If you are reading this, chances are that you are not Guatemalan. Or, at least, that you did not spend your formative years in Guatemala. What do I mean by this? Simple. Guatemala has a huge literacy problem. We witnessed it first hand on the plane coming home. To give credit where credit is due, my wife picked up on it first and clued me in.

A substantial number of people boarding the plane to NY in Guatemala City could not read their boarding passes. The crew, knowing this, had to tell them where they were sitting by either leading the passengers to their seats, almost taking them by their hands, or by pointing to exactly which seat they had. One of the crew confirmed to my wife that a lot of people boarding in Guatemala could not read and needed the crew to fill out all of their immigration and customs forms. The crew did say that some of the passengers asked them to do it out of laziness and not because they couldn't read, but still. The crew came from El Salvador, by the way.

Can you imagine what that must be like? Navigating the rocks and shoals of modern life without being able to make sense of the world around you? Or, maybe you compensate, like where one sense gets stronger when another when gets weaker. Beats me. But to be deprived of reading poetry.

The literacy rates are very poor, according to the research I've done. Actually, one UNESCO graph is particularly interesting because it casts the information in the form of illiteracy percentages. If you click on the link, you will see that almost 4 out of every 10 Guatemalan women are illiterate and about 2.5 out of every 10 men are illiterate. Those numbers tower over all of the other countries UNESCO includes in their graph.

One aspect of the literacy problem fairly leaps off the page: the disparity between literacy rates for men and for women. This suggests that women have much more restricted access to formal education than the men do. It also suggests that women have it much tougher in general in Guatemalan society. Or, at least, maybe they do. I don't really know enough to fully draw that last conclusion. But is does suggest that, ipso facto, fewer opportunities exist for women as we in the developed world understand those opportunities.

No matter how you look at it, it's a total mess.

Still, I don't want to leave this topic with the implication that there is no hope. Since 1980, some 25 years ago, the rate of adult illiteracy has dropped from 47% of the population to 29.5%. That suggests hope, right?

Posted by: Random Penseur at 04:04 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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