The COVID-19 pandemic closed their school, but it also thrust a group of disadvantaged Mexican children living next to a giant garbage dump into the digital world.
A project teaching the students how to use computers and the Internet has given them hope of a life far from the trash mountain where their parents work recycling waste.
Miguel Tejeda had never used a computer before COVID-19 arrived, because there were no machines in the 14-year-old’s school in Chimalhuacan, located in the urban sprawl surrounding the capital, New Mexico.
Photo: AFP
However, for the past six months, he and 200 other students aged five to 21 have learned basic IT skills helped by a Mexican non-governmental organization (NGO), using old computers donated by a religious association.
“Learning is much easier with the computers. We have a much better understanding of subjects,” Tejeda said, wearing a mask and face shield.
In a makeshift classroom in an unfinished house, the NGO Utopia taught the students reading, writing and mathematics, as well as how to send files in the PDF format.
The fetid smell of garbage wafted over from the nearby dump.
Mexico, a country of 126 million people, has registered more than 186,000 known COVID-19 deaths — the world’s third-highest toll.
After schools shut, the NGO added digital skills to its educational plan so that the students in the disadvantaged community could continue their studies remotely.
Before the crisis struck, “for us it was more important to teach them to read than to use Word,” Utopia founder Jesus Villalobos said.
The impoverished community is located in one of the most populated and violent municipalities in the country.
The dusty district of Corte Escalerillas, home to about 5,000 people working mainly to collect and separate 12,000 tonnes of garbage a day, has had public lighting and water supplies for barely a year.
Harassed by aggressive dogs, some children help their parents, scavenging for waste that can be recycled.
If they stop studying, “the first thing they do is go collect garbage with a donkey, and there, among the trash, they lose their life plan,” Utopia coordinator Yahir Ruiz said.
“Sometimes the first contact of these children with a computer is at 15 or 16 years old, because the schools were not equipped,” Ruiz added.
About 30 million students in Mexico are not physically going to school because of the pandemic, which prompted the government to start distance-learning via television or the Internet.
According to UNESCO, about one-quarter of Mexican students between the ages of seven and 17 have no Internet access and 4.4 percent have no television.
High-school student Norma Hernandez does not have a computer at home and can only get two channels on her television because of the limited signal.
Her mother recently had the Internet installed so her brother could study online using his cellphone.
“But the signal is so bad here that sometimes it’s impossible to connect,” the 13-year-old said.
The Mexican government has said that schools would reopen only when the risk of infection has dropped sufficiently.
In the meantime, 17-year-old Armando Alvarado said he is no longer daunted by using a computer.
“The first time, when they started teaching me here about computing, I was scared, that I was going to have to take it to pieces or something like that,” said Alvarado, who learned to read at the age of 12 with help from the NGO.
“When they began to teach me everything became easy,” he said.
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was