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Copyright 2000
Oregon Live ®

A man trades a life of poverty for the wealth of reading, and now shares his fortune with others

Sunday, September 26, 1999

As the son of poor Mayans in Guatemala, Rigoberto Zamora Charuc says he faced a bleak future of illiteracy and the prospect of picking coffee beans for a few cents an hour.

But at age 14, he was rescued by a scholarship that allowed him to attend high school at a Catholic seminary and later a public college, where he became a proponent of books and a true believer in the gospel of education.

Now 36, Charuc is a teacher and founder-director of a 7-year-old literacy project -- Probigua: The Library Project of Guatemala -- designed to make real his dream to "change Guatemala one book at a time." Instead of tending coffee crops, Charuc plants the seeds of knowledge in young minds.

Sharing the dream
Richard Carroll, a financial planning consultant, heads a Portland-based agency, SoundAid, that shares Charuc's dream.

In fact, SoundAid is helping to speed up the process of converting the dream into a reality, said Carroll, who is host to Charuc at his West Hills home this weekend for SoundAid's annual board meeting. Charuc is presenting his plans for his project's future at the board meeting, networking with local Guatemalan groups and visiting libraries and schools.

Carroll said he was studying Spanish in Antigua, Guatemala, about six years ago when he befriended Charuc, a mild-mannered but energetic man.

During his many intense talks with Charuc, who agreed to become one of his Spanish teachers, Carroll said, he learned about the illiteracy rate and the resulting poverty in Guatemala, especially among indigenous people.

An estimated 50 percent of the Guatemalan population is illiterate, Carroll said, including 70 percent of women and 90 percent of people in rural areas. Charuc began Probigua to counter those bleak realities; the nonprofit project has established eight libraries in areas of Guatemala where students had no access to books, he said.

The project also provides scholarships for youths to attend secondary school and operates a mobile library in a converted school bus, which visits about 10 schools weekly.

The project maintains its programs with money from its not-for-profit school in Antigua for foreigners who want to learn Spanish.

Big results
Most notably, Charuc said, the program is making differences. In areas where the project's books have been distributed, "children go to school more frequently."

Also, school dropout rates have declined and start-up rates have increased, he said, explaining that in Guatemala from 33 percent to 36 percent of youths never start first grade. Among those who do, 30 percent to 40 percent drop out before completing elementary school. "Only 1.8 percent of those who started school will make it to the university," he said, "and the rates are even less for indigenous people."

In its biggest operation to date, Carroll said, SoundAid in December 1996 procured, arranged for transport and distributed 70,000 new textbooks in Spanish.

Carroll said SoundAid, which supports another anti-poverty/educational program in Guatemala called Fundit, also provided hearing aids and training programs to treat hearing-impaired children in Oaxaca, Mexico, and start-up money for five of Probigua's libraries; funded scholarships; and offered technical and organizational advice.

"SoundAid finds and partners with indigenous groups in underserved communities . . . such as Probigua . . . which have the vision, strategy and human resources but lack the financial, technical or organizational means that SoundAid provides," Carroll said.

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