towns next summer to go further upon the progress made this year. As it is customary in our project, we worked with the community to leave a public library in San Miguel Tecuanipa, the operation of which will be enhanced through next year's work.

On the attached table we summarize some of our results.

The activities of the project go on, since we have to evaluate our results and develop further proposals for our work next year as well as perform follow-up visits to the communities to strengthen the work done.

We repeat our invitation to you to send us comments, bibliography or any other kind of feedback, as well as to get further involved with the project in a closer manner. We also want to send our kindest regards to the volunteers, the people at the communities and to you who have supported us this far.